Self Assessment Report essay

Today, the problem of the prevention of youth runaways is one of the most important problems affecting a large number of adolescents and children. In this respect, my internship experience in the youth runaway shelter was very important for me and uncovered a lot of new aspects of the problem of the youth runaway. In this regard, I should say that, in the course of my internship in the youth runaway shelter, I revealed the fact that many children and adolescents need t have some shelter, where they can stay for a while and get essential psychological assistance as well as health care services. Many children escape from their families because of the domestic violence and cruelty from the part of their parents and other adults. In fact, many children have serious psychological problems and what they need is just a bit of attention, a word that can help them to find the purpose in their life. They need to feel support and assistance from the part of other people. In this respect, my internship proved to be very important for me because I have managed to develop new skills and abilities and to expand my professional skills and abilities, to improve my communication skills and relationship-building. My internship in the youth runaway shelter was an important experience in my life.
The development of new skills and abilities as well as acquisition of knowledge is of the utmost importance for me because, when I have just arrived to the youth runaway shelter, I revealed the fact that I have difficulties with the communication with runaway children. First of all, I could not find an effective approach to children because it was difficult for me to start talking to children. Many of them were unwilling to communicate and I did not know what to do to make them talking and uncovering their problems. In this regard, I steadily learned how to start talking to them. At first I started to talk directly about their problems. I asked them why they escaped, what problems they had at home and so on. In such a situation, children were unwilling to talk to me. In contrast, they grew anxious and avoided talking to me. Eventually, I used a different approach. I started talking to them about some regular things. For instance, I could start discussing the last football match I saw or I could start talking about the favorite sport or activity of children. For this purpose, I observed children before starting talking to them. After observation, I could identify their interests and I used subjects of their interests to start communicating with them.

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When they found that I am talking about things interesting to them, they opened their minds to me and we started our communication. Steadily, I attempted to become a friend or a sort of confident for children. In such a way, they grew confident in me and I attempted to help them doing my best in counseling children, who attempted to escape from their homes.
At the same time, I have managed to develop my skills and abilities. First of all, I improved my communications skills. I have learned to communicate with the youth effectively to the extent that I could start talking to any child or adolescent without any difficulties and they did not want to escape conversation with me. Furthermore, I have developed my analytical skills. I became more attentive and capable to develop my analytical thinking which was essential for my communication with children. In addition, I developed relationship-building skills because I needed to establish positive relationships with the youth to help them and to counsel them. In this regard, I needed to work hard. Moreover, I improved my professional skills and improved my performance in counseling children. Finally, I improved my organizational skills because I learned to organize my work properly to maximize the effectiveness of my work.
The development of new skills contributes to the emergence of my strengths, such as my communication skills and relations-building. In this regard, I proved to be quite successful. Nevertheless, I am conscious of the fact that my work and counseling are still far from perfect but I am ready to keep working on the improvement of my professional skills and abilities and to help the youth to tackle with numerous problems children and adolescents face in their life that make them running away from their homes.
Furthermore, in the course of my internship I revealed my inclination to reflection on my behavior and my self-analysis to improve my skills. In such a way, I revealed the fact that I am an applied observer for I have managed to improve my skills and abilities due to careful observation and self-analysis. In fact, I analyzed carefully all my actions and assessed my current skills. On the ground of this assessment, I set goals I have to achieve in the development of my professional skills, such as communication or organizational skills. On setting goals, I have started to work on their fulfillment and improved my skills.
Thus, in conclusion, I would like to place emphasis on the fact that my internship contributed to the development of my professional skills, my communication skills and relationships-building. In this regard, my internship experience was very important because it laid foundation to my further professional development. Now, I understand how important it is to work on the extension of my knowledge and improvement of my professional skills and abilities.

References
Austin, D. (2002) Human Services Management: Organizational Leadership in Social Work Practice. New York: Columbia University Press.
Walton, S. and J. Huey. (1996). Sam Walton: Made in America: My story. Canada: Bantam Books.