Virtual Open Houses for Widener University’s Online Degrees

Yra Coleman: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Widener University’s online social work virtual information session. My name is Yra, and I work in admissions with our online social work candidates. In this session, you’ll be hearing from Jen Norton, our online MSW program director, Michelle Brandt, our of field education, and Carly King, our assistant online MSW program director.

In today’s agenda, you will learn more about why Widener University and what sets our program apart. We will dig into the program outcomes, career outlook, discuss quick facts, our curriculum, the online classroom, as well as the application process. I will also provide my contact at the end for further questions.

Why choose Widener University? A few reasons are our history. Widener has been preparing students to excel in their homes since its founding in 1821. The Widener mission, to lead, engage, inspire, and contribute. And finally our accreditation from the Council on Social Work Education.

And I will now turn it over to our online MSW program director, Jen Norton.

Jen Norton: Thank you, Yra. So I am happy to share more information about our program, the online Master of Social Work through Widener University. As Yra said, we’re accredited by CSWE, that’s one of the more critical components, especially when it comes to licensure. You want to make sure that you are attending a program that is accredited. We are preparing our students in this program for clinical social work. So there are also different programs out there. Some might be more macro focused or policy focused. We are a clinical social work program, but we really incorporate and live in our program the concept of social justice, which transcends across direct practice to macro practice.

One of the most important and pieces of our program, and this is also one of the values, I think, that we live and breathe in our program, is really understanding how trauma affects our clients, affects our communities, affects organizations, you name it. It’s an underlying theme throughout the program and throughout the work that we have students do in the…

We also offer two different options. In our program. We have an advanced standing MSW option that is available to students who earned a BSW degree from a CSW accredited institution. They are able to take less credits than at the traditional track. So the advanced standing track is 36 credits, and it takes two years to complete our regular track for those students who did not earn a BSW degree, that’s a 57 credit program, and you earn your degree in three years.

Both program options, though, do prepare you to sit for the licensing exam in your state. Its licensing is not required through our program, but it’s something that a lot of our students, especially those who are interested in advancing in clinical work, might be interested in. The caveat to this is that licensure requirements do vary by… So completing our program may completely cover all of the educational requirements for licensure, but there are a few states that require maybe some extra courses focused on areas specific to that state.

So California, at least at the time of this presentation, California is a really good example. They do require that students complete some training in California specific laws regulations. So there may be some additional education that you would need post-graduation in order to qualify for your state’s licensing exam. We do have, though, information about whether or not we meet the full educational requirements on our website. We also have a dual degree program that entails earning your master of social work degree, as well as a master of education and human sexuality studies. It is a pretty intensive, rigorous option to complete two master’s degrees at the same time. So we really encourage applicants who are interested in the dual degree to fully explore the workload and consider the time and intensity of two degrees at the same time.

We also have some certificate options, including a trauma certificate, that allows students to take a deeper dive into clinical work with a trauma focus. Trauma, as I said at the beginning, is infused throughout the program, but the trauma certificate allows students to really dive into how trauma is affecting clients. It entails a seminar that takes place while students are in their specialization field placement, that really allows students to explore those issues affecting clients.

And then, we also have a required field internship component. For those who are in the advanced standing program option, they do one field placement, the specialization placement. For those in the regular MSW program track, you would complete two field placements. You would have a generalist field placement and a specialization field placement. And Michelle Brandt will talk more about some of the specifics around field later on in this presentation.

So just a few things to highlight, and some of these pieces I touched on earlier. We have a trauma focused curriculum as well as a trauma certificate option. This really allows us to incorporate what we think is one of the most important things to understand about our clients throughout the program. The big question that you will hear us say time and time again, we want our students to be asking not what’s wrong with you when they’re meeting a client, but what happened to you, exploring the events and traumas that may have shaped the person that you are sitting with.

And again, also we are a CSW accredited program. Like I said, this is really important, both for ensuring the quality of your education and the quality of your experience in whichever MSW program you pursue, as well as it’s important for those who are interested in pursuing licensure.

We’re an online program that doesn’t have a residency requirement. This means that at no point will you be required to travel to campus for courses or for field work. You complete your field work at agencies more local to you in collaboration with our field team. The asynchronous piece means that our courses are completed on your own time. You do have weekly deadlines, but you would be in charge of your own schedule, ensuring that you’re completing the work at times that are convenient for you meeting the deadlines. This is different than a synchronous program, where you would be logging in, let’s say via Zoom, for set class times during a week. And then Michelle will talk about this piece as well later on in this presentation. But our field planning model is one that is collaborative, one on one, and also support.

Speaker 3: What can you expect if you complete your degree here with Widener? Some of our program outcomes include that our diverse faculty of experts will prepare you for direct clinical social work and supervisory positions. We use advanced assessment intervention and evaluation skills. You’ll be engaged with an active understanding of policy, empowering you to empathize with and advocate for those in need. Through self-reflection and critical thinking capacity, we provide purposeful and informed interventions and teach about these interventions. And we have a deep dive and focus on cultural, gender, and racial sensitivity that will help you to be effective in working with a diverse population wherever you’re located. And as Jen previously mentioned, there is a strong underlying theme of trauma informed practice and trauma informed care throughout our entire program.

With a degree in social work, you can expect that there will be plentiful career options. Overall employment of social workers is projected to grow 12% in the next 10 years, from about 2020 to 2030. This is faster than the average for all other occupations listed. There’s an anticipated about 78,000 openings for social workers projected each year over the next decade.

Our annual wage for social workers, median annual wage, about 50,000, a little over 50,000, across the different specializations within social work, is significantly higher than the median wage for other US occupations, which is around 41,000, almost 42,000.

An advanced social work role that you could consider with an MSW degree, there’s a few lists here on the screen, but there are so many to consider. This degree could prepare you to be a trauma informed clinical social worker, to work in medical social work as an adoption specialist or in child welfare, children’s services, and even not listed, school social work, military social work. There are so many options that this degree can prepare you for.

And some quick facts. Some of these we’ve already covered, but we do have here at Widener, we have a regular and advanced standing MSW program. So there are options that you can choose from. The average cost per credit is about $943 per credit. So again, for regular admissions, you would need 57 credits, only 36 if you’re entering as advanced standing. You’d be able to do the math to estimate the total cost of tuition there if you needed to. The average time to completion is about three years if you’re a regular admit and two years if you’re entering as advanced standing.

You can transfer up to nine graduate credits from a related master’s degree if you started a program elsewhere, are looking for transfer credits for the regular MSW program. You can also choose, as Jen previously mentioned, from some of the other program options. We have a trauma certificate to obtain that deeper knowledge and understanding of trauma. Or you could explore the hybrid or dual degree, the MSW MED and human sexuality. And we, again, encourage anyone pursuing that dual degree to do some reflection and take a deep dive on the amount of work. It’s a great program. It is intense.

And so with that, I will pass it back to Jen to take us through another few slides.

Jen Norton: Hi again, everybody. I’m going some details about our curriculum. One of the big pieces, though, I’d like folks to know… This is going be a really quick blip on some of these courses, but on our website you can find full course descriptions for each of these courses. So I encourage applicants to look through those more deeply.

These are the core courses in our program. We could also consider this a generalist curriculum. For those who are advanced standing, some of these courses are the ones that you would not be required to take in this program. The ones that have the little asterisks, those are the ones that advanced standing students would take in addition to the Social Work 600 Foundation for Clinical Social Work Practice. That’s our bridge course that, in just three credits, we try to cover at least briefly the generalist curriculum, as some of our advanced standing students will come in maybe a few years out of their BSW program. So this is a refresher on some of the generalist curriculum that was covered in the BSW.

For regular students, regular MSW students, you would be taking all of these courses. We’ve got Social Work 501 and Social Work 502. These are the human behavior and the social environment courses. The course sequence, the first course covers more of the developmental life stages, while the second course is known amongst the students as the DSM course. The second course covers the diagnostic system, the DSM system, as well as the diagnostic process, both the good bits of it and the more problematic bits that go into diagnosing clients.

We also have Social Work 503 Interpersonal Processes. This is a course that all of our students take as the very first course when they enter the program. It’s a really lovely course for orienting students to both social work in general, as well as the wider version of social work. So each program’s going to have a little bit of a different flavor to it, I would say.

Our program is really centered on the idea of respect when we are interacting with others, in our communication with others. The course covers nonviolent communication, which is an orientation towards communicating with others where it’s about listening, actively listening, thinking about how our differences can be assets and other concepts along that line.

We’ve got Social Work 505 and Social Work 50- These are practice courses that prepare students for their generalist field placement, which is Social Work 552 and 553. We’ve got Social Work 520, that’s our research course. We’ve got Social Work 540 and Social Work 541. Those are the first two courses in a three course [inaudible 00:14:38] covering the more macro side of social work. Social Work 540 looks at the history of social policy and social welfare in the US. And Social Work 541 covers more of community social work advocacy, those types of concepts that are more specific to the macro side of social work.

The big thing to really understand with all three of these courses, though, here, 525, 540, 541, we are a clinical social work program, so we’re preparing students to do clinical social work. But like I mentioned, social justice is a really key principle that we believe cuts through the work that you do directly with individuals, with families, with groups, as well as with communities and organizations. So when a client comes into your office, you’re really not just meeting with that client. You’re meeting with a person who is part of many different systems, not just one on one.

So it’s really important to understand what goes into their lives from both the individual level and small groups with family and their peer groups, as well as those larger systems, like their community organizations that they may be a part of. And for the social work research course, that one is really important to understanding what we mean and what we’re talking about when we say evidence-based practice. It’s the evidence that goes in to evidence-based practice, which is a phrase that you will hear often throughout your time in the program.

And then moving on electives, these are courses that you will have the opportunity to choose from to fulfill your elective requirements. So you won’t be taking all of these courses, but you’ll be required to take at least two of them. And you are welcome to take more, if you have the time.

And so, we cover a host of different topics. These are things that we believe are important in the field of social work, so important areas in social work, as well as areas that have historically been of interest to students. So just covering a few of these. And again, we have course descriptions on our website. We cover areas such as social work in prisons. We do two courses here, Social Work 642 and 648 that involve children, adolescents, as well as families at risk. We have working with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, substance use, grief, loss, human sexuality, spirituality, medical social work, and social work practice with older adults. So again, these are electives covering maybe specific populations in social work that you may be interested in working with, or working with, going a little bit deeper into specific issues that may be affecting clients that you’re interested in working more closely with.

Looking now at our advanced concentration courses, these are all courses that all students would take, whether advanced standing or regular admission. Similar to 505 and 506, the generalist practice courses, we’ve got Social Work 630 and Social Work 639. Those courses are the specialization practice courses or clinical practice courses that are really meant to prepare students for their specialization field placement, which would be 637 and 638.

We also have Social Work 633, which involves clinical social work practice with families. So looking at some of the major models and theories, as well as interventions that involve families.

We’ve got Social Work 636. This is the third course in that social and economic justice sequence. This one looks at organizations and programs, and students will often refer to it as the grant writing course. So you do write a grant in this course, and that is something that is honestly a really good tool for every social worker to have, whether you consider yourself a clinical social worker or a macro social worker. All agencies and organizations require funding to offer rate, and grants can be a really important piece of that funding stream.

Finally, we have Social Work 664, treating trauma. We’ve mentioned it many times now throughout this presentation. The trauma focus is infused throughout our curriculum. This takes it to a deeper level, focuses solely on trauma, going deeper into some of the theories and interventions, and also types of trauma that you may encounter.

Speaker 4: So I’m going to take a couple of minutes to talk about the field education components of our MSW program. Field education provides student with the opportunity to integrate all of the material from coursework, all the coursework that Jen just discussed, into actual practice under the supervision of an MSW with two or more years of experience. We often refer to the coursework as filling our students’ tool bags with theories, skills, interventions. Students then take that tool bag out into the field and practice. The field seminars that coincide with the hours spent in the field provide space for students to come back and unpack their experiences, with a focus on self-reflection and feedback from instructors and peers.

Advanced standing students, as Jen mentioned, come to our program with a BSW and only complete one field placement with Widener. All students in the regular MSW program will complete two distinct field placements.

The first is the generalist. Just as it sounds, that’s our foundation field placement. The second is the specialization. And as Jen has mentioned, our only specialization or concentration at Widener is clinical. So all students can expect their specialization, your field placement to have a clinical focus. Both placements take place over two consecutive semesters at a single agency. And typically, unless you’ve had transfer credits or other changes to your program ladder, most students can expect to begin their first field placement in the fifth semester of our program.

So a little more details about the field placements that you’ll be expected to complete while at Widener. The generalist field placement requires a total of 450 hours, which is broken down to 16 hours per week, with a minimum of six direct client contact hours weekly. The specialization field placement requires a total of 560 hours, which breaks down to about 20 hours per week, with a minimum of nine direct client contact hour.

Many students will certainly get more than the minimum direct client contact hours. But what that does is leaves room for all of the work that we do as social workers. As Jen mentioned, it’s not just the clinical practice, but it leaves time and space for some of the more macro tasks that students will need to complete while they’re in field.

For the specialization field placement, we also offer an extended field option, which allows students to complete that placement over three consecutive semesters, usually breaking down to approximately 16 hours per week. This is a good option for our students who come to our program, perhaps who work full-time and have other obligations, and see the 20 hour a week minimum as maybe a barrier to completing the degree. So by completing one extra semester, and which has a one credit fee only, students can complete the required field hours and maintain their wellbeing, which is a really critical piece for us at Widener.

We are currently prioritizing in person learning opportunities for field. However, if an agency is functioning in a hybrid format, we would consider that for student learning. Likewise, if we were to experience another increase in the pandemic, requiring agencies to shift to virtual work with their clients, we would look at that on a case by case basis as well.

Matching students with a field setting that provides rich supervision and learning opportunities appropriate to the field year, generalist or specialization, is the goal of the field placement process and requires significant preparation and planning. Each student at Widener is assigned to an assistant director of field who is familiar with their geographic area and works one on one with the student during the planning phase. We do engage students in identifying potential options, but we do not require that students find their own field placements.

The tasks of identifying agencies of interest is purposeful, as it requires the student to demonstrate an understanding of either generalist or specialization agency based social work tasks, as well as their ability to identify resources in the community where they reside. Widener requests or requires that students make one full business day available for field.

In the event that students do not have this availability, we will work with them to find placements offered during evenings and weekends. However, I have to be transparent and say that this is challenging, and we cannot guarantee, as we don’t have the authority over agencies that we work with. So keep in mind that while some agencies function 24/7, such as hospitals and residential facilities, they do not all provide services with MSW supervision during these off hours. And that’s a component that’s really critical to the field education requirements.

In the event that a match is not made due to student availability, we do have the flexibility in our program to delay the start of field and continue planning until we’re successful. We strongly encourage students to consider at the start of the program how they will incorporate the field education requirements into their already busy schedules. There is a lot that we can offer flexibility on in this program, but due to accreditation standards, field hours and requirements are not among those that we can change or flex very much.

Some students who work in the field do complete their field education requirements at their agency of employment. This can sometimes be done by focusing on a subset of their existing clients or tasks through their work, as long as the agency can provide a separate MSW field instructor, which is an accreditation standard through CSWE. Other times, students might identify other programs within their agencies to complete their field education requirements.

I recognize that there’s a lot of information packed into these two slides and many requirements related to the field education component of our program. Keep in mind that CSWE, our accrediting body, has designated field as our signature pedagogy for the MSW degree. And despite the challenges and barriers that we might face, this is the part of the program that many students enjoy the most, remember the most, and this is the time where many students truly connect with the material and blossom into social workers.

Yra Coleman: All right. So now I would like to share a passage from one of our online MSW students, Cary Reid, [inaudible 00:26:25]. “I’ve learned some new conflict resolution skills, and I’m learning to be a better counselor and communicator. I’m learning how to listen and really hear what the other person is communicating. That has been the most important lesson I’ve learned to date. It’s also taught me some self-care processes and information I needed to learn. I have felt appreciated in this MSW program, and that has been the best thing. It’s allowed me to feel like what I have to say is important, and I can use my experiences and new skills to help others.”

Speaker 3: And so what are some of the benefits for engaging in an online MSW program? The online classroom here for Widener is, we use Canvas. It’s a learning management system. It’s a user friendly platform that integrates all of our social learning, our collaboration tools, and provides mobile access. When admitted, you’ll have access to Canvas that will provide you the asynchronous platform that Jen previously spoke about when we talk about having async classes and assignments. It provides accessibility, integration, multimedia capabilities, and a student resource center.

Through Canvas, you’ll have access to so many additional links and resources. This is how you’ll be able to engage with your peers, with your instructor, with administration. You’ll be able to watch videos, click on links to submit assignments, see your grades, engage in discussion board posts. And then in that student resource center, we provide a plethora of information about licensing in many states across the country. We have links to writing center tools, sometimes list mental health resources, messages to students and faculty, invitations to upcoming events, all kinds of cool things. And so it’s a great tool that’ll be available to all, and that’ll be your primary platform for engaging in your classes and work.

Yra Coleman: All right. And here’s our application checklist. If you do decide to apply to the program, you will complete an application online. You will also complete a four to six page personal statement discussing your personal background, career objectives, personal evaluation, to submit a resume, two letters of recommendation. Keep in mind with advanced standing, you will need one of your recommenders to be from a field instructor or social work director, and transcripts from all schools attended. And of course, I will be here to help you along that process. So you can reach out any time with any questions.

Thank you all again for attending at Widener University’s virtual information session. Feel free to reach out to me with any additional questions. 844-386-7321, or via email at admissions@onlineprograms.widener.edu. And I look forward to hearing from you soon.