My name is Jadira Bautista and I was born in New York. Growing up I was raised in every borough except Staten Island. Currently I am living in Manhattan, Chelsea and studying in Brooklyn at the New York City College of Technology. At this moment I am studying to get my bachelors degree in human services. After obtaining my bachelors degree I plan and hope to attend Hunter College to begin my masters in social work.
Originally I planned to attend college to become a chef. I had heard that in City Tech they had a good program for hospitality but going in for the orientation I realized it wasn’t my true passion. I talked to my social worker about the work she was doing and based on her experiences she inspired me. From the many things she told me what intrigued me the most was the many paths you can take in the overall human service department. There is a diversity in jobs but also the people. She continued on in talking about how many similar cases she had but with each there was a different relationship. Not only that, but everyday she got that satisfying feeling that today she could have motivated someone to reach their goals. This is the main reason why I turned over to the human service profession. I want to wake up everyday excited to see my clients and give people a new scope to view their life. To me it is not necessarily the feeling that I am helping people that’s made me choose this career but it’s knowing I have a purpose in life to do good and feel good about it.
As a future human service worker I plan to bring a lot of my background, characteristics and experiences to the field. Through out my life I feel like I have matured a lot. I have learned how to talk to people and even more important how to listen to them. I’ve been exposed to problems dealing with immigration, alcohol abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence, chemical use, family’s with no communication skills, adoption and even end of life care. I feel like going through many of these experiences, either personally or helping others cope, I have gained a lot of empathy and genuineness towards people in general, not just those in need of help.
I stated before that I have lived in most of the boroughs and this also has a lot to do with why I took an interest in this field of work. In the beginning, my family and I usually moved from place to place because of either changes in my moms job or because there was better and cheaper apartments out there. Around the time when I was 10 years old I moved to a homeless shelter with my family. Till this day I still have no idea why exactly this happen but I do know that it was do to problems with my oldest brother and his girlfriend at the time. For about two years of my life I lived in various shelters. Moving from shelters where we stayed months or shelters that were just for overnight was very confusing at the time. I asked myself through out those two years how I can help my mom to get our own home but I was a loss of thoughts in how I could. I would sleep in floors while my mom stayed up to watch over me and my brothers. I remember eating canned food at these places and having curfews. The last place I ended up in was a shelter near JFK meanwhile my school was in Spanish Harlem. It was about an hour and something ride and 5 days a week I would wake up before the sun came up to arrive at school on time to eat breakfast. As I am writing this paper I need to hold back tears because of everything my family and I have been through. The though of this not even being one of the worse things we’ve experience gives me shivers because who knows what other people have lived through. I am motivated and will always keep my experiences at the back of my head whenever dealing with clients.
Although I would like to work with every population the one that I would really like to work with are at risk teenagers. I don’t know how else to say this with out sounding cliché but I do believe that children are the future. They have the power to gain so much knowledge and are open to many opportunities. For this specific population I believe they would need therapy both family or one on one. They might also need support groups, different educational opportunities, and working programs. In some cases even rehab references. It would definitely be a challenge to gain their trust at first because they probably feel like everyone has turned their backs to them and at first they might not even be cooperate. I need to learn how to talk specifically to teens and also learn different strategies to show them I’m really here to help. With all the courses I have taken in human services I feel like I’m getting a hang of body language and what the clients really feel with their movement. This population has great potential and I’m hoping to let them see that strength to better their life.
I hope that I will have a very successful career as a social worker. I believe that in my future I would expend my field of work from social worker to maybe psychologist or even end of life care. In ten years after graduating both college and grad school I would probably be around 33 years of age. I envision myself with a family and am thinking I would like to spend half of my time to work and the other with my family. Taking this into consideration I think I would probably have left social work for a while but return to it eventually. This doesn’t not mean that I would have left the field but I would expand my work into joining organizations for people who need end of life care. This would be a very big step because loosing people in all senses is very hard for me. I want to grow as a person and face my own fears and challenge myself. In an overall picture, the 10 years following after my graduation I hope to have learned things from my community, clients and myself that I can take with me even if I were to totally change careers. I want this to be a learning experience and keep true to the ethical standards of this profession.
In conclusion, I am hoping to get a lot out this career and hope to give a lot back. I want to live a good, healthy and meaningful life and I know that it’s destiny that I changed my choice of study. I’m ready and willing to receive criticism to become better at this and am highly thankful to my social worker to have shared her experiences with me.
