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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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The name of this blog

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It's the weekend! For this post, I figured I should discuss the story behind the name of this blog.

Ironically, I am actually not that cheap. Just like everyone else has a weak spot for something, two of my weaknesses are shopping and eating out. Given that I'm in school right now and don't have much income, I try to do the two aforementioned activities while spending the least money possible. My friends have commented that I always seem know when a particular store has a sale, and can list where all the cheap restaurants are and times and locations of places that have decent happy hour specials. Knowing what my field pays and my personal goals in saving up and having some financial security, I doubt my current shopping and eating out habits will increase much once I graduate and have an actual job. In fact, I should work on eating out and shopping less anyway.

The name of this blog is inspired by my boyfriend, who completely blows me out of the water in terms of cheapness. He is so cheap that his ex-girlfriend wrote a prize-winning blog titled "My super cheap ex-boyfriend" (which I won't link so as not to embarrass him). Having a general idea of what my blog was going to be about prior to creating it I knew I had to incorporate "cheap" into the title, even though it didn't necessarily describe me. In fact, upon showing my blog to my boyfriend for the first time he commented that I was indeed not cheap at all. I wholeheartedly agreed, stating that I should probably take more lessons in cheapness from him. I'm sure his tips in saving money will wind up on here at some point, the first being to cook more and shop less.

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