Sketchitar

I've found that dating someone outside of academia is actually pretty healthy for me. My boyfriend has not been able to go back to school and finish his associates degree, but the fact that he's not in school is actually a plus. He's out doing a real people job, and I think that makes it easier for him to pull me out of my school-related funks. He'll sit all night and listen to me talk about my field, but if I'm stressing out he calms me down. Meeting him was the problem because at the time I was working 70+ hours a week in practicum and a part time job. Online dating for the win. He's a deep thinker about things not even remotely related to my field, and it helps remind me that no matter how it feels, I am not living in a bubble made up only of MSW students and unending books on theory and therapy.

@OhSoSolipsistic My program isn't on campus this year, but I'm familiar with Fairfax, so here's my two cents. GMU is a commuter school, Fairfax is hella expensive to live in.It just is, and being a super economically stratified area there are parts of it that aren't very safe. I live two counties over in a less populated area. Fairfax right near DC so there are a lot of politically-important speakers that come down, which means part of the campus sometimes gets shut down around whatever building they're speaking in so the secret service/regular police can do sweeps and make sure it's safe. That doesn't happen too often though. Cheaper places to live include Bristow, Gainseville, Manassas (though also not very safe in some areas), Haymarket, etc. It's pretty easy to get on the metro in Vienna and head up into DC to go see the sights and the (free!) Smithsonian museums, and the area in VA is very historical, it's full of Civil War history. GMU is one of the fastest growing schools and I know my program has had some growing pains to match. Other programs (my dad is in the engineering school) do not have this issue. I see you're a flavor of psychology; that program owns an off-campus building (my classes are there right now) where there is a mental health clinic and they do the educational testing for the local students. I know a fair number of their grad students get practical experience there. As far as I've heard from people in my program who were psych undergrads, it's a pretty good program. TL;DR is the city is very expensive, the school pretty good and growing really fast, and overall the area in Virginia is pretty great.

Additionally, depending on what state you're in you need to take certain course/have certain content to be able to licence. I don't know if you want to license, but that's usually good for clinical work. Where I am (Virginia) we have four areas of content we have to have in school to be able to license later on, including psychopathology and some clinical practice courses (micro and macro). You don't have to do it during your degree, but you do have to get credits for them. That may be something you'll want to look into.

If you want to stay in the DC-ish area, George Mason University has an Advanced Standing MSW program, you can go either clinical or social change concentration here. It's about 20k for tuition and it's cheaper to live about south of Fairfax (so, Manassas area) and commute in. Fair warning, the program has some growing pains since it's pretty young, but the professors are great.

It really depends when the applications are due in. I applied to my MSW (at GMU) in December of 2016, before my spring semester had even started, and before my transcripts had been updated. I was required to upload my official transcripts when they were ready, as all schools require, but I don't think it impacted anything about the decision process. Often schools don't begin looking at your application until you have official transcripts are in, the website on the admissions process should tell you more about that. However, your best bet is to call into the graduate admissions office and ask someone there. What I'm curious about is how you have 30 some credits to complete before you can get into an MSW if you're in your senior year of undergrad. If you really have that many credits left, how do you even finish that before next fall?

Why did we mutilate the English language? I swear Americans are why learning English can so difficult for people, we spell it all differently than the rest of the English speaking world. Thank you @juanmesh!

There are some issues with this; I think what you should do it take more than the 30 minutes in the beginning when you're practicing for these essays so you can get used to answering the questions well. As you get used to that, start timing yourself. Also, maybe write for a set time every day--write anything, just get used to writing and feeling what writing for 30 minutes is like. You have some good thoughts, but you don't really expand on any of them enough to form a complete argument. The question is the ability of humans to think for themselves will surely deteriorate, but you don't address the "humans ability to think for themselves," you talk about manufacturing and factory work. You aimed for the question, but you hit a little to the left of it. Really think about it--what impact does technology and all it's implications (globalization, AI, mob mentality on social media, having the internet teach our kids, etc) have on us and how we think? A good place to get ideas for that is old 50s-80s science fiction--The Man Who Evolved, The Twilight Zone show, even the Cybermen from Doctor Who, who rely on technology to the point of getting rid of human emotion so they always make rational choices. Get in the habit of asking these kinds of questions to yourself--question everything, believe nothing outright, and make connections from what you read to what you see in the world around you.

I'm starting the MSW this summer, I'm really excited!

@UrbanMidwest It is crap that we don't/can't get paid and like morlvera said, the fact that we have to pay for the credits makes it worse. My comment on funding for field students is maybe more specific to my institution. Out in Farmville (yeah, that's a real place) money for agencies is almost nonexistent, but when the agencies do pay a stipend my program ran into a bigger problem. The paid student were being treated like employees--they were under-trained, put into dangerous situations, and sort of supervised. Certainly not to the level that you want a field student to be supervised. That being said, we were allowed to take paid positions. The catch was we had to find them ourselves instead of relying on help from our faculty coordinator, which was incredibly difficult. Unpaid internships suck. But depending on how many classes you have and the number of hours you're in field per week, it's not impossible to pick up a part time job to give yourself some savings and some pocket money.

@cvsorange Call into the offices, you might get a better answer that way. Or at least an answer. Thank you taahir! Now I'm just trying to figure out how to get everything finalized. I did my intention to enroll thing yesterday and have the limited access things, but I can't figure out how to get the full access username so I can get my e-mail set up and all that. It also hasn't told me how to submit my final transcripts yet, so I'm going to have to e-mail my adviser and see what I'm meant to be doing.

This is a complication I ran into (am still in) in my undergrad. We were discouraged from taking paid positions because it's social services and most agencies (including schools) don't have the funds to support a field student, among other reasons. There are a fair number of MSW programs that will allow you to do your field work at your current job if you meet certain criteria, you could look into that.

I'm officially in! @cvsorange have you heard anything?

This isn't an age of technology or anything, so the office has to manually enter the decisions. In 1-2 business days I should have it. I am so tired of waiting on this school.

No link so I'll call and see if they can give me the information over the phone. Sometimes I look at myself and wonder why someone would let me into an MSW program when I can barely operate as a human.

It doesn't give me anything to click on. I go into applications (nothing)-->summary(nothing) and my profile doesn't have anything either.