Tell me about Social Work school (MSW)

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve been thinking about going back to grad school, and one of the options I want to look at is getting an MSW. I’ve done a lot of work in the social work/human services field, and I like doing counseling, so I know an MSW would be a good fit for me career-wise, but I’m not sure whether I’d like the schooling.

There is a Master’s of Counseling program at the university in my town that I’ve looked at, which would provide most of the professional advantages of an MSW, but I think I would hate the program. It seems very “fluffy,” with a lot of focus on working through your own issues. It also seems to be have very little in the way of empirical foundation; from what I’ve heard it is based largely on the biases and opinions of the professors. Students do no research whatsoever and are not encouraged or taught to think critically.

I don’t expect a research-based program (though I have thought about doing a PhD in Psychology) but I do want to know that I’m being taught things that are grounded in solid research and I want to be able to read and evaluate the research, even if I’m not doing the research myself. I also want to be surrounded by people who are critical thinkers and taught by people who are engaged with the latest developments in research and who encourage and demand critical thinking of their students.

Would I find these things in an MSW program? What are the coursework and assignments like? What are the students like?

2

Looks like I’ve been Warnocked.

3

Calling olivesmarch4th…IIRC, she’s actually doing her MSW at the moment, so she could definitely tell you something about it! Let’s hope he does vanity searches, or else you could PM her with your questions!

4

I do not have an MSW, but I work with many people who do. The ones I respect describe their degree like your complaint above. They feel they would have been much better served getting their Masters in Psychology, Criminal Justice, or another neighboring field.

The people I work with who LOVE their MSW degree are generally the type who don’t think critically and believe “the world is full of bright happy wonderful people oh my isn’t that a shiny object over there?”. To be fair, I don’t think there are any great schools for MSW’s in this area, so things could be different in your neck of the woods.

My M.S. was Criminal Justice, and it qualified me for the same jobs as an MSW.

5

Yeah, I know some dumb people with MSWs. I mean “holy crap” dumb. I also know some great people who suffered through the degree just like I suffered through the stupider parts of library school - because you need the stupid thing to get the job.

6

Sorry for stepping in late… I don’t come here often lately.

Ask yourself these questions:

  1. Is your commitment to social justice one of your most defining characteristics?
  2. Does that commitment include a willingness to be in a profession that is undervalued, underpaid, and incredibly stressful?

If you answered yes, you may just be a social worker.

I am an advanced year student at Penn right now, and my perspective is that the program is about as good as you make it. Most people think of social work as counseling, and while that’s certainly an option, there is so much more to social work than that… it is just an enormously broad and flexible field that runs the gamut from making policy in Washington to community organizing. I’m much more interested in the big picture stuff: policy, programming, building capacity within a community. My first year practice class was indeed very ‘‘fluffy,’’ but you have to understand a lot of people drawn to this career have suffered through a lot of the things they want to address. When you get thrown into a situation where you’re spending 55-60 hours a week essentially immersed in human suffering, some thereapeutic outlet is necessary.

Students in my program choose between a clinical and macro track. I can’t speak to the clinical except to say that most of the students appear interested in evidence-based practices and are incredibly smart professionals. Some of the professors are old-school/touch-feely and make me roll my eyes; others absolutely humble me with their academic rigour. So it’s going to be a mixed bag. But don’t think for a second that if you go into clinical psychology you’re automatically going to get access to more sound education. My husband is a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology and while his program is very evidence-based, there is a lot of touch-feely B.S. taught in the Psy.D. program.

The tension between research and practice is a massive concern among multiple fields, social work and psychology are just the tip of the iceberg. It makes me angry and it fuels my motivation to implement evidence-based programming in social service agencies. I’m honestly furious how difficult it is to get direct practice workers to use methods that have been proven to work, but that is starting to change because funding is a very outcomes-based decision. Funders now want proof that what you’re doing will work. Business, as always, is going to be a game-changer, and for once I am grateful that money talks.

All social work programs require an internship in addition to full-time coursework, so if you think this is going to be as easy as showing up to a few classes, guess again. Last semester on top of my internship I had 17 papers, 5 presentations and 4 major projects. I’ve never worked this hard in my life and I say that as someone who worked full-time to support herself in high school. I had 800 pages of reading last week, and unlike Ph.D. programs, most professors actually expect that the reading will get done. Of course YMMV with regards to program difficulty and workload - I deliberately chose a notoriously difficult program. I think it was a good call because I’m learning to manage crazy levels of stress which seems pretty essential to the nature of the work I’m going into.

I’m not sure exactly what you want to know about the coursework. Some of it is hard, but grading is easy, and you’re going to study inequality and the history of racism in the U.S. (my racism sequence was hands-down the best course I’ve taken here… though having a civil rights superhero as a professor didn’t hurt). You’ll also study sociology and theories of human behavior, philosophy, and policy up the wazoo. You will read a lot of statistics. The emphasis for the first year is on the roots of both inequality and the social justice movement. Personally I find the history of social welfare utterly fascinating - when you realize where our notions of welfare came from, and how the arguments remain essentially unchanged after hundreds of years… it’s pretty eye-opening.

The challenge I guess is to figure out where you fit into all that. Some people just want to get the degree and get out, but others decide they’re going to go do radical political work or change a community or whatever. I have friends in advocacy, counseling, public policy, non-profit management, and so-on.

I chose the macro track. Currently at my internship I’m working on the development of a new nurse-managed health care center at a large social services agency that serves a high-poverty urban area. We are an anti-poverty organization, meaning we’re trying to create changes in the community that raise the standard of living for everyone. I’m writing a lot of grants, and participating in a lot of planning meetings with marketing and development teams. The focus of my job is to successfully integrate existing behavioral health services into the new health center, so I have to do a lot of background research on best practices for integrative health care. We also have to facilitate partnerships with organizations who have experience with this - we’re currently in the process of applying for a federal grant in partnership with two major capacity-building organizations.

So that’s probably not the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear ‘‘social worker,’’ but that’s what I’m doing, and I love it. I love that every day, no matter how stressful things get, we are implementing specific, targeted changes based on a thorough evaluation of community needs, and that we are an outcomes-based organization with the data management and evaluation capacity to determine that our programs are working. That matters to me. I’m really hoping to stay on when I graduate as a full-time employee.

The average graduate from my program makes $60k after graduation, which is a lot better than most MSW programs, but some people make as little as $36k and I’m probably going to start out around $40k. If that bothers you, definitely don’t go into social work. It’s not a financial investment. Social policy and public administration are related fields that tend to generate higher incomes.

I don’t regret the choice for a second. I had a very victim mentality for a long time, social work gave me a sense of agency and put that to rest once and for all. When I hear about something tragic, I no longer get upset the way I used to. Instead I’m automatically thinking of the 20 different things we could do to prevent it from happening again. It’s not a bullshit Polyanna mentality, it’s a rolling up your sleeves and getting shit done mentality, and it happens every minute of every day. There are thousands and thousands of people working to make this better, and now I’m one of them. I like myself and others better than I ever did before. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

7

Sorry, it’s early. I just realized I didn’t directly address your question.

It sounds like you want to know about clinical evidence-based practices. I am passionate about this issue which is why I’m trying to be one of the handful of people in social work who demands evidence from the programs I implement.

No, this is not a field that typically gives a shit about evidence (I almost screamed when someone in my class recently announced, ‘‘I don’t agree with the evidence…’’ and then inserted her own opinion as if it had equal bearing on the truth), but it’s not social work so much as the culture of therapy that creates this problem. The history of social work is not rooted in psychology, it’s rooted in community organizing and the social justice movement. If you’re going to blame anyone for the lack of academic rigour in therapeutic settings, blame Freud, whose peddled bullshit has been the dominant pscyhotherapeutic framework for the better part of a century despite the fact there is no evidence that it works. There are a ton of practicing psychologists with fancy Ph.D.s who spend hours every day doing nothing of value and getting a lot of recognition for it. Have you ever read a psychodynamic research paper? It’s a freakin’ joke. Or it would be, if lack of access to evidence-based treatments wasn’t such a serious problem. I would personally be in favor of terminating the licensure of any person who knowingly fails to use evidence-based practices in a therapeutic or intervention setting, unless conducting research. I think it’s a moral travesty. I’m kind of militant, though.

So the first thing we need to do is stop assuming social workers are inhernetly poorer therapists than non social workers. There is no evidence of that. All research conducted on this matter indicates that psychologists and social workers are equally shitty therapists. :slight_smile: Social workers came into the field of therapy rather late in the game - I believe it was the 60s and the War on Poverty when the need just overwhelmed our resources and they started throwing social workers into clinical practice. There are social work theories of clinical practice, but a lot of them are hippie theories, like the ‘‘ecological approach’’ which teaches that the client is a part of his of her larger environmental context. No shit? Then there’s ‘‘family systems’’ which makes sense but as far as I can tell doesn’t have a lot of research to back it up. But if you go into the field saying, ‘‘I’m going to do CBT,’’ you’ll be in high demand and certainly will find the job training you need. A lot of my colleagues are receiving training in evidence-based practices.

The reason it’s changing is that there is now a direct financial incentive to use evidence-based practices. Also, the new generation -i.e. me and my husband - we are demanding more rigorous education. With time, we are going to replace the old ‘‘I know better than some silly study’’ mentality with a radical new viewpoint: ‘‘everyone deserves treatments that have been proven to work.’’ The social workers and psychologists of yesterday are very different than the social workers of today. Times are changing. I would say the last ten years or so have brought massive changes to the field’s approach. You can even see it in the way research articles are written. This is the dawning of a new era. It’s a fascinating thing to behold.

As for the general bad rap social workers get, the fact that anyone can call themselves a social worker doesn’t really help - there is a world of difference between an M.S.W. and what my Dean calls ‘‘a 22-year-old art history major.’’ I think people assume that those in social work positions have social work degrees, but that is often not the case, particularly in direct practice.

You will read a lot of research in your coursework, but it’s anyone’s guess whether the professor and students will approach it critically or not. There is an actual method to this madness, the fact is a lot of people just ignore it. Social work is hardly unsusual in that regard - there is evidence that medical doctors trust their judgment over research, as do a number of other fields, despite the fact that they show consistently worse outcomes than those who do use research to inform practice. People in general have terrible judgment and nobody wants to admit it.

In short, you will get out of your program what you make of it. Some students and professors are going to be more critical thinkers than others. I do think my particular program is probably better than average, in part because there is a such a heavy emphasis on research among the faculty. (“Publish or perish.”) If you want the best chance of being exposed to the best evidence, I would look into programs that mention their faculty are active publishers.

I hope there is something helpful here. Let me know if you have any more questions and I would be happy to help. I definitely know where you are coming from and had the same concerns going in.

I have to go do work now.

8

[OT]Olives – Doper Dinner in Center City next Weds. – see thread in MPSIMS – I’m late for work, can’t look for it now. [/OT]

9

I do want to point out that it seems like a lot of people in the field have their own issues*, so working out your own problems is not a negative. The lack of evidence based training is, though.

*Often, it attracted them to the field in the first place.

10

Exactly. Imagine sitting in a classroom having an academic discussion about child abuse when you yourself were a victim of abuse. Imagine working in a homeless shelter knowing that your brother is homeless and you haven’t heard from him in 15 years. Imagine reading about how hard it is to be a poor black single parent when you’re an African American student working two jobs to support two children you adopted following the death of your sister (this last one is an actual colleague of mine.) Now imagine that you don’t get reminded of those things once a week or once a day, but that you spend 8-12 hours a day constantly immersed in study and practice that reminds you always of where you came from. How do you shape a professional identity without first letting go of your identity as victim? And how do you achieve any degree of objectivity when you are so caught up in your own crap?

That process for some of us is grueling but has implications way more important than just improving our work as professionals. First thing I had to do was realize there are no dichotomies in real life. I worked with elderly Holocaust survivors with more money and social status than I will ever dream of having. Some of them were racist as hell. Are they privileged, since they’ve had power and status throughout most of their lives, or are they victims of horrific racial oppression and their own frail bodies? Are they oppressed or oppressor or both? And what does that say about me? Could it be that I’m more than just a victim too? The first 22 years of my life were pretty rough. But could the fact that I’m at Penn and am doing pretty well for myself suggest that this concept of ‘‘privilege’’ is more nuanced than I thought? What does it say about me that I claim to value equality but chose one of the most privileged, elite universities to get my degree? Do people’s choices create their reality, or are they really just victims of systemic oppression? Why not both?

As I stated above, becoming a social worker gave me agency, it allowed me to not take my own experiences so damn personally because I now see them in a broader context, part of a system that creates these same scenarios over and over again. I can also see the thousands of ways I’ve had advantages that other people haven’t, as well as the fact that hey, I deserve some credit here because I’ve busted my ass and made some really good life choices. It was not easy to get there. I had to accept some very real professional limitations (for example, I should never, EVER work in child welfare) and push others (I can, nonetheless, take a child welfare class, and learn to make reasoned arguments about the system without emotionally flying off the handle.) I understand not everyone has that personal connection, but a great many social work students do, and I’ve found that this particular ‘‘touchy-feely’’ crap is every bit as relevant to practice as the evidence.

And I think that is true regardless of whether you have personal experience with social problems. Everybody comes in with their own ideology and their own view of how these things happen, and everybody is going to be challenged philosophically because there are really no easy answers to a lot of the questions raised. It’s not as simple as blaming the system or blaming the individual or calling some people victims and others oppressors. As Freire says, there is an oppressor and an oppressed within every one of us. At some point you gotta contend with that.