Staying Organized: Mendeley

If you are new to graduate school or you are coming back after a long time in school, Mendeley is a great tool to look into.  Last year when I came back to start my MSW, I passed a sign for a Mendeley workshop in the library, and I signed up for a brief overview.  Today, Mendeley is one of my best organizational tools.

Mendeley has a few key selling points.

1. It can be accessed via the internet and via multiple devices.  Hence, I can access it from a computer lab on campus or from home or from my tablet.  
2. It is just as good at being an e-reader and note-taking space as it is at being a reference manager.  I love this.  This means that I can keep everything together in one place.  Yeah, EndNote lets you highlight, but its highlighter is super buggy and its notes are not as clear.  I color-code my highlights and "post-it" notes and can write additional notes in the margins (see below).  This spring Mendeley launched an app that means I can read papers luxuriously (or as luxuriously as one can read 10 journal articles in a sitting) on my tablet, highlighting, noting and tagging away.  
3. You can tag.  This helps me keep important points organized and allows me to collate all of the papers discussing a particular point with the click of a button.  
4. Mendeley has a social networking feature that lets you follow topics or authors.  This seems helpful, but I haven't explored this feature much yet.  I think it will become more and more important as time passes and more researchers join up.

Organize Citations

• Folders - I create a new folder for each paper I write.  If I'm working with someone else, such as my mentor, I can share the folder with them in a group (see below).  I suppose you could create folders by topic, but I use tags for that.  Maybe as I get deeper into my subject area I will switch, but for now - being in coursework - organizing by paper is easiest for me.  
• Groups - Groups help you collaborate.  You can share papers with anyone with a Mendeley account, including the rest of the folks on your team.  You can also publish a folder on a topic to the social network that Mendeley provides.  
• Tags - This is probably my favorite part of Mendeley.  I tag journal articles based on their key findings.  This way, when I'm writing I can pull up all the papers whose findings decribe the "gender pay gap," quickly review the paper and my notes on it, and add my thoughts into my writing.  This does, however, require you to remember to tag after you read each article, so that you pull up all the articles discussing that point.  But, once you make that contract for yourself, it works like a charm.  
• Linked PDFs - Like EndNote, Mendeley lets you link the PDF.  In fact, the easiest way to get the PDFs into the program is to download them and then just drag them onto the main page.  It will populate the meta-data (i.e. bibliographic information) for you.  
• Adding PDFs = Adding citations 
• You can add PDFs by just dragging the PDF onto the main window.  It will load the citation information.  
• You can "watch" a folder.  This feature lets Mendeley "watch" a folder on your computer/cloud.  When you sync, Mendeley will check to see if any new files were added to "watched" folders, and it will automatically bring those new files into Mendeley.  

Take Notes

• General Notes - You can write notes in the "notes" section.  I usually set a brief outline that would basically be the headings in a systematic review (e.g. sample, method, intervention, key findings, etc.) and copy that into each "notes" box.  This way I can quickly review the article's key points later without having to re-read too much.  
• Highlights (and color coding) - I color-code my highlighting so that I can find and generally interpret key notes quickly.  
• Yellow (default color) - general point I find interesting
• Red = Read - any authors or particular citations I want to read later
• Green = Gap in the literature
• Orange/ Gold = Goal - goal of the article and, subsequently, outcomes and key findings
• "Post-its"  - You can color-code the notes too if you have additional reactions to the points you highlight.  

Syncing

• Once you're done working on a device, sync.  Then the articles and notes will load to your online profile.  After that, you can just press sync on your other device (e.g. tablet) and ta-da all your new stuff is on this device too.  For example, if I run a search and load a bunch of new articles on my PC, I can sync on my PC, open my tablet, press sync, and then read the new articles on my tablet which is more ergonomic.  

Cite as You Go and Build Your Reference Pages

• Once you commit to Mendeley, you can activate the "cite-o-matic" (no really, that's what it's called) under the reference tab in word.  Then, as you type, you can just start typing the first few words of the citation, and it will complete the in-text citation.  When you're finished with your paper, you can click "insert bibliography" and it will make a bibliography based on the citations you've included.  

Better than Endnote

I like that you can use tags, that it's easily accessible, that the highlighting is less wonky, and that you can take in-text notes in a way that makes more sense to me.  But EndNote does have better search options from EndNote, in that you can search the library from EndNote.  I could never get this to work when I was off campus, so this was more trouble than it was worth for me.  But really, it comes down to personal preference.

Limitations

• Sometimes the citation gets loaded incorrectly, which means your citations and references will be wrong.  Solution: When you read the article, get in the habit of double-checking the citation information as far as accuracy and capitalization.  
• Some PDFs are not able to be highlighted or post-it-noted.  This seems to mostly be in the app, which is new, so maybe they are working on this bug.  I have not had this problem in the PC version.  

Self-Care Plan

Okay, so we've established that self-care is necessary to radical practice.  But how do you actually accomplish taking care of yourself with the amazing number of things we have to and want to do every day?

In my life, self-care was a joke for a long time.  As a young person growing up in an emotionally stressful home, self-care was in limited supply.  Most of the time I was helping others or staying busy enough that I didn't have to think.  So I lived on a spectrum from helping others to completing objective tasks, a spectrum of activities largely divorced from self-care.  This seems like it is a fairly common reality, particularly for women and/or people involved with caregiving.  Hence, self-care activities for the purpose of self-care alone - not for resume-building or because someone told you to or because someone required it - was not something I built into my personal habit arsenal.  I lived in this way through college.  And through my first years post-college.  Finally, I realized life was not going to slow down.  I wasn't going to "get there" - there being a fantasy land where I had a daily routine that had ample time for self-care.  Then a few things happened at once.

1. I realized I was planning for an emotional retirement that was likely to never occur.  
Suggestion: Accept that life is busy and fast because we live in a competitive capitalistic society.  If you are going to get self-care, you are going to have to prioritize it and carve time out to allow for it.  It's part of getting through this marathon in a healthy way.

2. My family and friends finally convinced me that I like self-care.
Suggestion: Try to listen to the people who love you when they say things that - if you are like I was - you hate.  Examples include, "don't work too hard," "you should go home," and "take a deep breath."  When I was a workaholic I interpreted these as being related to competition (i.e. they wanted me to stop working so I would be easier to beat) or that they just did not understand my work ethic (i.e. they couldn't understand me - adolescence, anyone?).  Eventually as I learned to trust, I believed them and I took a break.

3.  I realized that when I participated in self-care, I was way less anxious.  I could do my work with less stress and less fear of failure.  
Suggestion:  Try it.  See how you feel after taking a whole day or a whole weekend off.  Or taking off enough time that you feel like you can work again.

So clearly I had a battle even getting to the point that I was willing to admit that self-care was a real thing and was not going to prevent me from finishing all of my tasks.  Now I approach self-care like I approach most of my life as a budding social worker: through assessment, treatment planning, and progress assessment.

University of Buffalo has my favorite tools for making a self-care plan.  It takes into account the many facets of the individual: mind, spirit, body, work, emotions, and relationships.  It also helps you prepare for emergencies when your self-care bucket is empty and your stress bucket is over-flowing.  Check it out here: https://socialwork.buffalo.edu/resources/self-care-starter-kit.html.  

The only thing I've added is a worry/ re-frame t-chart.  Do you have worries that come up all the time and you find yourself and your friends/spouse/support system talking through a million times?  I do!  I'm trying to avoid this anxiety deja vu by writing out my worries and worst-case scenarios and then writing a response to myself to help me re-frame the situation.  Here's an example:

Worry: I will get a poor grade on this paper.  

Re-frame/ Response:  Number one: no one cares what grades you get anymore.  No one will ever see these grades.  Number two: you work your best when you are fearless.  Be fearless.  You might get a poor grade.  That is good practice for paper rejections.  Just write.  Believe what you've always believed - that you have important ideas that will help people and you need to get them out.  This paper is a small step on the road to being able to do that.  You can take the step, and you can miss a step and still get to the destination.  It will be okay.  Just write something.  

So yeah - a bit corny, but definitely what my husband would say if I asked him.  Which I have.  Many times.  And he's tired of repeating it.  So writing it down will help both of us.

Last step.  Share your plan.  Share it with your partners in life, so they can remind you about it when you are stressed or feeling guilty about taking a break.

Take care,
Kess

First Day of the Doctoral Program

Well, the long-awaited first day happened.  After years of preparing and months of thinking through how to make sure my life was ready to be a doctoral student, the first day of class came and went.  Maybe it was because I was very prepared, but it seemed much less scary than I imagined it would .  I've looked at most of the syllabi at this point, and I'm not scared.  They seem on par with the amount of work I've always done.  I'm glad I didn't get rid of my part-time job or lose too much sleep.  Today's class was fun (yay for small class sizes and finally being in the inner-sanctum of know-it-alls), but it wasn't hard.  I keep reminding myself that maybe by the end of the week I will realize I'm in over my head.  Or maybe I'm actually ready for this.  Maybe the hammer isn't going to fall this semester.  We will see.

This is not to say it won't be incredibly time-consuming or that I won't wish that I was not in grad school at some point.  But working most of my days and nights and weekends is how my life has been since the fourth grade, except for a few years when I had a regular job and I filled the boring hours of free-time with much more interesting community service.  So maybe my life really is ready for my doctorate and maybe this won't be the most challenging two years of my life.

Either way, today was fun.  I got to talk about interesting things, read about interesting things, and dream about all of the ideas I can write about and questions I can answer.  Being a social scientist is going to rock.

Update: By day 4, I felt like my research agenda was completely useless.

Update 2: By day 7, I felt okay again.  Let's see if I live on a 3-day sin curve for the rest of grad school.  I'm hoping it's a few more than 3 days, but hey.

Getting Up for Grad School

When my husband was in grad school and I was working, I would get up at 5:45, get ready for work, go to work, prep my classroom, and have taught my first reading group or two before my husband was even out of bed.  Since he went straight through from college to undergrad, I wondered if he'd be able to get up for a "real" job.  Obviously, this was a pretty condescending position for me to have about my kind, responsible husband.

Fast forward to now, and the tables have turned.  Now he's working and I'm in school, with about six years of full-time work under my belt.  But now I'm the one who's struggling to get up while he's up, dressed, and out the door.  Seems like grad school is the real culprit.

Sleeping in sounds great, until you realize it actually makes you feel crappy on at least three levels: the level that tells you you are being an irresponsible adult, the level that tells you this is not a Saturday and everyone who has a real job is already hustling, and the level that tells you you have way too much to do to be snoozing.  This summer I wanted to figure out how I was going to get up, get fed, exercise, get ready, and be "in the office" by 8 A.M.

As it turns out, it only took two steps.

Step 1: Alarmy
Alarmy is the best app I could find to get me out of bed.  When I was a kid I had a little analog clock with no snooze button.  With that baby I always got up for school when it went off because I knew if I didn't there were no second chances.  I didn't have my first snooze button until college, when the downward slide of mornings began.  Alarmy takes away the snooze button and forces me to get out of bed for it to turn off by requiring a task rather than a simple button slap.  Mine is set so that I cannot snooze it, and I have to take a picture of a painting in my bathroom to turn it off.  It has easily gotten me up at 6:15 every day since I started it, even when I really, really didn't want to.

Step 2: Re-vamped Morning Routine
One of the greatest things I learned being an elementary school teacher was how much I enjoy routines.  Not that I don't love being spontaneous.  But when I want to be efficient and feel accomplished, routines help me out a lot.  The problem with my routine during the last academic year was one half not getting out of bed and one half not including transition times.  It also made me do something I hate as soon as I got up: exercise.  I wanted to wash my face and drink coffee, not pretend to kickbox.

(I have spent way too much time in my adult life trying to figure out how to incorporate physical activity into my life.  I'm not a fan of exercising just to exercise, I never played sports, and I had been pretty fit (read as thin not actually healthy) so I didn't really care.  But I figured this was not sustainable (and I realized I had just been thin not actually healthy and now I wasn't thin anymore either), so I've been slowly figuring it out over the last 3 years.  And yeah, after 3 years it's STILL a work in progress!)

Anyhow, suffice it to say, the thought of exercising did not make me want to get up.  The thought of coffee was slightly more motivating.  So my new routine gives me what I want.  And it has plenty of transition times.  Before, it was like get up at 6:15, exercise from 6:15-6:45, shower 6:45-7:00, etc.  Well, guess what, you can't start exercising the minute you get out of bed and you can't get into the shower as soon as you finish exercising because you are too hot.  So it failed every day and then I just stopped exercising.  So now I have plenty of transition time.

Weekday Morning Routine
6:15-6:30 - Get up, put on exercise clothes
6:30-6:45 - Drink coffee, eat breakfast, download news podcast, skim the paper
6:45-7:15 - Exercise
7:15-7:25 - Feed cats, make kefir smoothie, make bed, cool down
7:25-7:40 - Shower
7:40-8:00 - Get dressed
8:00 - in the "office" if working for home or leave to commute

So far, it's working.  Since I started it in the summer, and I've stuck to it, I think it has a pretty good likelihood of working out through the semester.  We'll see.

So, if you're in graduate school or are in some other situation and you are finding it is hard to get up, you are not alone.  You are also not a worse adult than people that get up just fine in the morning.  You may just need to think about what motivates you to get up (e.g. coffee) and use some kind of app that really gets you out of bed and prevents your brain from tricking you into staying in bed.

Good luck!

Self-Care is Radical

The other day I was driving and heard a radio commercial for a pharmacy's urgent care clinic.  It insinuated that you just don't have time to get sick and if you go to their urgent care you'll be back to picking up your kids from soccer, making dinner, and rocking it at meetings lickety-split.  I'm concerned about this framing.  It wasn't, "oh no, too bad you're sick, we can help."  Instead, it was you don't have time to let your body go through an inevitable and natural process that is picking up a bug.  This pharmacy echoed what we are being told from so many angles: you do not have time for a break, you need to be working.  And if you're a woman, you need to be making sure that everyone you care for is sticking to it too.

This all-in worker is not a new American ideal.  In her 1977 landmark work, Men and Women of the Corporation, Rosabeth Moss Kanter describes this person as the "ideal worker" (not by her own definition, but by that of the corporation culture).  The ideal worker is a person whose whole focus is on work.  They work hard at work.  They bring home work.  They think about work in their spare time.  A lot of their social time is work-related.  They are okay with their vacation being interrupted by work or not taking a vacation at all.

Kanter discusses how in the original corporate culture this meant that women really couldn't be ideal workers and attempted to exclude them from the market.  Predominately white middle- and upper-class women did unpaid labor for their family and for their husband's corporation (e.g. organizing charity events and networking socials).  Women did all this so their husbands could be ideal workers and not worry about things like chores or children. Corporations believed that women could never be ideal workers because they wouldn't be able to avoid thinking about or actually helping their children, aging parents, or community efforts.  Hence, they largely excluded women from being a part of corporations and when they were included, it was in positions that were routine and time limited (i.e. not requiring an ideal worker).  Clearly this is only one corner of the market and excludes many groups of people, but Moss Kanter's work was one hint to the bind we are in as corporate culture takes over everything - including social work, education, and other women's fields.

This corporate culture is not designed to make sure people have lots of emotional energy.  So it's not designed for social workers.  It is up to us to re-claim the fact that we need self-care to do our work.  It is also up to us to acknowledge that self-care is the only way we will have space to connect with others, to critically analyze our situation, and to be creative.  Not prioritizing self-care is one way, I believe, that the corporate take-over of the helping professions prevents us from focusing on macro-issues.  Working on macro-issues requires consciousness-raising and organization which means time, space, and relationship-building.  These cannot be done by the "ideal worker" in the sense of corporate culture.  

So self-care isn't about being selfish or not doing your best as some organizations and corporations might lead us to believe.  Self-care isn't just about healing from trauma, vicarious trauma, or compassion fatigue (although it is those things).  Self-care isn't just about re-charging so that you can do more work (although it is that too).  Full and complete self-care is radical.  By taking space to reflect, to think, to create, to learn, you can consider how you want to commit your energy and how to stay true to our ethical code.  Learning about topics and participating in activities unrelated to work can open new ways of thinking about work-related problems.  This creativity is what we need to crack the tough problems we face in the helping professions.  Becoming more robotic will not help us help our clients raise their own consciousness and find solutions.  Becoming all-consumed by one topic will not let us exercise our creativity to consider ways to break down power differentials.  Being so consumed by our work encourages linear rather than circular thinking.  In this way, self-care allows us to explore radical solutions to our broken systems and our societal problems.  It allows us to feel like the smart, capable people we are.  

Self-care is a radical goal in our "work work work!" society.  It is also extremely difficult to pull off with so many people and problems - about which we care deeply - competing for our limited time.  I look forward to writing a few posts about how I'm trying to commit to self-care so that I can be a better social worker and a better all around person.  Hopefully, we'll hear some other ideas here as well.  

Notes on the Blog Title and Plan

Hello!

So I know the name of this blog is Rad Social Work.  And I really am going to write a lot about radical social work and my developing research that supports radical and feminist practice.  I'm going to write a lot about feminism as a good frame for social work and try to use this as a space to meet other feminist social workers.  BUT I also chose "rad" social work instead of something like "feminist" social work or "radical" social work because of the nostalgic use of the word "rad" to mean cool and free.  Meaning, I'm going to post what I want.  Right now, a lot of that is going to be about being in graduate school, since I've been spending my summer in a mental boot camp as I prepare for my most challenging years of my academic career.  And I will probably post cute pictures of my pets sometimes.

So not everything is going to satisfy the radical part of rad.  This may be an unnecessary disclaimer.  But I'm one of those people who wants to be clear that I've thought through some assumptions and pitfalls and tried to make the best decision I can.  Maybe I'll get enough feedback that I change the name some day or maybe I'll come up with a more catchy title.  But for now, I really just want to write and don't want to get too hung up on the title.  I think it's a good one.  If I find it's not, I'll change it.

I will write some about being a radical person in the real world.  I'll explain how I'm really only radical in some ways.  Some of my way more rad friends would say I'm not that radical.  In many ways, I'm actually pretty square.  Like being a feminist, living radically can come in many shapes and is not well-defined.  A lot of people will try to define it, and that's a good exercise.  I'll work to define it how I define it for me and we can talk about what feminist means to me versus other folks.  But my scholarship and the changes I hope to make in the world are pushing it away from patriarchy and capitalism, and working to reroute our society from neoliberalism and as far as I understand it that's radical.  I wish we could just get rid of these systems of control today.  But that is not a real thing that can happen.  Even though I hate it, change takes a lot of time and all change has unintended consequences.  But we can participate in moving toward change, we can be a voice in the crowd, and we can work together to set up a different world.  In fact, we have no other choice.  I'll write more about my beliefs and over time we'll get to know each other.

I just wanted to write this because I don't really want to be facing too many expectations for this blog.  I want to write what I think will be helpful.  Being efficient in my life and being an effective professional/ scholar are important to me.  I believe these are ways to make progress toward breaking down oppressive systems.  So I'm going to write about that.  I'm also going to write about ideas for actually breaking down or at least questioning and chipping away at oppressive systems.

In short, be ready for some things to relate directly to radical social work and for some things to not be.  I'm probably going to focus more on process than on product because I'm very interested in the way we social workers work, not just what we objectively accomplish.  In many situations, I think the way you work, the way you live, the way you are is more important than what you actually do.  But of course, I think they're both important, so I'm going to write about both.

Thanks,
Kess

Introduction

Hello!  I'm Kess.  This is my third attempt at blogging (third time's the charm?).  I am a domestic violence advocate, turned research assistant, turned community program founder, turned special ed teacher, turned social worker.  Though my resume seems like a crazy journey, overall I have stuck to my core career goals which are to use information, hard work, and authentic relationships to help the community.  In my personal world, I'm super happily married to my fabulous engineer husband/ best friend/ life teammate/ personal chef.  I love animals, particularly my two cats and two rabbits.  I would love to add a dog and llama to the mix, but I definitely don't have time for either and I don't live on a farm so... no llama.  My hobbies include obsessively watching RuPaul's Drag Race and everything related to it, various needlecrafts, reading, gardening, and organizing.  But mostly I work.  I am currently in an MSW/PhD program and also work in program development for my local Office of Children, Youth and Families.

Next week I start my first year of doctoral classes while I simultaneously finish up my MSW (this is my second time in the Master's program rodeo having already gotten an MAT), do my concentration field placement, work my graduate assistanceship, and do a bit of work for CYF on the side.  So probably the last thing I need to do is start attempting to blog again.  But here are some reasons why I'm going to try anyways:

1. I want to.

2. I frame myself as a radical feminist social worker/ person (but you work for the government!! and a sometimes super oppressive part of it!! (I know, we'll get to how I reconcile that in my head at a later point and why I think rad people sometimes should work for the man)), and I think that we need more voices like that in the world.  So why not add to the flotsam and jetsam that is the internet when you think you have something good to say?

3. I am a fairly systematic and organized person who at this point is super experienced at juggling a lot of various work and personal projects and starting new things.  And since I'm working through my second master's degree, the thing I'm best at is learning.  Hopefully, sharing my process might help someone.

4. I know some pretty cool people and if this blog gets even 50 readers, maybe they'd want to share their ideas at some point too.  I'd love to help their voices be heard even louder.

5.  This is one way that I can start breaking down the ivory tower.  I'll probably always have at least one foot, or possibly all four appendages, in academia.  But I completely refuse to do so if my ideas just stay there.  That breaks my core value of helping the community.  So hopefully this blog will be one way to build a community where I can share these ideas and help other people help their communities in one big radical chain of helping.

So here are my goals to make this blog different than some of the other resources for graduate students and social workers that I've enjoyed and used online.

1. I am going to REALLY try to avoid whining about graduate school.  Earning my doctorate has been a lifetime goal for me, and I am incredibly privileged to be in a position to do this.  I am here for many reasons but definitely my unearned privilege as a white person raised by educated parents (who are also white and benefit from tons of unearned privilege).  I am here because I'm married to a person who makes enough money to enable  five years of working at less than my earning potential a difficult choice.  I am here because I left direct practice where kids whined and rolled their eyes and required a ton of patience to help them learn (and I loved them for it) and left the really hard work to other people.  I am here because a lot of people have helped and supported me.  I'm here because I had access to some awesome opportunities.  So yeah, grad school is going to be busy, and I'm going to work all the time.  But I've always worked all the time, so that's not really new for me.  What's different is that now I sit and drink coffee and work at my super cool desk and read and write interesting things and can pee whenever I want (which any teacher will tell you is one of the best things about not teaching).  So I am lucky.  I am extraordinarily privileged.  And I am not going to whine about that on this blog.

2.  There really isn't a lot of online info directly for social workers.  I want more podcasts, blogs, and resources to enjoy.  So I'm going to try to expand the resource base a bit.

3. There are few resources for feminist social workers online or anywhere.  I am enjoying doing research on feminist social work and how we can change the way social workers experience their work using feminist strategies.  I want to talk about that and provide as much information as I can because I strongly believe we need an ignited, educated, active feminist movement in America, particularly in historically women-dominated fields including social work and teaching.

Okay, so that's the plan.  We'll see how it goes.  It may die immediately, or it may help me share and collaborate my way through the next four years.  So read if you want to, and I'll try to keep writing.

Cheers,
Kess