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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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Demand For Social Workers Expected To Grow

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As I was watching the news recently, I saw this segment on the social work profession.  Nice to see the profession get some non-negative publicity, but I felt the need to repost this video to address some inaccuracies and lack of clarity.

Demand For Social Workers Expected To Grow « CBS Chicago

My thoughts:

1) Where I live, most entry level social worker jobs require a masters degree, though a BSW is sometimes acceptable. Typically, psychology and sociology degrees are NOT acceptable, though I've seen them in case worker and counselor positions. This profession really needs to work on getting some title protection in place, because it's degrading to have non-social workers doing work meant for and done best by people with social work degrees.

2) Anyone with a BSW and MSW can diagnose patients and provide interventions, therefore performing the function of what this report calls "clinical social worker". I mean, I was diagnosing patients as an MSW intern and my BSW friends were doing the same (with LCSW co-signature of course). I think whoever wrote this report meant to describe licensed social workers, who are able to diagnose, intervene, and practice independently. Licensed Clinical Social Workers (LCSW) are the ones that require 2+ years of experience (3,200 hours in California) and passage of licensing exams.

Anyway, it's nice to see a relatively positive job outlook for our profession. Hopefully the demand for social workers will mean an increase in our wages (as long as non-social workers don't hijack our jobs and as a result keep our wages low).  It's refreshing to know that job stability is something I don't necessarily have to worry about for the next decade!

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