Welcome!

Hello and welcome to Living on the Hyphen!

My name is Jamie.  I have worked in the field of Aging services for the past 17 years (Geez... time flies!). I graduated from Humboldt State University in 2006 with my MSW. 

This blog will be a chronicle of my own personal and professional journey, I hope you will follow along to see how it all works out !!!!

So to start, I bet you are wondering how I found Social Work.  Well it started around 17 years ago. I come from a fairly conservative family with traditional values related to gender roles.  I always knew I wanted to pursue a degree, but for my family that was just not what was expected.  There were really only two professions (Nurse and Teacher) acceptable for a woman (and then only if you she is able to maintain her required role of wife and mother).  I chose nursing. Unfortunately for me, so did everyone else!  The local nursing program was impacted and my name was not selected in the lottery for admission.  This meant taking a year or so to work and I landed an awesome job at an Adult Day Health Care. It was there that I met my first Social Worker and realized that everything happens for a reason... More on that later (:

I am currently a student in a PhD program in a program designed for the Scholar-Practitioner- thus the title of my blog... how will I learn to live on the hyphen between the two roles? I am also a wife, a mom, a pet owner, a traveler, an advocate, a friend, an administrator and faculty member at a University and a Social Worker in the community!

Life is full and I look forward to sharing it with you along the way!