sweetmelissa
Jan 19, 2014
Graduate / I was challenged by the lack of simple answers; MSW at NYU [2]
Hi--Please help! I'm applying to the Silver School of Social Work at NYU and I'm obsessing about my essay. At this point, I've written and re-written and deleted about 30 pages of essay content to get this six double-spaced pages and I have to turn this in by Thursday. I would love any comments or editing help that you could provide. Thank you!!
Essay guidelines:
In a well-constructed essay of no more than six pages, answer each of the questions below. Your essay MUST be double-spaced, with one-inch margins and a type size of at least 12 points.
Question 1: How did you become interested in social work? What personal, academic, organizational, volunteer, and/or paid work experiences have influenced your choice of social work as a profession? If you considered a different major or career, please discuss your reasons for the change to social work.
Question 2: What are your reasons for seeking graduate social work education at this time? What are your expectations of graduate social work education?
Question 3: Describe some intellectual and personal attributes that you believe make you particularly suited for the profession of social work. What attribute would you most like to strengthen or change in order to increase your ability to be helpful to others?
Question 4: Briefly discuss a current social issue of great concern or interest to you.
Question 5: What are your career interests and goals? As a graduate of the Silver School of Social Work at New York University, how do you expect to contribute to the social work profession?
Question 6 (optional): Is there anything else you would like us to know as we consider your application? Please describe.
My essay:
The NASW Code of Ethics says that ethical decision making is a process and that there are many instances in social work where "simple answers are not available to resolve complex ethical issues." Every day in Madagascar, I was challenged by the lack of simple answers. Nothing that I could read fully prepared me for the messy and complex realities of every day decision making in the developing world. Do I give this street kid money and help her eat today, but possibly help perpetuate a system which is preventing the government from creating real change that could lift this kid's life, and the lives of thousands of others like her, out of poverty? Is it racist and disempowering of me, as a privileged outsider, to work within the goals I've been given by Peace Corps, when they go against the stated desires of the people I work with? How can I mitigate this? What is the scope of my role? What can I, as an outsider, really do here? It might be easy, as an educated middle class American, to fall into the trap of thinking that I knew what was best, but I believe that people have a right to self-determination and I worked hard to check this assumption. Peace Corps taught me how to reflect on my role as a change agent, and on how to carefully consider how my identity and basic assumptions about the world influence my work, which is a skill I hope to keep honing throughout my career and through my social work education.
I studied anthropology as an undergraduate, and I loved anthropology's emphasis on self-reflective practice, cultural competency and respect for the diversity of human experiences, but I was drawn to social work by something I felt was missing from anthropology: an active stance against social injustice. Living in "the field," as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I felt too close and too committed to the people I loved in Madagascar not to want to take a stand for them. I had my first real social work experience, as a case management intern in the refugee resettlement department at International Rescue Committee, after I was evacuated from my Peace Corps service extension in Mali. Working with Julie, my supervisor at IRC, cemented my desire to become a social worker. Julie is thoughtful, kind and respectful. Watching her patiently listen to her refugee clients and help them solve problems, I knew that I wanted to follow her example. In social work, I found a discipline which is built on the assumption that all people deserve access to resources that allow them to reach their full potential, and that as social workers we should be working to create a world where this is possible.
My first year in Madagascar, I lived with a middle class family in a small village. They had a thirteen year old girl, Fahasoavana (her name means "goodness"), as their live-in servant. We called her by a nickname, Neny, which means "mama," and is a common term of endearment for an older girl child. Neny's father was an alcoholic who sometimes beat her, and her mother died when she was a toddler. Her stepmother did not want her in the house, and, in any case, they were desperately poor, so as soon as Fahasoavana was old enough to work they sent her to my family, whose matriarch, Bebe, was the pastor of a large Protestant church. In some ways, Neny was treated like a child of the family, but she did not go to school and she got up at 4AM to cook the morning rice. In Madagascar, there are no social institutions that would protect children like her from exploitation, and Bebe, like many other middle class Malagasies, thought of taking in Neny as a benevolent act of charity.
After I had known her for about a year, Neny became ill. She had headaches and seizure-like fits; she was exhausted all the time. After a while, the determination was made that she was suffering from spirit possession. Her hair was cut off to prevent the demon from holding on to it, and the community began to hold prayer meetings in my back yard to try and cast it out. While we prayed and sang, the church pastor would lay her hands on Neny's head and scream at the demon to get out and leave her alone, while Neny wailed and writhed on the ground. I participated because Neny asked me to; it seemed really important to her as a way that I could show her that I cared about her.
I spent a lot of time hypothesizing about why this happened to her. Why wouldn't a child, unprotected and abandoned by her family to a life of very hard work, develop a spiritual illness that causes the whole community to nurture her? I saw this happen a few more times to other people, mostly young women, all of them marginalized in one way or another. I don't think of Neny's spirit possession as simply the expression of undiagnosed physical or mental illness, although it could have been partly that. Maybe being sick was the healthiest option for her in an untenable situation. Maybe being sick was the only way for her to get what she needed to be healthy. Being sick gave Neny hope that something around her would change for the better.
This is one of the reasons I chose to pursue social work: the holistic emphasis on the well-being of clients extends to an interest in social systems, and the cultural and historical contexts which shape individual experience. Relieving Neny's symptoms without relieving the circumstances that led to her spirit possession will not really cure anything. I plan to be a clinician, but I don't want to limit my professional or personal interests to doing therapy only. I want to work towards systemic change and help to empower communities to support each other in ways that alleviate suffering, which is why I want to be a social worker.
I've been working with refugee youth in Atlanta for the past two years, and I've seen the way that suffering can lead to an opening to hope, a crack of light, for my students and clients. These last two years, along with my Peace Corps experience, have galvanized my desire to work with and protect children. Minani, who is ten and came here from Burundi when he was three, was suspended for lighting paper towels on fire in the boy's bathroom. Later, he told me that he was hoping to burn down the school, so that he never has to attend again. He's desperately unhappy, has been struggling academically, and has to walk far to school every day, which he hates; because of funding cuts, there are only two buses which serve his school and neither comes to his house. Minani needs someone to help him feel hopeful again, and it's a privilege for me to be a person in his life who can do that. I referred him to Culture Connect, a local mentoring and language services agency, who hooked him up with a Kirundi speaking mentor, and I helped his family re-enroll their four children in Medicaid, so that he could access low-cost counseling. Many of my students, like Minani, are longing for a non-judgmental adult to listen to them.
The Silver School's emphasis on the centrality and power of caring human relationships resonates with me because I've found that the quality of my relationships with my students is the most important factor in motivating them to make positive changes in their lives. Something as simple as my effort to correctly pronounce their names can be very meaningful to my refugee and immigrant students and clients. They straddle the traditional worlds of their parents and the values of their new country and sometimes feel marginalized in both worlds. With respectful listening and attention to their experiences, I've been able to build relationships with my students from a position of trust, and I'm able to provide support and guidance that they may be less willing to accept from other authority figures in their lives. I think the listening skills I've developed, as a Peace Corps volunteer, and through my work with students and refugee clients, will help me be an effective social worker.
My goal is to become a clinical social worker, which is why I want to study at the Silver School. Working in the refugee community, I've seen a need for culturally competent mental health care and family intervention services for refugees and immigrants. I want to become a clinician who can help fill this gap, who respects the strengths of the home culture and who does not pathologize clients who are reacting, in ways that make sense (even if they have become harmful to the client in the current context), to the impact of violence, oppression and disempowerment in their lives. I'm looking for a rigorous clinical social work education, which I know that the Silver School can provide, and I think Silver, with its emphasis on trauma-informed practice, expertise in work with children and families, and interest in creating globally conscious social workers, is a good fit for me.
Hi--Please help! I'm applying to the Silver School of Social Work at NYU and I'm obsessing about my essay. At this point, I've written and re-written and deleted about 30 pages of essay content to get this six double-spaced pages and I have to turn this in by Thursday. I would love any comments or editing help that you could provide. Thank you!!
Essay guidelines:
In a well-constructed essay of no more than six pages, answer each of the questions below. Your essay MUST be double-spaced, with one-inch margins and a type size of at least 12 points.
Question 1: How did you become interested in social work? What personal, academic, organizational, volunteer, and/or paid work experiences have influenced your choice of social work as a profession? If you considered a different major or career, please discuss your reasons for the change to social work.
Question 2: What are your reasons for seeking graduate social work education at this time? What are your expectations of graduate social work education?
Question 3: Describe some intellectual and personal attributes that you believe make you particularly suited for the profession of social work. What attribute would you most like to strengthen or change in order to increase your ability to be helpful to others?
Question 4: Briefly discuss a current social issue of great concern or interest to you.
Question 5: What are your career interests and goals? As a graduate of the Silver School of Social Work at New York University, how do you expect to contribute to the social work profession?
Question 6 (optional): Is there anything else you would like us to know as we consider your application? Please describe.
My essay:
The NASW Code of Ethics says that ethical decision making is a process and that there are many instances in social work where "simple answers are not available to resolve complex ethical issues." Every day in Madagascar, I was challenged by the lack of simple answers. Nothing that I could read fully prepared me for the messy and complex realities of every day decision making in the developing world. Do I give this street kid money and help her eat today, but possibly help perpetuate a system which is preventing the government from creating real change that could lift this kid's life, and the lives of thousands of others like her, out of poverty? Is it racist and disempowering of me, as a privileged outsider, to work within the goals I've been given by Peace Corps, when they go against the stated desires of the people I work with? How can I mitigate this? What is the scope of my role? What can I, as an outsider, really do here? It might be easy, as an educated middle class American, to fall into the trap of thinking that I knew what was best, but I believe that people have a right to self-determination and I worked hard to check this assumption. Peace Corps taught me how to reflect on my role as a change agent, and on how to carefully consider how my identity and basic assumptions about the world influence my work, which is a skill I hope to keep honing throughout my career and through my social work education.
I studied anthropology as an undergraduate, and I loved anthropology's emphasis on self-reflective practice, cultural competency and respect for the diversity of human experiences, but I was drawn to social work by something I felt was missing from anthropology: an active stance against social injustice. Living in "the field," as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I felt too close and too committed to the people I loved in Madagascar not to want to take a stand for them. I had my first real social work experience, as a case management intern in the refugee resettlement department at International Rescue Committee, after I was evacuated from my Peace Corps service extension in Mali. Working with Julie, my supervisor at IRC, cemented my desire to become a social worker. Julie is thoughtful, kind and respectful. Watching her patiently listen to her refugee clients and help them solve problems, I knew that I wanted to follow her example. In social work, I found a discipline which is built on the assumption that all people deserve access to resources that allow them to reach their full potential, and that as social workers we should be working to create a world where this is possible.
My first year in Madagascar, I lived with a middle class family in a small village. They had a thirteen year old girl, Fahasoavana (her name means "goodness"), as their live-in servant. We called her by a nickname, Neny, which means "mama," and is a common term of endearment for an older girl child. Neny's father was an alcoholic who sometimes beat her, and her mother died when she was a toddler. Her stepmother did not want her in the house, and, in any case, they were desperately poor, so as soon as Fahasoavana was old enough to work they sent her to my family, whose matriarch, Bebe, was the pastor of a large Protestant church. In some ways, Neny was treated like a child of the family, but she did not go to school and she got up at 4AM to cook the morning rice. In Madagascar, there are no social institutions that would protect children like her from exploitation, and Bebe, like many other middle class Malagasies, thought of taking in Neny as a benevolent act of charity.
After I had known her for about a year, Neny became ill. She had headaches and seizure-like fits; she was exhausted all the time. After a while, the determination was made that she was suffering from spirit possession. Her hair was cut off to prevent the demon from holding on to it, and the community began to hold prayer meetings in my back yard to try and cast it out. While we prayed and sang, the church pastor would lay her hands on Neny's head and scream at the demon to get out and leave her alone, while Neny wailed and writhed on the ground. I participated because Neny asked me to; it seemed really important to her as a way that I could show her that I cared about her.
I spent a lot of time hypothesizing about why this happened to her. Why wouldn't a child, unprotected and abandoned by her family to a life of very hard work, develop a spiritual illness that causes the whole community to nurture her? I saw this happen a few more times to other people, mostly young women, all of them marginalized in one way or another. I don't think of Neny's spirit possession as simply the expression of undiagnosed physical or mental illness, although it could have been partly that. Maybe being sick was the healthiest option for her in an untenable situation. Maybe being sick was the only way for her to get what she needed to be healthy. Being sick gave Neny hope that something around her would change for the better.
This is one of the reasons I chose to pursue social work: the holistic emphasis on the well-being of clients extends to an interest in social systems, and the cultural and historical contexts which shape individual experience. Relieving Neny's symptoms without relieving the circumstances that led to her spirit possession will not really cure anything. I plan to be a clinician, but I don't want to limit my professional or personal interests to doing therapy only. I want to work towards systemic change and help to empower communities to support each other in ways that alleviate suffering, which is why I want to be a social worker.
I've been working with refugee youth in Atlanta for the past two years, and I've seen the way that suffering can lead to an opening to hope, a crack of light, for my students and clients. These last two years, along with my Peace Corps experience, have galvanized my desire to work with and protect children. Minani, who is ten and came here from Burundi when he was three, was suspended for lighting paper towels on fire in the boy's bathroom. Later, he told me that he was hoping to burn down the school, so that he never has to attend again. He's desperately unhappy, has been struggling academically, and has to walk far to school every day, which he hates; because of funding cuts, there are only two buses which serve his school and neither comes to his house. Minani needs someone to help him feel hopeful again, and it's a privilege for me to be a person in his life who can do that. I referred him to Culture Connect, a local mentoring and language services agency, who hooked him up with a Kirundi speaking mentor, and I helped his family re-enroll their four children in Medicaid, so that he could access low-cost counseling. Many of my students, like Minani, are longing for a non-judgmental adult to listen to them.
The Silver School's emphasis on the centrality and power of caring human relationships resonates with me because I've found that the quality of my relationships with my students is the most important factor in motivating them to make positive changes in their lives. Something as simple as my effort to correctly pronounce their names can be very meaningful to my refugee and immigrant students and clients. They straddle the traditional worlds of their parents and the values of their new country and sometimes feel marginalized in both worlds. With respectful listening and attention to their experiences, I've been able to build relationships with my students from a position of trust, and I'm able to provide support and guidance that they may be less willing to accept from other authority figures in their lives. I think the listening skills I've developed, as a Peace Corps volunteer, and through my work with students and refugee clients, will help me be an effective social worker.
My goal is to become a clinical social worker, which is why I want to study at the Silver School. Working in the refugee community, I've seen a need for culturally competent mental health care and family intervention services for refugees and immigrants. I want to become a clinician who can help fill this gap, who respects the strengths of the home culture and who does not pathologize clients who are reacting, in ways that make sense (even if they have become harmful to the client in the current context), to the impact of violence, oppression and disempowerment in their lives. I'm looking for a rigorous clinical social work education, which I know that the Silver School can provide, and I think Silver, with its emphasis on trauma-informed practice, expertise in work with children and families, and interest in creating globally conscious social workers, is a good fit for me.