Tag: Disaster Mental Health

Going Back to School

Today is the first day of my Disaster Mental Health certificate program.  I can’t believe I’m going back to school after getting a PhD and this late in my career, yet here I am. 

As it turns out, I have a good role model in my father. My father got his high school diploma and learned electronics in the military. I remember growing up with him taking a correspondence course in electronics with all these little paper booklets that were individual lessons. Later, he would go off to Dublin, Ohio to take various courses on the changing technology of his job, installing telephone switching equipment. A lot of his colleagues didn’t take the company up on their training, believing that the union would protect them. The union did not protect them, and so they slowly got transferred and laid off. Eventually, my dad was one of the few remaining workers in an increasingly automated system. AT&T would hand him a building full of equipment and a 32-page schematic and tell him to throw the switch and lock the door when it was done. In addition to this, he took a pastry chef class at the community college, and my family let him make the pie crust from then on out.
I did my first lesson this morning, and I found the material engaging and worthwhile. Maybe I haven’t forgotten how to be a student!

Moving Forward in More than One Way

I have to share this, because even though it doesn’t have to do with writing (directly), it’s so funny I have to share:

I’m going back to school.

I had long been of the opinion that, once you got a Ph.D. and hit a certain age, you would never need any more schooling. I would have been correct, except for a perfect cluster* of events:

  1. Six years ago, my department at the University got disbanded because they had to cut something, and Family and Consumer Economics (Home Economics or Human Ecology for my overseas friends) was a low-cachet major.
  2. Because I had tenure, they couldn’t fire me without due cause, so they put me in the Behavioral Sciences (Psychology and Sociology) department.
  3. Our school accrediting body, the Higher Learning Commission, decreed that if faculty were in departments they didn’t have a graduate degree in, they should at least have 20 graduate hours in the discpline. This rule appeared within the past three years. I’ve been here for 20.
  4. I fall short of that 20 hours — I believe I have 12 hours in psych/soc classes at the graduate level.
  5. We’re going through re-accrediation here, and our provost has been hired in part to guide us through the new accreditation.
  6. I was advised to take some grad level classes in an aspect of psychology/sociology by my chair — I was never told I would be fired, but I was told that doing so would “make me look better”.
  7. Taking the grad classes will not improve my pay. In fact, I will have to pay for the classes. It won’t help me get to full professor status, because I don’t publish enough research. I’m literally doing this to help my university get reaccreditation.
So I have to enroll in graduate classes … and I couldn’t be happier, because I get a benefit none of them can take away from me — I get to learn and improve. I move forward, which is the best feeling to me. 
I have applied to an online program at South Dakota State University for a graduate certificate program in Disaster Mental Health. I decided this by 6 PM last night, and by 8PM I had turned in my application materials, ordered a transcript, and secured three letters of recommendation from my colleagues with disaster management in their background. A reminder: I became Emergency and Disaster Management faculty simply by virtue of teaching a class in their major. The interest in casualty simulation (moulage) and CERT (community-based first responders for disasters) came from that. 
As I will be taking only one class per semester, I don’t expect it will make too big a cut in my time, and I even suspect that the book about the care and feeding of roleplayers might be a independent assignment. I will continue to write, because I can’t relax by vegging — just by doing**.
So here I am, a PhD taking more college classes, even though it’s ten years till I retire. Life is strange, isn’t it? 
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* To my international friends, “cluster” is short for a very salty military swear word that rhymes with “fustercluck”.
** “Doing” is a strange word. We’re expected to read and pronounce it “DO-ing”, but if you look at the word the wrong way, it looks like a sound effect that rhymes with “Boing” and mimics the sound of a fry pan hitting a cranium: “DOING!!”