Faces of Haviland Hall: Noah Miska (MSW '21)

February 2, 2021

Noah Miska is a second-year student in the AWELL (Advancing Health and Well-being across the Adult Lifespan) concentration; his current field placement is with the City of Berkeley's Mental Health Division. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Noah Miska with creek in backgroundCan you tell us a little bit about your background and what brought you here?

I've done a lot of different things, but the immediate precursor to this was working as a case manager on the mobile crisis and outpatient teams at a community mental health clinic in a small town in rural Oregon. I did that for a year, and I got a sense that this is maybe something I would want to keep doing and they would have to pay me more if I have some letters after my name. So with encouragement from my supervisor, my family, and other people around me, I decided to take the first steps towards licensure.

What had you choose UC Berkeley?

Mostly the name. I also had the choice of going to San Francisco State or pursuing a Masters in counseling at Sonoma State, and honestly I have mixed feelings about it. I do think that there are some things that I got through Berkeley that I wouldn't have gotten elsewhere, but for paying twice as much I don't know if I can justify it very well.

Your current field placement is with the City of Berkeley Mobile Crisis Team. Can you say more about that?

As a second-year student, I'm interning three days a week. One day is with the mobile crisis team. Another day is with the CAT team — crisis assessment and triage — which is sort of the intake screening side of Berkeley Mental Health. And then one day a week is meetings for most of the day; that's currently from home due to COVID.
As someone who has at times been very involved in abolitionist community organizing — and especially coming out of the uprisings in the wake of the murder of George Floyd — it has been challenging for me to work in a system that is so tightly integrated with law enforcement. There are a lot of good intentions. But — as it was described to me — the program has been around for about 40 years, and it has not changed a whole lot in that time. According to one of my supervisors, the conversation about creating an unarmed first responder unit has been on the back burner for about 15 years. It's only now in the wake of the public outcry last summer that the city is starting to implement that. Every call that I go out on in person, police are there first. And if you don't take any ethical or political issue with working closely with law enforcement, then it's fine. But if you are trying to dismantle carceral systems, then it may be a frustrating placement.
This is the second mental health mobile crisis team that I've worked on, and it's different. The community that you're working in really shapes so many things. There's more desperation here. But on a more fundamental level: we can do all of the crisis response that we want, but if we're not addressing the underlying conditions that produce these crises in the first place, then we are a hamster on a treadmill and we're not getting anywhere. To be completely transparent, I don't know if I will continue with social work after graduation, or if I do I may need a break.

How would you describe the impact of the pandemic on both your learning conditions and your and your field experience?

Significant. I didn't sign up for online schooling, and by the time I finish, two thirds of my program will have been done online. If things are still online in the fall, I would hope that incoming students would think seriously about the possibility of deferring enrollment if they think online school would be challenging. It's not the same experience.
The nature of my field placement is such that the core activities can't be done remotely, so I have continued to go to that in person. I requested an exception when other students were pulled out of placement [due to COVID prevalence in December and January]. And I did that because despite efforts by the agency and the school, there hasn't been a smooth transition to meaningful remote work for my internship. There's some phone work that could theoretically happen, but even that took a long time to get on the table as a possibility because [City of Berkeley] IT is swamped with everyone working from home. For us to be able to be part of the [Berkeley Mental Health] phone tree, we need BMH phones, and that has to get set up by IT. There are just logistical considerations that shape what can and cannot be done remotely. And so in retrospect, I wonder if I should have taken a leave of absence and come back when I could have had a richer experience. It's been rich, but in a very different way.

Is there anything else that you'd like to add about the programs here?

If you want to become a professional, open some career doors, and increase your earning potential then the Berkeley MSW is a reasonable path to that. But if you want to spark deep social change, you do not need to go back to school to do that. There are so many ways to organize and keep meaningful conversations going that don't force you to discipline yourself within this colonial institution.

What keeps you engaged outside of the MSW program?

Well, there's my dog for one. I also have a lot of creative pursuits. I worked as a caricature artist at the boardwalk in Santa Cruz for a few years, and I've done a lot of drawing and painting. I also recently started relearning brass instruments: mostly trumpet and tuba, which is a lot of fun. I am pretty politically engaged, as you may have picked up. I love to get outside and hike, hunt mushrooms... I try to do things that bring me joy, and that may change depending on my whims and who I'm around.