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MSW, Child Advocacy, Bilingual Latina

I came to realize that I wanted to be a social worker while working at my job in a bank. For years now, I have attended to a constant stream of people at one of their most sensitive and vulnerable moments, making their monetary transactions. I was once a single mother, as the oldest of my three children is not the biological child of the man to whom I am married, the father of my two youngest boys. While I am most happily married now and we are a unified and loving family, for me the real American dream, the struggles and sorrows that I endured as a single mother stay with me and this is one of the reasons why I am so inspired to help others, mothers with little children who do not have the support of the children’s father or a stable family life. I want a career change. I no longer want to work with money, I want to work directly with people, helping them to solve their money problems, along with the other great (and generally related) challenges that they face.

XXU is my first choice for study towards the MSW Degree because of everything that your university represents: a global perspective and commitment, liberal agenda, progressive creativity, and most of all the celebration of diversity. I was born in America; but, since my parents were refugees fleeing a brutal civil war in their home country, El Salvador, in many ways, I was raised to think and feel like a war refugee myself in a strange land. I empathize with those Latino families around me who struggle, especially the more recent immigrants. I feel like I understand them. With both Spanish and English as native languages, I also feel that I can be a good role model as a social worker for children and their families.

I have always worked in the business world, currently for a company that is a personal banker for JP Morgan Chase. I like to think of my work as valuable preparation for my career as a social worker, helping customers that come in needing statements and paperwork that they need for section 8 and welfare.  They would also open up to me when I asked questions, generally speaking, however, all I would do was listen and for some it appeared to be all that was needed, a hearing ear. It felt good to see my customers waiting for me in particular to help them.

I will earn my undergraduate degree in Family and Child Studies this coming January of 2015, with a minor in Psychology. I will also have completed my work for the Child Advocacy Certificate by the time that I graduate. I want very much to devote the balance of my professional life, many decades, to the protection of at risk children. I did well in college and even made the Dean’s List for the Spring of 2013. I think I did well mostly because of my passion for the topics that I was studying, protecting children, challenges, flaws in the system, and ideas for policy reform, etc.

I am also very much inspired to pursue the MSW Degree as a result of my current volunteer work. I volunteer with SAVE of XXXX County, a program of the Family Service League in the State of New Jersey’s “Designated” Rape Care Center for XXXX County. The Center has two primary goals: providing direct services to survivors of sexual violence and their families along with working to prevent sexual violence through education and advocacy. These goals are achieved through the services that we offer: our hotline, accompaniment, and education. I assist individuals on our 24-hour hotline, and help to staff information tables for special events. I am deeply honored to serve and promote an organization such as SAVE of XXXX County which has a team of highly trained volunteer Advocates ready to help, 24-hours a day.

My passion for building a career protecting at-risk children has also been inspired all along by my experience as a mother of 3 boys. After having my boys, I realized I wanted to work with children. I first thought I wanted to be a teacher; that changed, however, very quickly, as soon as I started taking classes for child advocacy.  Those classes taught me about child abuse and neglect, how the upbringing of a child is very important for their future.  I studied so many cases of parents neglecting their children, each case breaking my heart. The most difficult part of my studies has been my struggle to try to imagine how a mother can do such horrible things to her children. I find the abuse of the father less mysterious, frankly.  I speak freely on this because I am a mother of 3, and in my mind your children are your life, they are everything that is just the way it works with me. However, I am ‘normal’ and it the ‘abnormality’ that I seek to understand, and become an expert in this area. My heart has ached throughout my studies because we are talking about innocent children who depend on their parents.  It is sad how many of them become another statistic.  

But, if can convince these children that someone out there really cares, then maybe they will not go down the road that appears predictable as a result of their unfortunate circumstances. My short term goal is to earn my MSW Degree at XXXX University, My ultimate, or long term goal is to launch a private practice as an LCSW after gaining further experience. Ideally, I would be awarded a contract with XXXX Department of Children and Families providing therapy to at-risk children and their families, saving the world one little life at a time.

My central dream is to have my own private practice dedicated to helping at-risk children and their caregivers. I firmly believe that raising children is the duty of the community, not just the parents, and this is especially true in the absence of one or more parent. I want at-risk children to know that the community supports them, is with them, and will help them to see and feel part of a broader whole that will go a long way to filling the void that exists at home. I have spoken Spanish sometimes at work in the banking world when it was useful. As a social worker, however, I imagine speaking my own native tongue with much greater frequency. And I also feel strongly that the social worker who attends to at-risk Hispanic children of recent immigrants must be able to speak with them in the same language which they use to communicate with their parents, particularly their mother. Since m own parents were refuges from Central America, I will have a special gift to offer in this regard, constantly reaching out to the underserved in my community, so many of whom speak my language.

XXXX, where I have worked for years, is a tough area, and I learned a lot about the difficulties of life in urban America, especially for limited English immigrants. I got off to a late start in college myself and it has taken me a long time because I was raised to think in terms of earning money first and foremost, and to look at education as more of a luxury than a necessity. Thus, I look forward to helping children to achieve the kind of stability early on that will inspire them to work hard at their studies while growing up; this will be for me a special triumph, helping at least some of the children to whom I provide therapy to achieve a good education, and to do it quicker than their therapist.

Finally, I want to explain the period of time in which my grades were not good at all. While pregnant with my 3rd son, I was finishing my Associates Degree online through the University of Phoenix. I had complications with my pregnancy which caused me to be a little withdrawn from my classes, and this is reflected in the grades that I received. Also my son was diagnosed with a rear medical condition and he could not eat anything but vegetables, which added a significant amount of stress to our lives. If he ate anything other than vegetables, he was immediately hospitalized due to dehydration. After many hospital stays and seemingly endless testing, we were told it was something he would probably grow out of by the age of 3.  He is now 3 and he did grow out of it, already prior to his second birthday.

Even during our worst of times, however, I did not quit; I finished my classes as best I could. Getting into Montclair State University was for me quite an accomplishment. Back in those days, if someone had suggested that someday I might be admitted to the MSW program at XXU, I would have thought they were teasing. But I have grown enormously and I now I have the confidence, for myself, my family, and my community, I want to move forward in nursing and I want to attend one of the finest programs in the world, at the center of my world, XXXX.

I thank you for considering my application to your distinguished program.

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For almost two decades now, I have supported myself and my family by helping applicants to graduate school draft eloquent and highly effective admission statements for degree programs BSW, MSW, DSW; and PHD. I am convinced that I have talent in this area as a bleeding heart, myself, a militant for healing and a lifelong learner; it is the stories of social workers that most intrigue me. Working on behalf of social workers keeps my heart engaged as well as my brain. 

With My Son Davy!

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