What is the Concentration in Human Services?
What are the Field Education Internships like?
What else would be helpful to know about the CHS?
Do you want to travel and study abroad?

What is the Concentration in Human Services?

The Concentration in Human Services (CHS) is a comprehensive educational program that prepares students for generalist practice in the field of human services.  Students are prepared to work with people throughout the life span.  The focus is on people, who face a variety of needs and issues, e.g., poverty, discrimination, crime, developmental and psychiatric disability, interpersonal violence, and substance abuse. In addition, the CHS has a distinct focus on macro level advocacy, international social welfare, and human rights. Graduates work with children, youth and adults as well as families and groups, in treatment programs as well as preventative, social action or advocacy settings. Graduates have gone on to graduate schools in fields such as social work, guidance counseling, mental health counseling, law, special education, criminal justice, and international human rights work.

Some of the main features of the Concentration in Human Services are three supervised field education internships, staying together as a cohort throughout the educational process, and an emphasis on arts and recreation.

The Concentration in Human Services is inspired by European social pedagogy/social education and influenced by critical pedagogy with an emphasis on self-directed learning.

What are the Field Education Internships like?

Students do their field education internships in a variety of human services agencies, including domestic violence shelters, residential treatment facilities and runaway shelters for children and youth, community residences for adults with developmental or psychiatric disabilities, and criminal justice settings, such as maximum security prisons for men, probation or minimum security correctional facilities for women.  Field education settings also include daycare centers and schools for children with and without special needs as well as daycare, advocacy programs, and nursing homes for the elderly. Students are afforded the opportunity to do their internships in a variety of advocacy and social change/social action programs as well as in programs that utilize arts and recreation and animal assisted therapies.

Students choose their field education placements in collaboration with the college human services faculty and are expected to do their internships in a variety of agencies diversifying their experiences.  Intensive individual and group supervision is a main feature in the field education experience.

Students do three consecutive field education placements of each 104 hours (8 hours a week for 13 weeks) while also taking the three consecutive Human Services Theory and Practice courses.

All current and previous students highlight the field education component of the CHS as the most important part of their educational experience.  The field education placements afford students an opportunity to truly experience “real life” before graduating, to explore which populations and agency settings they prefer, to rule out what they do not prefer, and to guide them in their future career choices.

What else would be helpful to know about the CHS?

Although students certainly study and read about group dynamics, they actually LIVE it in their educational process. They stay together for 3-4 semesters as a cohort, often more than 4 hours a week.  This cohort experience affords students the opportunity to learn to work together, experience together, have fun and work out differences together and, very importantly, learn from each other.
Students have a variety of learning experiences both inside and outside of class.  We begin the cohort experience with a full-day Ropes Course (adventure based and team building activities).  Hanging from trees, exploring our own boundaries, and encouraging each other, while also laughing together are all great bonding opportunities!

We go on field trips every semester.  Some of the field trips include: visits to residential treatment centers for children, who have been removed from their homes due to abuse and neglect; visits to agencies serving people with developmental disabilities; and a trip to New York City, where we visit a child welfare program that serves lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning young people in foster care. While in New York City, we also tour the United Nations and attend a briefing on human rights. Exploring and understanding human rights are an integral part of the CHS.  All field trips augment the learning process in the classroom and serve to further strengthen the cohort experience.

The requirement to build knowledge and skills in the area of arts and recreation is also an integral part of the CHS. Although we consider verbal counseling skills paramount to the practice of any human service professional, we value the use of arts and recreation as equally important.  “Doing with” people is an amazing opportunity to build relationships and rapport and it provides people with competence and skills.  We continuously do a lot of class exercises to demonstrate the use of the arts and recreation and students are encouraged to take 1-2 expressive arts courses, which have been developed specifically for CHS students.  
Finally, an international social welfare perspective is integrated into every aspect of the CHS (see below for more information regarding our International Social Welfare course).  Expanding our knowledge and learning about other cultures further prepare CHS students to take on the challenges that they will face once they are in the field working with a diversity of people and issues.

Do you want to travel and study abroad?

In addition to the required courses, the Concentration in Human Services also offers an International Social Welfare course every summer to Denmark, Germany or Spain to study human services practices and the overall social welfare system.  These 3 credit courses are 11 days long and count as either a Sociology Elective or a Cognate course. This course is open to both undergraduate and graduate students.  Human services practitioners and educators are also welcome!  The course has been approved as an advanced elective at several Masters in Social Work programs as well as in other graduate programs.

We encourage students to study abroad a semester and will work with each student individually to make sure all major course requirements are fulfilled.