Black Friday!

Apparently my last post was roughly a month ago. My hospital has been offering pretty generous hours lately, and while I've been making decent money, the work coupled with my long commute leaves me pretty drained by the end of the day. Hopefully, I'll be able to alleviate this situation once I have a permanent job and move out of my parents' house.

Anyway, if I haven't mentioned this before, the period between the beginning of October to the end of January is my favorite time of year. This is because all my favorite holidays and my birthday fall during this four month period. Last Thursday, I had a relaxing Thanksgiving filled with family time and food. Yesterday was Black Friday, signaling the beginning of my favorite time of year to shop.

While I do like to save money, I'm not hardcore enough to do something like pitch a tent in front of Best Buy in order to get a cheap television (which I saw on the way home from breakfast Thanksgiving morning). I have nothing against these people, and in fact wish I could actually wake up that early enough on Black Friday morning. This year, my dad somehow managed to get up at 5am to get a deal on a Christmas tree. While I may try braving the cold and crowds someday, for now I'd rather stay under my warm sheets on Black Friday morning. There's always Cyber Monday and the new Small Business Saturday.

As has been the case for several years now, I spent Black Friday in San Francisco to watch the Union Square tree lighting ceremony and do a little Christmas shopping. While the deals usually aren't as good on Black Friday afternoon, I usually go to the city for the holiday shopping experience. In the end I got some makeup items for myself and some giftcards, though I ended up returning the giftcards after my cheap boyfriend kindly told me I could get up to a 10% discount online (more on that in a future entry). I also got some basics from Old Navy after the obscenely long checkout lines finally thinned at 10pm. Here's a tip for shopping at Old Navy: If you can't find your size in a certain item, just buy a different size at sale price. You can exchange it for the correct size once they restock!

Well, that's all for now. I'll try to update this more frequently since I probably won't be working as many hours this month. Happy Holidays!

Sephora Friends and Family

Sephora is one of my favorite stores. Despite the fact that my cheap boyfriend prefers a natural look on me, I visit Sephora regularly to shop, play with make up, and pick up free samples to test on my sensitive face before buying.

Word on Slickdeals is that Sephora is having its Friends and Family sale from 10/21-11/3. Now would be a great time to stock up on make up, face and body products, and Christmas presents as everything will be 20% off with the code FF2010. If you want to save more money, shop through Ebates.com for 4% cash back! Buy now while the sale is happening, because when the sale is over and your eye cream runs out you'll be paying full price!

Happy Case Management Week!

At work, I am part of the Case Management Department. This department consists of nurse case managers, social workers, and assistants who work in tandem on a patient's discharge. While case managers handle the medical aspects of a discharge, the social worker's primary role is to address social issues such as coping, substance abuse, family dynamics, community support, safety, abuse, and end of life decision making.

This week is National Case Management Week, and I am pretty happy that my job is including the social workers in the festivities. This week, I received a free pin, free lunch, and free gift certificates. Very sweet. Next up: National Social Work Month in March!

Don't forget to thank your case manager, social worker, and discharge planner for ensuring that each hospital patient gets discharged in a safe and timely manner!

A new beginning

Wow, it's been almost a year since my last post! I suppose time flies when you're busy. Let me summarize the events of the past year:

-I completed my MSW program last May. While I am relieved to be done, there are times when I miss the student lifestyle. I suppose contributing to this feeling is the fact that...
-I moved home. Considering I didn't have a job lined up upon graduating, I took advantage of my parents' generosity and moved back home. While this is meant to be a temporary arrangement, my parents do not want me moving out until I secure a full time job. Moving home has certain been an adjustment, as I enjoyed living on my own. However, the biggest benefit is that I'm saving tons of money by not paying rent (my parents refuse to accept rent money, telling me to save it instead).
-I landed a per diem job at a hospital. After three months of obsessively searching and applying for jobs, I was finally hired by a staffing agency. I currently work at an acute hospital as a medical social worker. While planning discharges and addressing multiple patient issues can be exhausting, I find that my days go by rather quickly. Overall, I am content with the work I do and happy that my salary is higher than my initial expectations (which were really low). Currently, I am working full time hours as one of my co-workers is on leave for a few weeks.
-I am still applying for jobs. Ideally, I would like to land a full time job with benefits so I can move out of my parents' house already. However, I am not in too much of a hurry to sign away the next 30 years of my life just yet. There are a few things I'd still like to do, such as travel and dedicate time to hobbies I've been neglecting because of school. When I feel ready (and the right job comes along), I'll move out. Ideally, I'll have saved up a decent amount of rent money from not having paid rent while at home.

Anyway, that's my life update. Now that I'm not busy with school, I'll see what I can do about updating this blog more often!

We're #1! We're #1!

While surfing the CNN.com website, I found a link that read Stressful jobs that pay badly. Clicking the link, I was not surprised to see what was number one on the list.

Being number one on this list is not something we should be proud of as social workers. Furthermore, a person with a masters degree should not be making $12 an hour. I understand that social workers are not in it for the money, but it becomes unacceptable when people with education levels this high can barely afford to support themselves.

As social workers, we are constantly advocating for the needs of our clients. It's time we advocated more for ourselves in ensuring better wages and working conditions. What kind of social workers would we be if we couldn't help ourselves?

The name of this blog

It's the weekend! For this post, I figured I should discuss the story behind the name of this blog.

Ironically, I am actually not that cheap. Just like everyone else has a weak spot for something, two of my weaknesses are shopping and eating out. Given that I'm in school right now and don't have much income, I try to do the two aforementioned activities while spending the least money possible. My friends have commented that I always seem know when a particular store has a sale, and can list where all the cheap restaurants are and times and locations of places that have decent happy hour specials. Knowing what my field pays and my personal goals in saving up and having some financial security, I doubt my current shopping and eating out habits will increase much once I graduate and have an actual job. In fact, I should work on eating out and shopping less anyway.

The name of this blog is inspired by my boyfriend, who completely blows me out of the water in terms of cheapness. He is so cheap that his ex-girlfriend wrote a prize-winning blog titled "My super cheap ex-boyfriend" (which I won't link so as not to embarrass him). Having a general idea of what my blog was going to be about prior to creating it I knew I had to incorporate "cheap" into the title, even though it didn't necessarily describe me. In fact, upon showing my blog to my boyfriend for the first time he commented that I was indeed not cheap at all. I wholeheartedly agreed, stating that I should probably take more lessons in cheapness from him. I'm sure his tips in saving money will wind up on here at some point, the first being to cook more and shop less.

Why certain majors are more profitable than others

The other day, I read an article on the San Francisco Chronicle website which discussed the increasing phenomenon of college graduates having to move home due to being unable to find a job. This particular article focused on three struggling recent graduates - a sociology major, an English major, and a double-major in economics and political science. These individuals expressed their frustrations at not being able to find a job and thankfulness that their parents allowed them to move back home.

Now, what struck me about this article was not the article itself, but the comments section. Many readers had no sympathy for these students, claiming that their humanities majors had no practical use in finding a job. Some claimed that if these students had majored in the hard sciences instead of merely fooling around during college, they would have jobs right now. Others stated that their situation was a result of not being intelligent enough to study the hard sciences. A commonly recurring theme was that those who chose majors such as sociology or psychology were epitomes of sorority girl, fraternity boy, and student athlete stereotypes.

I suppose none of this is new to me, coming from a school where sociology and mass communication majors were stereotyped as the partiers and underachievers. In actuality, I never thought much about until it I went to grad school and realized that most of my classmates were indeed sociology and psychology majors. From having interacted with a number of them, I know firsthand that these people are extremely intelligent, driven, and hardworking, hardly fitting of the aforementioned stereotypes. Additionally, I have a number of classmates who were science majors as undergrads, including biology and computer engineering. In fact, I found out recently that one of my friends has done work on particle accelerators. While I don't know the reasons as to why they didn't choose to pursue a more science-related career, I highly doubt that lack of intelligence is one of them.

Why am I talking about this? I suppose part of it is a little bit of transference because I admit I had a rather negative reaction to this comments left on this article. Another reason is to process my thoughts, which is one reason I like to blog. Similar to these undergrads, social workers are generally frustrated due to lack of pay and stressful working conditions (or lack thereof). Many people do not understand or even see the value of the work we do, with our academic field being grouped with the other fields that are notoriously underfunded and under appreciated. To some level, many negative stereotypes are applied to the academic portion of our field because it is not perceived as rigorous as hard science curriculum.

Fact of the matter is that appreciation and more pay would be nice, but the fundamentals of the social work field prevent this from happening due the nature of our society. In our capitalist market economy driven world, more jobs are going to be available in sectors where there is a demand for workers. In recent history, this has been the science and tech industry and not the humanities or social sciences. Additionally, today's economic world is heavily driven by production and profit. While social workers help many people with whatever issues they may be facing in life, they do not exactly produce a tangible and profitable product. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked, "How exactly do you measure productivity among social workers?" Indeed, it is quite difficult to quantify the end results of what we do on a mathematical or economic scale.

I don't think the problem is that social workers, social science majors, and humanities are unimportant. The issue is that the worth of our profession/degree is defined in terms of the world market. Sociologists and psychologists study the plight of the disenfranchised. While admirable, the surplus of these majors does not bode well for one looking for work. English, philosophy, art, film, and music majors are important in furthering culture in our society. Unfortunately, the important of culture in the past few centuries has been greatly diminished by advents in science, greatly increasing competition among artists, writers, and thinkers and hence decreasing the amount of money and job opportunities in these fields. As for social work, social workers oftentimes work with undesirable populations in situations that generally do not produce profit. In today's world, there is certainly a need for social workers to pick up after the mess society leaves behind. Unfortunately, the nature of what we do and who we work with may not lead to prestigious jobs with high salaries. Despite constant talk among social workers and social work organizations about advocating for more respect and better pay, I'm skeptical to think that any big change is going to happen unless there is a major paradigm shift away from the current economic philosophies that run this world.

I suppose when choosing a career, one must evaluate what is important to them. If you want to study sociology, but place more importance in making money, realize that with your degree you'll probably have to do more work in the long run to achieve wealth as opposed to if choose more lucrative field in the hard sciences instead. Hence, if being wealthy is important to you, then it's best to think about the profitability of your future career. Essentially, it's what you value in life. If one feels that being wealthy is the only way to achieve happiness, I'm not opposed to them pursuing a lucrative career. However, there are some things simply cannot be measured in terms of supply, demand, profit, and monetary worth. Life is temporary, and money can only take you so far and buy you so much.