You need to write up a one-page description of what you hope to get out of the practicum–your learning objectives should focus on three different areas:

• Professional. Something related to your career goals.
  • Do you want to learn the ins and outs of case work, the credentials and licensing issues, the settings, etc.?
  • Do you need to familiarize yourself with the specific language and acronyms and agencies?
  • Are you looking to make professional contacts, have a firm grasp on the social welfare network in the area, or at least how one for an area of comparable size functions and is structured?
  • Can you identify professionals in the workplace from whom you’d like to learn (people who really seem to have a handle on things–good rapport with clients, co-workers, calm demeanor in the face of stress, encyclopedic knowledge of the welfare system, wealth of experience in the field, etc.)?
• Personal. You need some sort of intellectual goal.
  • Do you want to improve your interpersonal skills, your ability to gain rapport with clients, etc.?
  • Would you like to practice interviewing skills and gaining rapport with people (in some cases, clientele whose trust you might have to earn)?
  • You might want to consider the last part from the above bullet for this one–identifying someone who would be a mentor, someone whose professional ‘style’ you would like to emulate, or at least learn from. Maybe you need to learn how to deal with stress, how to separate work from home life. Etc.
• Sociological–Many possibilities here, obviously.
  • You could focus on the organization, how it is structured, how it is connected to the broader world outside of the community
  • You could focus on how decision making occurs, interactions between staff and clients, office ‘culture,’ etc.
  • There are major differences between working for a public, non-profit or private organization. Something else that you might want to explore and that might affect your career goals and trajectories.
  • You could practice being more attentive to differences–gender, class, race, sexual orientation, age, religion, disability, politics, etc.

The important thing is that you identify goals that reflect what you want to learn from the practicum, you stick with them, you use them to guide observations and writing in your journal, and subsequently the paper you must write at the end of the term. Your observations in your journal ideally should be based on the objectives you set out for yourself.

The learning objectives should be written briefly on the capstone contract, (Word, Word template, pdf) and elaborated upon and attached to the contract when it is signed by supervisor and faculty adviser. They need to be integrated into your research design.

The learning objectives become the basis for your research project in 403. In other words, you will be designing a modest research project, data collection for which should be based on your learning objectives. Students sometimes choose to do participant-observation research, to conduct some interviews, occasionally try to do a modest survey, content analysis of agency documents, collection and analysis of secondary data, etc. The key is to prepare before the term where you are enrolled in 403 begins. This can be facilitated by taking a credit or two of Soc 407, or Soc 455 (which is three credits, offered by Drs. Puentes or Gougherty), to do some reading and work on a research proposal, human subjects application, etc.