by Aimee B. Chung, MSW, LSW
Expensive graduating discipline college students,
Congratulations! You might be about to finish your diploma in social work. You’ve labored so exhausting. You’ve survived the group initiatives, written the papers, introduced the shows, and (most significantly) put within the discipline hours. You might be becoming a member of the ranks of the mere 7% of the world’s inhabitants who’ve a school diploma. We’re honored to know every of you and be witness to your discipline training journey. We’re humbled to have walked this path with you, as you navigated moral dilemmas, wielded your newly discovered theories, utilized your social work instruments with talent, fessed as much as your errors, and exercised your shiny new skilled boundaries. We’re duly impressed!
We noticed as you persevered in your discipline websites. For many, this progress seldom presents fully as easy rainbows or fairly unicorns. Alongside the way in which, there have been educational obstacles, competing life calls for, and oh, additionally that nasty unpredictable international pandemic and that ever-expanding world-wide endemic racial injustice. Regardless of all these challenges, you didn’t cease. You persevered. If you encountered overwhelming moments or miscommunication with discipline instructors, or once you have been consumed with self-doubt and questions on your home within the discipline, you didn’t cease. You persevered. When disaster and loss in your private lives threatened to disrupt your training, you didn’t cease. You persevered. If you have been coated in frustration and tears with no concept how you’ll full your discipline hours, you didn’t cease. You persevered. As people and as a cohort, you accepted the problem, discovered power in one another, and rallied on your neighborhood. You persevered.
You’re the embodiment of all we hope social employees shall be—caring professionals who’re identified for his or her heat, empathy, and genuineness. As burgeoning social employees, compassion is obvious in your discipline work, within the connections you will have with one another, in your private self-care plans, and within the advocacy you observe. You’ve turn into ambassadors for justice and champions of change, not solely on your purchasers, but in addition for yourselves and one another. You might be sort and genuine people. We’re proud.
You’re a sensible, flourishing cohort, already leaving indelible marks on us as college, employees, and discipline instructors. As you graduate, you are taking with you the metaphoric fingerprints of your lecturers, discipline instructors, and coordinators. As you shut this chapter, you bear the deep impressions left by relationships curated along with your discipline purchasers and new colleagues. You are taking with you the battle scars of balancing class time, discipline hours, homework, employment, and household obligations. You’ve come to intrinsically perceive the adventurous artwork of self-care. Being a social employee is just not a day job. It’s a way of life. It’s a approach of being and present on this world. It’s a navigation system designed to middle, floor, and information you effectively.
Congratulations, graduates! The time is right! We’re honored to name you colleagues within the ever-evolving, demanding, but vastly rewarding, career of social work.
Aimee B. Chung, MSW, LSW, is a Area Schooling Coordinator on the College of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Thompson College of Social Work & Public Well being. Her expertise and curiosity areas embrace discipline training; self-care; trauma-informed frameworks; power-based private violence; and culturally various, indigenous, differently-abled, economically deprived, marginalized, and underserved communities.
