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Tips for New Social Work Graduate (MSW) Students

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  Happy start of the school year! Perusing social media, I came across a NASW blog article called “Guide for the First Year Social Work Student”. This post provided lots of great information tailored for new undergraduate students interested in studying social work. I wanted to take that NASW post a bit farther and compile a list of tips specific to graduate students pursuing a masters in social work (MSW). In my opinion, graduate school is a completely different experience from undergraduate, so my hope is that these tips will serve to be beneficial. Tips for New Social Work Graduate (MSW) Students -Don’t worry about grades so much When I was in graduate school, one of my professors told a story about a straight A student who committed suicide several years after graduation. His point was that given the people we need to work with, we social workers need to focus less on being perfectionists (as demonstrated by obsessing over grades and test scores) and work on being empathetic an...
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Becoming a Counselor: Addiction counseling

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Here is an excellent post from Becoming a Counselor that talks about addiction. My favorite parts of this post are the pictures, which would make great educational handouts during individual or group counseling sessions. Definitely worth the read, especially for people like me who don't do much drug counseling.

Becoming a Counselor: Addiction counseling: Quite some time ago after attending a few weekend courses related to addiction I became interested in working with this population of peopl...

Comments

  1. AllieFebruary 15, 2012 at 9:10 PM

    Thanks for much for sharing my post :)

    Allie

    ReplyDelete
  2. ReaganJuly 22, 2012 at 2:23 PM

    Hi! Great site! I'm trying to find an email address to contact you on to ask if you would please consider adding a link to my website. I'd really appreciate if you could email me back.

    Thanks and have a great day!

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownJanuary 18, 2014 at 10:01 AM

    Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  4. UnknownJanuary 19, 2014 at 7:34 AM

    From my childhood its my wish to be a Counselor. For this purpose whatever information I've got here surely will be handy for me. I think addiction counselor is really very important and I've trends to be an addiction counselor. Thanks
    how to become a counselor

    ReplyDelete

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Popular posts from this blog

Tips for New Social Work Graduate (MSW) Students

-
Image
  Happy start of the school year! Perusing social media, I came across a NASW blog article called “Guide for the First Year Social Work Student”. This post provided lots of great information tailored for new undergraduate students interested in studying social work. I wanted to take that NASW post a bit farther and compile a list of tips specific to graduate students pursuing a masters in social work (MSW). In my opinion, graduate school is a completely different experience from undergraduate, so my hope is that these tips will serve to be beneficial. Tips for New Social Work Graduate (MSW) Students -Don’t worry about grades so much When I was in graduate school, one of my professors told a story about a straight A student who committed suicide several years after graduation. His point was that given the people we need to work with, we social workers need to focus less on being perfectionists (as demonstrated by obsessing over grades and test scores) and work on being empathetic an...
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Why I Want To Leave Social Work

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It's been a while since I've updated this blog. I actually wasn't sure if I would actually come back to it, but given recent events I have some free time on my hands and should keep occupied. With that said, let's cut to the chase. I'm burned out. After 10 years of being a social worker, I'm ready to leave the field. A few of the reasons are as follows:  1) Emotional and physical exhaustion  As we all know, social work is an extremely demanding job with high caseloads, emotionally taxing situations, and strict deadlines. Depending on how busy I am and how much caffeine I've had, I'm usually running on high alert so I could finish everything by the end of my shift and sit in traffic. Being in a continual state of stress has started wearing on me, and I find that as I age I'm not as physically and emotionally resilient as I used to be.   The social work profession promotes self-care as a way to prevent burnout. This is nice and all, but how can you ta...
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A Day in the Life of a Medical Social Worker

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One of the problems of being a medical social worker in a hospital is that my work is so varied that people get confused as to what I actually do! To give you a better idea of my job functions, here's a rundown of a typical day at work. At some point, I may write different versions based on what unit I'm working on and what model of social work the hospital uses. For a comprehensive overview of the medical social work profession, please go here: About Social Services at a Hospital A Typical Day in the Life of a (not so) Cheap Medical Social Worker  6:20am: Alarm clock goes off. I hit the snooze button. 6:30am: I drag myself out of bed, wash up, throw some clothes on, and slap my makeup on my face. 7:00am: I run out the door and proceed to sit in traffic for the next hour. 8:00am: I arrive at work, clock in, and head to my desk to print out the hospital census. After figuring out who all the new patients are, I go through each one to determine if they ne...
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