I’m only a second semester freshman, and there are already things I’m extremely sick of hearing about my major…
“You’re going to need to marry rich”
Or, I could just continue with my education, land a decent paying job, and not live a lifestyle that will put me into debt. Considering the average salary for a social worker with a master’s degree is just below sixty-thousand dollars per year, I think I’ll be okay. If I wanted to be rich, I would be in a different major. But then, I wouldn’t be in love with what I want to do for the rest of my life, and, at least from my perspective, being excited to go to work everyday will be much more fulfilling than a few extra thousand dollars.
“Why would you go to school to learn how to take children away from their families?”
Social Work is not solely child welfare. Social workers are found everywhere from hospitals, to mental health clinics, to prisons, to schools, to nursing homes, and anywhere else where people are in need. The U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs is one of the largest employers of social workers, with more than ten thousand professionals working for them. Personally, I hope to one day join the two-hundred thousand clinically trained social workers that make up the nation’s largest group of mental health professionals. But back to child welfare...
Child welfare is the furthest thing from “taking children away from their families.” The main goals of child welfare agencies are to ensure the safety of children, to keep families together if at all possible, and to provide treatment to those families in need. If a child does need to be removed from their home, the guardians of that child are given ample time to correct the issue that caused the removal (fourteen months in the state of New Jersey). I'm not suggesting that there are no problems present within the child welfare system, but it needs to be understood that both social work as a profession and child welfare as a branch of that profession are much more complicated than one would originally think.
“Why would you willingly work with bad people?”
People that are struggling are not bad people. Social work is a profession that is rooted in the belief that every person has worth and dignity, regardless of where they currently are in life. Social work respects the potential of every person and aims to help clients reach that potential. Being a social worker does not mean I will be working with “low-lives.” Being a social worker means that I will be helping people who are struggling to help themselves, and to eventually enhance their way of living.
Long story short: Stop saying things intended to insult a profession which you probably know close to nothing about.
