Brianna Clark
Fall 2019
During the semester of Fall 2019 I took the class HMSV 440W, this is a writing intensive class. Over the semester I learned a great deal of information on program evaluation. Each task, and discussion board was laid out in a way that would prepare me for the next step in the course. During my program evaluation I felt prepared because of all of the research and information I gathered from each model in order to effectively conduct a successful program evaluation. After I felt that I had a greater understanding of the purpose and how my program evaluation could benefit my agency in many ways.
The discussion board were extremely helpful during the evaluation process because it helped in seeing other ideas and getting a different prospective on the different questions and research that was being done on other agencies. Also, this was a great way to get feedback on our assignments before we submitted them for grading. It was nice to also get compliments on your work from your peers, after putting in just time and effort on your work and knowing that what you’re doing makes sense and its quality work. This class has probably been one of my favorite classes, besides all of the work involved. But at the end you see why and how it all flows together in the Human Services field.
I feel as if improved on my writing skills and I feel a lot more comfortable with typing. I used to look at homework and be so overwhelmed but now I am more confident in my work. This course has shown me that whatever agency or company I choose to work for will benefit from program evaluation. I will use what I learned to encourage my fellow co-workers that this could potentially be a game changer for the entire agency/company. Knowing that change could be very positive and having someone from the outside looking in is not negative that we can be very biased when it comes to ourselves. In my current job I mentioned my evaluation and my boss thought that it would be a good idea to implement it into our job to review the services and how people view our environment and would rate our performance. So needless to say, that mentioning this to my boss was positive for our company because now we can benefit from our own evaluations.
In the future I believe that I could use this skill if I potentially would like to work for a company or agency. This would help me determine the positives, negatives, things that could be changed and so on. I feel like this is a very vital piece in the Human Services field because it actually shows if the things, we are doing are actually making a difference or reaching towards our goal.