A woman from Israel who very much loves and admires New York City for a host of reasons, XXXX University is my first choice for earning my MSW Degree. I deeply admire XXXX as the oldest and finest Jewish University in the city and very much long to become part of your academic community.

I seek a full immersion in social work foundations, theory, and practice in a very rigorous program such as your MSW Program at XXXX and I hope to excel especially in my area of special interest: everything having to do with childhood trauma from a multi-disciplinary perspective. I was myself abandoned by my mother as a child and went through my own trauma and my own recovery period -  and have been fully whole for some time. Frankly, I have completely moved on from my own experience of trauma and no longer dwell on it. Rather, I fill my life and spend my energy in a search to better understand how and why childhood abuse and trauma occur, so as to be able to devote the balance of my professional lifetime working to prevent it to the extent to which it is possible to do so, and laboring to help the victims heal when it cannot be prevented.

Another reason why I feel that I am a good fit with an MSW program in NYC is the way in which NYC was the victim of a horrific terrorist attack that left the entire city traumatized to a certain extent. NYC is an excellent place to study trauma generally speaking; and the trauma that results from terrorist attack in particular. As an Israeli, and someone who looks forward to a long lifetime caring for the vulnerable and those who are victims in my own country, Israel, I am concerned for the safety of our people, especially our children, since we too are frequently victims of terrorist attack with rockets falling indiscriminately on schools as well as hospitals, and apartment buildings as well as vacant lots. Israeli children are subjected to traumatic circumstances for the same reasons as children around the world, in addition to political violence and terrorism, all of which I want to study in depth.

I originally started out my career in hi-tech, working in the computer world. After almost 8 years I came to feel less and less fulfilled and I quit my job and began to study towards my BSW, beginning a rich process of self-discovery and the appreciation of counseling as a most rewarding journey. I have found that most people come to counseling because they want to be happier and counseling becomes an exploration of what is getting in the way of happiness. I am extremely excited about the way that these factors which interfere with and prevent us from being happy can be successfully dealt with through counseling so that the individual is able to achieve much higher levels of fulfillment and satisfaction in life through the exercise of self judgment, removing over time the obstacles to happiness.

I find myself very much drawn to a client-centered philosophy and a counseling environment where an alliance is developed that facilitates personal growth. I have always been intrigued by psychological issues, and have done a great deal of reading in this area for many years, increasingly about childhood issues. My ultimate goal is to become part of a group private practice providing psychotherapy to clients as a social worker.

I am currently taking a course for certification as a sexual abuse therapist here in Israel. Thus, I am already developing a solid foundation in the way in which sexual abuse affects family and interpersonal relationships resulting in emotional and behavioral disorders, acting out, sometimes even suicide. I look forward to learning as much as I can at Yeshivah concerning eating disorders, self-harm, addiction, prostitution, re-traumatization, vicarious traumatization, and transference/counter transference as therapeutic tools.

Whilst working in a detox center, I cared for a 15-year-old Ethiopian client who had moved to Israel at a very young age. Her parents divorced and her mother died. She was brought up by her grandmother and until recently thought her to be her mother. She had very limited contact with her father who remarried and had another family. She was very suspicious of the social services and of social workers in general. In the past they would put her into institutions and boarding schools against her will and take her away from her grandmother. While I did enjoy some success at helping this client, I realized after the fact that I could have I learned more about social interactions in Ethiopian culture because the way they interact with one another is very different than in Western cultures such as Israel. I could have learned that they don’t trust outsiders and there are a lot of secrets kept within the family and from one another within the family. I could have read up concerning keeping secrets in Ethiopian culture. The way in which this girl continues to pop into my mind speaks to my profound hunger for learning to think about social work issues in multicultural ways so as to be able to provide more effective and targeted, culturally appropriate services, especially as a social worker in such diverse locations as New York City and Israel.

I thank you for your consideration of my application to XXXX.