xrc742

A little late, but just wanted to respond to the question from @BCgirl, as I was in the last (2019) MSWF cohort at UVic, and am currently finishing off my second year of the program in the MSWA. First off, congrats on your acceptance! I know that the faculty has been extremely stressed out all semester going over the applications as they received a record number of them this year!! I absolutely echo everything @afk612 said about the program and the School, from their perspective of the BSW. The course content is extremely critical, anti-oppressive, and decolonial. There is zero clinical content (yes, less even than the BSW program). I imagine that if you have been accepted to the program, then you will be aligned with this. Although I feel tremendously grateful for the ways this content has pushed me to grow and I think that this type of social work education is extremely valuable, as someone without a ton of practice experience prior to entering the program it means that I will be graduating feeling quite unprepared to actually enter practice and the types of roles my fancy degree supposedly qualifies me for. It also means that if you wish to sit the registration exam, then you need to expect to spend several months cramming for it after you graduate, as none of the exam content is covered in the program. In the MSWF, you will be part of a very small cohort (we were 13 in our year) and receive in person classes together for the first year, and then transition to the completely online MSWA along with all the new students accepted to that program for the second year. I absolutely adore my MSWF cohort and it is our shared connection and support for each other which has gotten me through grad school. The program overall is extremely intense and the workload is frankly unrealistic. It is particularly inaccessible to students with disabilities or caring commitments as there is no option to do the MSWF year part time. Several of my classmates did reduce their courseload to part time in this second MSWA year due to exhaustion and the necessity of juggling paid employment, as there is basically zero funding available for grad students in this program. The quality of all of the teaching during my first year was exceptional and the commitment and dedication of all of the faculty is very apparent. There are faculty members here who have been enormously influential in shaping the social worker I will be, as well as just the person that I am in the world, and I have a huge amount of gratitude and appreciation for that. However, the transition to online classes has been ROUGH, and tbh the quality of my educational experience has dropped massively. The interactive component of these classes is usually limited to mandatory online discussion forum posts, and sometimes profs will record a short lecture or link to YouTube videos. It's really not great, and I often just feel like a number now. The pedagogical style feels pretty incongruent with the critical content we are learning. Furthermore, despite the stated commitment to social justice and anti-oppressive principles, the School as a whole manages to be pretty opaque, dismissive to student feedback, and generally profoundly lacking in student support. There have been countless frustrating issues for myself and my classmates over the past couple of years with the program administration, its lack of organization, and its failure to actually centre student's needs. Also, as @afk612, the practicum department is breathtakingly disorganized. I do think that if you are interested in settling on the west coast for a career, then it probably makes sense to do your program here, as it will help you build connections and network - but I wouldn't think it's a dealbreaker. Think about where you want to be living for the next few years and the *type* of education you want. For what it's worth, if you were accepted into UVic, I would imagine that you are aligned with a more radical and critical analysis - and from what I know about the U of T program, you may struggle with the absence of such perspectives there. Anyway, hope this helps, feel free to ask more questions:):)