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Professional Development Program
Autumn 2009 Schedule
Winter/Spring 2010 PDP Schedule available January 4, 2010
The Field of Social Welfare
Social work attracts idealists: people with an acute perception of human suffering and injustice and an equally strong commitment to do something about them. The issues that engage these individuals change over time.
The first social workers fought to outlaw child labor and to provide universal social security. Their successors today struggle to prevent child abuse and exploitation and to improve the quality of life of the impaired elderly. The central commitment to helping those in need and working to bring about effective social change, however, remains constant.
To people who have this kind of commitment, graduate training in social work offers two things: First is the opportunity to explore, in the disciplined and intellectually rich environment of the University, the dimensions of social need and response. Second is the opportunity to acquire, through class and fieldwork experiences, the skills for effective action.
The School of Social Service Administration pioneered the idea that social work demanded a firm intellectual base. Its founders identified that base in the social sciences and in their own pathbreaking research on social conditions and methods of intervention. Today the School continues to challenge students to combine a concern for human distress with a clear-eyed, thoughtful understanding of its causes and consequences. It also provides training in clinical, analytic, and organizational skills to enable students to act to improve the well-being and capacity for independence of vulnerable individuals, families, and communities.
With an intellectual base and effective skills, graduates take jobs at many levels of social involvement: clinical practice and other direct service in public and private agencies; community organization; leadership of social organizations; and involvement in the making of public policy at all levels of government. Throughout their careers, SSA graduates are agents of personal and social change and advocates for the amelioration of human distress through social policy and effective service.
