Last semester one of the required classes that I took was a class on Social Welfare Policy. My professor's name was Dr. Seipel, he was obviously very liberal in a lot of his beliefs and there was many a day that I spent in his class where I found myself silently disagreeing with his expressed opinion in  the back of the classroom. However, there was this one day in that class where he decided to talk to the class about ways that citizen's could get involved in the decision making process. His example included, social protest, symbolic acts, petitions, letter writing, etc. Despite my various disagreements with Dr. Seipel's opinions I actually found this section of the class rather interesting.

Also, last semester I took a class on Models of Psychotherapy, basically a class discussing all the different type of therapeutic interventions we might be able to some day employ as Social Workers. During that class my professor, Dr. Cox, had a guest speaker, Dr. Michael Cheney, come address the class on the subject of Persogenics. Persogenics, is in many ways like the Color test, or the Meyer's-Brigs. It's a type of personality classification, but unlike the others Persogenics specifically addresses how you communicate with others. How you see yourself, how others see you, and how you are seen at work. The four communication styles are amiable (those who are always trying to help and don't really like to say "no"), analytical (those who are more focused on a step by step process, lists, etc.), dominants (who are very to the point, direct, and live very much in the present), and expressives (who are pretty much that chatty kathy that was constantly talking that you either were yourself, you loved, or you hated). Each of us was asked to take persogenics before Dr. Cheney visited the class to find out which communication/personality styles we scored highest on for example, when I took it I scored as most characteristic of an amiable/analytical. Dr. Cheney visited our class and talked about how the basis of Persogenics is to help people to learn to communicate better based on their dominant communication style. He applied it to social work because he said that it has proven to be extremely valuable in helping social workers to build strong, trusting therapeutic relationships with their clients. He also told us that next semester (this current one) be would be offering an entire class on Persogenics run through the School of Technology that we were welcome to sign up for and use as one of our electives in the program. I was definitely interested so I registered for the course.

The first day of class was last Thursday and I immediately knew that I made the right choice in which elective to take. Just from that first class I felt as if I learned so much from Dr. Cheney. Of course it also helped that he mentioned our tests for the class would be based on class participation, that pretty much the only thing we would be doing as far as assignments went was writing a 20-25 pg paper based on the interactions between a couple we interviewed, and that our final was going to consist of Dr. Cheney taking us all out to dinner. Not bad if I do say so myself. Especially since it was a class I enjoyed and felt like I was going to learn a lot from. The only problem was that only 6 of us signed up for the class and BYU has a strict 15 student minimum requirement in order to carry a class. We asked Dr. Cheney about it last week and he infomed us that we shouldn't worry about the possibility of the class being dropped because he had a good amount of support from the School of Technology who pretty much believed it was an important and useful class for anyone to take. Well, one of the girls registered for the class flaked and dropped it and that sent things into a tailspin. Today, as my peers and I sat in class eagerly awaiting it's commencement Dr. Cheney walked in and told us that it looked in fact like they were going to drop the course due to lack of enrollment. I'm just outraged! Anyway, I feel like at this point in my life I did Dr. Seipel proud. I went home after class today and wrote an email to the Director of the School of Technology as well as the Dean to the College of Engineering and Technology about how important this class was to us and how helpful it would be to our careers, etc. I gave them the whole sob story. Then I emailed all my classmates (all 4 of them) and asked them to do the same. Three of them agreed. I won't give up on this. I'm not losing this class without a fight! In the meantime, I've added another class, Marriage and Family Practice, which will still be interesting and I was planning on auditing anyway, but I really hope that somehow Persogenics can be saved. Regardless, I got involved in the decision making process, I made my voice heard, and now all that's left to do is sit and wait for the outcome, which I'm not expecting there to be much of one. But, I think somewhere out there Dr. Seipel is shedding a single tear if only for the fact that he actually influenced one of his students from last semester, especially me, which I'm sure he never thought would happen.