MSW - advice on how to get in?

juillet
Thu, 11 Sep 2014 00:32:53 +0000

Social work is not my field. However, I do have a few friends who are social workers, and as far as I know…it’s not a field that highly values prestige or anything like that. Moreover, median salaries for social workers are pretty low- in the mid-$40,000 range. So consider attending a public university. If you are in-state for New York, look at Hunter’s MSW - it’s a well-respected program and way cheaper than NYU or Columbia. Lehman College also offers an MSW. Stony Brook also has an MSW program. If you don’t mind leaving the NYC area, other less expensive options are SUNY-Albany, and Binghamton.

You don’t want to just pad your resume; you want to do some real work that’s going to shape your outlook as a social worker and expose you to the kinds of work that you would do as a social worker. So basically, follow your interests. Clearly you want to be a social worker for a reason - why is that? Who do you want to work with?

Volunteering is of course highly valued; you could volunteer at a hospital, a social service agency, a school, or anywhere that will get you doing some work with community members. You should try to volunteer somewhere like where you’d want to work - i.e., if you want to be a hospital social worker volunteer at a hospital. Since you want to do therapy you might try to volunteer in the psychiatric ward at a hospital, or you could work as a rape crisis counselor and/or on a night-time hotline to help those in crisis.

Being a resident assistant might be some good experience - they do a lot of one-on-one peer counseling with their residents and also work to defuse crisis situations. So there’s that!

AmeriCorps is a really good idea; that will look very good but also give you a lot of exposure to the kinds of things you want to do.

It’s impossible to tell your chances for the bigger name schools at this point. You’re on the right track, though.