Personal Statement: A Career As A Social Worker

At first I thought I wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to help children learn and grow through the process of education, but something amazing happened. I was hired at the Saint Louis Crisis Nursery. It was this organization filled with people called social workers. The work they did was amazing. The work they did could change lives. I want to be a social worker because I believe in people. I want to help them become what they want to be in life. I want every child from an impoverished background to know that if they want a doctoral degree, they can have it. I want every teenage mother to know she can do more than get a technical certification in the hopes of making more than minimum wage. I hope to help people reach their greatest potential.

I have always been led to work with children. Every time I try to work in another type of job, I always find myself in another position to work with children. I walked away from working with children in the beginning because I did not feel the field held enough value and was underpaid and underfunded. Although, my happiness told me something else. I would want to work in the child welfare system and eventually open my own non-for-profit organization. All the organizations in St. Louis were opened or started by people who saw a need and tried to fill that gap between what was being done by the state and communities. I hope to fill the gap between what is being done by our current government, and the communities in which our children

I feel I have always had a spark for working with children, but it is nice to see there are other positons and options for people in this field. I realize there are many avenues I can take as well. School social work is an option I had considered for its flexibility and higher than average pay. Social workers in the school position could work with any range from poor to rich children. This demographic switch would give the social worker a wide view of what their possibilities look like and working with many types of people gives a social worker perspective. As a social worker, I could work with sex trafficking victims and still affect children as these victims may be parents. Domestic violence is another part of social work that people could work in, and again influence the children it has impacted. This class has given me the opportunity to see how much I care for working with