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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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A Return to Blogging

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Wow, almost four months have passed since my last post!  Seems like so much time has passed that even Blogger has changed its interface...  I've definitely been doing a bad job at blogging.  Between work, sitting in traffic several hours a day, trying to exercise, and trying to relax after a long day, I really don't have time for much.

I've been thinking about the format of my blogs and what to do with them.  Since I don't blog frequently enough, one option is to recombine them into a single blog again.  I suppose I could also keep them separate and find a way to connect them into a bigger site at some point.  My blogs will always be works in progress, so expect changes in the future!

Quick life update: Still working the same jobs, living at home, and not having much luck with the Bay Area housing market.  Seriously, who wants to pay $1000/month to live in a room in a house?  Doesn't help than my parents expect me to live at home until I either get married or buy a house. Given my home situation, I wonder if I would have a better life if I did go to medical/law/engineering school.  Then I realize that my doctor friends have debt in the six figure range (and make less than expected after malpractice insurance/taxes/overhead), my lawyer friends are mostly unemployed and in six figure debt , and my engineering friends only make slightly more than I do.  I suppose it's sad times for everyone right now.

The positive thing about all of this is having extra money to do a little traveling.  It's quite addicting and a motivating factor in finding a career that lets me travel all over the place.  I'll talk about my trips at some point.

Well, that's all for now.  I'll also be updating Cheap Social Worker, so please feel free to check that out too!

Comments

  1. AnaisSeptember 29, 2012 at 8:54 PM

    I hope you continue to update whenever you can! I'm a MSW student also interested in medical social work and I appreciate your insight and experiences. I'm glad to have found your blog and thanks for sharing! :)

    ReplyDelete

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