TheCrow

Rejected via e-mail yesterday to UChicago's AM/PhD program. Asked if I wanted to be considered for the AM program.

I haven't heard anything back from PhD programs. We'll see what happens.

Sociologists hold a PhD in sociology. PhDs are about research, so I would suggest getting some research experience.

Basically, social work has values. What would you do if your personal values or beliefs conflicted with a professional obligation? Demonstrate this by referring to a conflict you were confronted with earlier and what you did to resolve it.

My understanding has always been that deposits are non-refundable.

Thanks everyone!

Got my writing score back--5.5. Any thoughts?

Are you sure that all of these schools offer an MA that's not just en route to their PhD program (i.e., you can only get the master's if you're admitted for the PhD)? Also, have you considered data science master's degrees?

If I recall correctly, NCSU's MS in Analytics does not require or accept GRE scores (or any other standardized test).

Hey! I took the GRE yesterday and got a 165V and a 156Q. Are these competitive scores for a PhD in social work? Since that's a pretty narrow pool, are they competitive a good to top PhD programs in sociology or psychology (which are more competitive than PhD programs in social work)? Also, is a 156Q going to raise eyebrows for being low from someone who majored in economics? Thanks for any help you can give!

I can't make heads or tails of what GRE scores on this new scale means! I got a 165V and a 156Q. Is that good enough for social work PhD programs?

I'm applying to MSW/PhD, MSW-only, and back-up master's in other fields. I've registered for most applications; I've gotten feedback from my first round of SOP drafts; and I've gotten the green light from all my letter writers.

I'm a college senior. I'm applying to MSW/PhD programs at Boston College, Rutgers, Berkeley, Chicago, Michigan, UPenn, USC, and Wisconsin-Madison. I'm applying to a joint MSW/MPA program at UNC-CH and an MSSA at Case Western. I've gotten my first draft of my SOP back from professors that are working with me and have finalized my team of references. I'm gearing up to receive a lot of rejection letters on pretty letterhead.

This is the curriculum at NYU: http://socialwork.nyu.edu/academics/msw/course-descriptions.html. The first year, you would take the professional foundation. Your first-year field placement will probably not have anything to do with therapy. Would you be able to live with that? In the entire first year, you'd take one general class about clinical practice. I see you're from the midwest. Here's a school I picked at random: http://www.uic.edu/jaddams/college/programs/msw/plan_of_study.html. See how the first year courses are identical. Here's another: http://clas.uiowa.edu/socialwork/graduate-program/msw-program/msw-curriculum What are you going to do if you get a professor you don't like? Or a field placement that in some unrelated field (e.g., a foodbank)? Or clinical supervision you don't like. What about colleagues or even clients that you dislike? What would you do if you didn't get into NYU? Where else would you apply?

The two-year MSW degree at most schools includes a foundation year and an advanced/specialized year. Your first year placement may have absolutely nothing to do with therapy. NYU's MSW program, as well as many other programs, accept transfer applications for those who've completed a year elsewhere. Why don't you attend the local, cheaper MSW program to see if you like it and apply to transfer to schools that offer the training you'd like? If worse come to worse, maybe you could spend the final year at NYU or wherever else by yourself (you'll be busy enough with coursework and your field placement) while your husband continues his career and you use the 60k+ you saved by going to the local school to pay for child care and travel costs to visit home. Then, you could return home or move wherever else to do your clinical work for the LCSW. In terms of what's fair with your husband, I don't think any of us are in a position to answer that. But if this "falls through," you've about run out of options to be a therapist.

Paradoxically, you might find that some of the higher ranked school are less difficult to get into than the lower ranked ones. Look closely at each program's website. Sometimes, social work programs are bound by requirements of other divisions of the university (UNC Chapel Hill's graduate school requires the school of social work to require GRE scores, even if they don't want to). One program that comes to mind is Case Western. Even though they're highly ranked, their acceptance rate is really high and their website says, "A minimum undergraduate grade point average of 2.7. A Miller Analogies Test Score or Graduate Record Exam (GRE) score is required for a grade point average below 2.7."

I don't know about Ohio: In order to set up a private practice as a clinical social worker, one must have the following credentials: • A masters degree in social work from an accredited school of social work • A minimum of two years or 3,000 hours of post-graduate experience in a supervised, clinical setting. (Some states require more. Check with your state licensure board for a confirmation of hours.) • A clinical license in the state where the practice will be located http://careers.socialworkers.org/documents/Opening%20a%20Private%20Practice.pdf

You might want to see "Should Doctoral Programs Graduate Students with Fewer than two Years of Post-Msw Practice Experience? No!" and a response, "Should Doctoral Programs Graduate Students with Fewer than two Years of Post-MSW Practice Experience? Yes!", both in the Journal of Social Work Education. I guess a lot of what matters is what you mean by "social policy researcher." (e.g., are you looking for a tenure-track job in social work?). (As well as Shore, B., & Thyer, B. A. (1997). Should non-MSWs earn the social work doctorate? A debate. Journal of Teaching in Social Work, 14(1/2), 127-145.)

Social work is very much not something that you can just do on the side. Even if you could attend school part-time, at least in my state you would need to work almost full-time to get enough supervised hours to get your LCSW (licensed clinical social work license) within the time limit (here it's a certain number of hours within in a three year period) and be eligible to do counseling. The bachelor's degree in applied behavioral science will not authorize or license you to do anything like counseling that you're not already able to do right now, but having a bachelor's degree in general will make you more employable. What do you envision your life as being like after the MSW? How many hours would you want to work?

I'm referring to the poster before me, who is a professor of social work. The differing organization of doctoral work in different fields has to do in part epistemology. If I were to hire someone to teach clinical practice courses, it would make sense for me to higher someone with years of work. In terms of organization, social work is organized most similarly to nursing, where the BSN is required for nursing (and for admission to the MSN or PhD) and where those who hold a degree in a different field can earn accelerated BSN or BSN/MSN degrees. The result can be to either more or less rush someone through the PhD after years of practice as a pro forma approach so that everything looks as it it supposed to (much like the field of education is notorious for having poor methods or and more or less stapling pages of regressions together and calling it a "dissertation" or many nursing "PhD" programs) or to divide labor so that you have those who produce new knowledge and those responsible for instructor on the basis of years of applied experience (as law does: you have tenure-track professors of law, most of whom have never been "real attorneys," and clinical professors from the field). The epistemology of social is ostensibly a posteriori, as seen in books like Social Work in the American Tradition. Here, we can clearly trace the history of the formation of social work programs as primarily charity workers who organized to provide training to entering members of early case management, determining and managing the "worthy poor." Those with applied experience of many years then became the instructors at these schools like the New York School of Philanthropy (now Columbia University School of Social Work), which would later lead most such programs to affiliate with university and formalize the credentialing process that we see today in the BSW and MSW and their appertaining structures (in particular, CSWE). One of the problems is that the MSW is the terminal practice degree in social work, while the PhD degree in the terminal degree in research. This is dissimilar from law (where most professors only hold the JD, the terminal degree) and business (where this distinction is similar, but very few people hold both the MBA and the PhD since they are intended to accomplish very different tasks). However, social work wants everyone to hold both degrees, even though the PhD is not accredited by CSWE and represents vastly different things at different schools. Like nursing, at many lower-ranked schools, the PhD in Social Work does not represent a traditional PhD, but an advanced practice degree under a different name (which was more appropriately named the DSW, or Doctor of Social Work and, in nursing, the DNP, or Doctor of Nursing Practice). However, the PhD has come to replace EdD, DSW, and DNP degree at many places since it is a higher-status degree. Ironically, however, these sort of camouflaged degrees, despite the name PhD, are not intended to prepare their holder for academic work or even independent research. The problem then is that the formalized academic apparatus wants social work to conform to other fields through the doctoral process, based on independent scholarship and not advanced practice. But there's debate on what this should look like and it makes sense that those engaged in clinical and casework are going to focus on the importance of years of practical experience, while those in policy are going to focus on the importance of economic modeling, social theories, and the like--not years of practical experience. Importantly, the requirement of the MSW to teach "practice courses" means that social work also cannot hire many scholars from other disciplines who may be better trained in certain areas, but must reproduce from within. I think that Michigan's doctoral program has one of the best attempts at solving this, by providing a joint PhD in social work and another social science discipline. Relatedly, the MSW prepares students for psychotherapy, case management, and perhaps community organizing, but not real policy work--it does not have the public administration, economics, statistics, and research focus to accomplish that task because it is not intended to. But, the field of social work cannot address social problems in earnest if it cannot also engage meaningfully with policy in a way that is not organized based on someone who is a clinician or caseworker happening to engage in macro-level practice on the side. There are a number of competing perspectives here. Some would argue that the argument between micro- and macro-level social works has been quelled and that there's sort of an uber social worker who is expected to practice at all different levels. The result there is usually that the term "social worker" really represents a clinical or case worker who engages in macro-level work on the sides. It is difficult to try to professionalize what is ultimately a quite political role for those who are engaged in policy work and challenge macro social structures. It is also difficult to distinguished a professionalized macro-level social worker from competing fields like public administration. In Social Work in the American Tradition, Nathan Cohen argued in passing that those engaged in private clinical practice aren't social workers at all! And in Unfaithful Angels, the authors point out a growing trend of the use of MSW-level social work to provide private psychotherapy to the middle class and not to engage with social problems in any real way. This is being supported by third-party reimbursable billing, restrictions of the use of title through NASW lobbying (consider that it's not possibly to engage in the unauthorized practice of social work unless one calls oneself a social worker; social work does not have a distinct body of knowledge that characterizes its members practices and distinguishes them from others who provide psychotherapy in legally meaningful way, compared to attorneys and physicians), and the like through which there's a dangerous possibly of social work coming to be merely a cheap psychology--focusing on the individual and problems within his or her control in away that reaffirms the existing power structure and distribution of economic resources and political power.

We've already have this conversation via private message about 18 months ago. Given the organization of the field, it makes no sense for me to take large amounts of debt for the MSW, a degree that on average would pay much less than my undergraduate degree, and would not teach me to research skills I would need for the type of job I would want if I don't eventually get a job in the academy as I intend. Should I do so and then go to a PhD program, those loans would continue to accrue interest while in the PhD program (since subsidized loans have been eliminated at the graduate level). You could--and have--advise to go to a cheaper regional public school, but these programs not only seem not to pretend to offer macro work, but indeed have lower acceptance rates than flagship public and top private universities that offer macro-level courses (and offer PhDs, meaning there's more research to get involved in). Such programs mostly intend to take those working full-time in social services in the area, train them up to the next level (usually almost exclusively in clinical methods), and then return them to the local environment. Their acceptance criteria follow from this mission, so I may not even be particularly competitive. In fact, one of the full professors at the MSW program at a regional public university in my state that you recommended (as I have already mentioned) told me not to come to their program because I will not find the training I'm looking for, and recommended her alma mater instead. It would make far more sense for me to do one or two years after the MSW while I work on my dissertation (even if it extends my PhD program), or even do two years of practice after the PhD. According to Unfaithful Angels, there's a big division in social work between faculty interested in clinical methods and those interested in research and policy--and both need each other. Policy and research needs the clinical people because that's where most of the demand is, as well as external grants; clinical people need the policy and research people to legitimate that the field is not just psychology under a different name (and lower price tag). Social work also seems to suffer from a lack of specialization and division of labor that other fields (e.g., education, law, business) have long since arranged. How much sense does it make to do at least two years of full-time work after a bachelor's degree (to qualify for many regional public MSW programs), take on debt for a two-year MSW (sold as an "investment in your future"), work two more years full-time, then move way off to get a PhD, then move way off again for your first faculty position?

With a BSW: one year, at MSW schools that offer advanced standing (not all do), followed by two years of supervision (in every state except Georgia, I think) With a non-BSW bachelor's: two years for the MSW followed by two years of supervision One of the main considerations is with careful planning (and maybe CLEP tests) you could finish the bachelor's degree in something else in less than four years and perhaps even mostly online. Unless you're already working in social services, I would plan to attend the MSW full-time (it'll take you longer part-time and not all schools offer that option). In comparison, the BSW will require field placements and will probably be less flexible about online courses etc. Also, a significant component of the MSW is field placements, unlike most other master's degrees. A lot of this has to do with what state you're in and what your local (particularly public) universities happen to offer.

You would need an MSW to do third-party-reimbursable clinical counseling (i.e., their insurance company would pay you), which is what you seem to be interested in, as well as at least two years of supervision thereafter. With a BSW, you could do case management, which means you could work with people with the challenges you mentioned, but you would do so on the basis of helping them find and navigate various resources, not in the typical counseling setting. You might have an easier time doing an online bachelor's degree in another field (or by doing your first two years at a community college and then transferring into an online four-year degree at a local public university) and then attending a two-year MSW program. Alternatively, you might see if there are any MSW programs in your state that will allow you to earn an MSW online/distance learning if you already have a job in social services and then try to get one of those jobs while you earn your bachelor's degree.

I'm applying to MSW/PhD programs without a prior graduate degree in the upcoming year. I'm also interested in policy and research. I agree that there's nowhere near enough information about applying to PhD programs.

I don't need help identifying programs; I'm looking for feedback on whether I'm competitive for the programs I'm looking at. I'm trying to go into social work.... it might follow that I'm never expecting to make 100k/year. I need a master's degree in order to apply to many social work MSW/PhD programs. I'm applying to the MSW/PhD programs I can right now, as well as two affordable, high-status MSW/only programs. I want to know if it's a viable option to get into a school like NC State.