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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Hey Pp, actually my spouse is the one motivating me to do this change, he's actually more excited about it than I am. He believes that I should pursue my passion and quit Banking since that is not making me happy. He is scared of course about the loss of income especially in the 2 years I'd be in school full time, but said he could manage. Im the one stressing about it, but he  keeps telling me everything will be fine and he will find a way to make it work and will adjust his schedule if need be. I guess whats making me guilty is puting all of my family on hold, cutting our finances and going through all of this, just because I feel this would be a better career for me. I'd hate to put them all through it and end up failing. If you're fone with the program, and dont mind me asking, what salary ranges are you seeing for new MSW grads? Is there something i canstart doing now to better position myself for better jobs once im done with school? And do you think my experience in business/finance will help once im ready to apply to jobs? [/quote]

That's great! That's actually how my spouse is too, but it took me a while to truly believe him :)

I'm not done with the program yet, but the jobs my friends who are done have taken are a pretty big range. DC government pays a lot more than nonprofit case management organizations. I have a friend who started with a DC govt agency with a general license. They are sponsoring her clinical license, and she makes like $70k. The job that I turned down was offering $45k, but that's with no MSW. It would probably have been a little higher with the MSW. The best thing that you can do is get a feel for what jobs are available in the area where you live and watch them. I generally know what the government jobs look like and what the nonprofit ones look like. I haven't looked at hospital jobs as much but it's on my list of stuff to start paying attention to. It can be hard to figure out salary information. The numbers I mentioned above are things that I was told directly by the organization or are publicly available.

I personally think that a background in business and finance will be good for you, particularly when you get to a point where you are moving to private practice and may be establishing your own business. Not sure what particular flavor of finance you're in, but knowledge about operating a business (vs. a touchy feely clinic where people come to feel better) will serve you well later. It can also open doors to other kinds of work within the field. I know a woman who works as a program analyst whose job is to look at how effective services provided are from a financial AND clinical standpoint. She has a MSW and some kind of finance background.[/quote]

I have a broad range of experience in Finance, my undergrad was a mix of Econ and Finance and my masters was in Finance. I have worked a bit on the Accounting side (hated it), corporate finance, credit , risk analysis, and  commercial banking .  This is all interesting PP, thank you so much for sharing, you have no idea! It is giving me hope that some agencies will pay $70k n free supervision. What sort of firld work have u done so far? What's the field experience like? Do you know what way you will go once u graduate? As in clinical or Macro and why? [/quote]

My first internship was a clinical placement with a crisis agency for adults - so psych emergencies, hospitalizations, active suicidality, etc. It was interesting. Pretty hardcore, both in terms of what you see and the pace/hours. I really appreciated the exposure to a lot of the problems of urban poverty that I am fairly insulated from. It gave me a deeper appreciation for a lot of the challenges my city faces and the things that are being done about them. One of the things that I really liked about my internship, as a person who has already had a ton of work experience, was being treated like a member of the team rather than "as an intern." My responsibilities during my field placement were not any different than any other team members, and I wasn't treated differently after the first couple of months. There was supervision that happened, and my supervisor was really attentive and careful to assign me to cases that he thought would be interesting for process reports back to field seminar (where you basically write down a client encounter and use your school knowledge to analyze it). He has been supervising students for a long time and is a LCSW himself, so he knows the requirements of the program as well as what will be useful in a job vs. a classroom. My second internship hasn't been set yet, but it's likely to be something working with children rather than adults. I am expecting that it may be in a school setting, but I have a few different options other than that.

After I'm done, I'm looking at clinical jobs. I haven't decided specifically what population or practice setting. I would actually be happy to do crisis work for a few years while I'm getting my clinical license, but my husband thinks that emotionally, I need to be in a situation where I see clients more than once because he noticed that I felt pretty unsettled never knowing what happened to people after I worked with them. He is probably right :) Either way, like you, I would eventually like to end up in private practice, but I know that's not going to happen for quite some time. The low salary of the field doesn't bother me that much because a) we don't really need the money and b) my current field isn't super lucrative anyway.[/quote]

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