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Showing posts from January, 2014

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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 and co
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Models of Social Work Practice in a Hospital

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In my short career, I've been fortunate enough to work at various hospitals as a medical social worker.  Doing so has helped me hone my social work skills and learn about the various community resources in different locales.  Additionally, I've been able to see first-hand the true versatility of this profession, as demonstrated by how the social work role differs at each hospital. I've practiced two main models of hospital social work practice: pure social work and social work/discharge planning.  In this post I will elaborate on these two practice models and discuss the pros and cons of each. Pure Social Work Pure social work focuses exclusively on the psychological and social barriers that affect a patient's well-being and hinder a safe discharge home.  Social workers practicing this model focus on completing comprehensive psychosocial assessments, providing brief counseling/crisis intervention services, assisting with end-of-life situations, finding shelters
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2014 Spending and Savings Goals

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Yesterday, I was looking at my Mint.com account, which I signed up for over the summer to better track my spending.  Let's just say that after getting the account, I probably visited the site a total of 5 times between then and yesterday.  Looking at the charts from the past six months, I was horrified to find out that in the span of half a year, I had spent over 35% of my annual pre-tax earnings.  I know I'm not cheap, but I didn't realize I had spent that much! Fortunately, upon further inspection I noticed that Mint.com was adding my total credit card charges to the totals on my credit card statement, making it look like I spent a lot more than I did.  Mint.com also counted several transfers to savings accounts as spending.  In the end, I computed that I actually spent 29% of my pre-tax earning in the span of a WHOLE year.  Still not that great, considering I live at home, but not as terrifying as the idea that I spent more than I made. Here are a few more things
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2014: Another New Start

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It's been a while since my last blog post.  Between work, travel, and general writer's block, I've really haven't written very much lately.  Hence, I really feel like my already mediocre writing skills have diminished even more!  This year, I'm hoping to change that by making alterations that facilitate more frequent posting and allow me more practice in writing. The first major change is streamlining my blogs.  Looking through my archives, I noticed that I was cross-posting many of my posts to my other blog .  Instead of having two infrequently updated blogs, I figured it would be best to consolidate everything into one blog.  I will still keep Adventures of a (not so) Cheap Social Worker up for now, but all the posts from there can now be found on this site. Postings on this site will pertain to my job, the social work field, anything remotely social work/healthcare related, money related issues, and my attempts to make the most of a social worker salary.  Li
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