MRU Social Work?

MRU is absolutely accredited and even if the standards are different, other provinces social work colleges (such as Ontario) have a different category for diploma holders (such as SSW vs RSW) but your job prospects will be similar. Not sure why so many people are speculating that it’s not an accredited program when they have a transfer agreement with U of C’s BSW program.

Social Work is such a general category that your level of fulfillment will vary greatly on the population you’re working with and the type of organization you work with (eg non profit vs government). The compensation can be brutal when you consider what you have to deal with on a daily basis (even if you get a relatively well-paying AHS/government job your case load might be astronomical), and I’ve yet to work for a non-profit that didn’t have a pretty fucked up, toxic management structure. I work in homelessness and addictions and it can be pretty grinding and often times you feel less like you’re Making a Difference than just upholding a system. There are lots of shelter type jobs that are pretty easy for a new grad or even current student to get, but they can be very rough jobs and not for everyone. But if you can handle it, it’s a good way to rack up experience to pave the way for better opportunities which, in my experience, is more important than what school you went to or what program you completed, especially if you want to just work in the human services and you’re not terribly caught up with needing to have the Social Worker job title.

I’ve been working in the field for 5 years and while I want to stay in it, I caution anyone who is interested in the field to actively seek out unbiased accounts of what social work jobs are really like. A lot of people have really rosy, idealistic reasons for why they want to pursue social work and the reality of the types of jobs you might end up with - whether it’s insane case loads, delusional upper management who preach self care while consistently demonstrating they couldn’t give less of a shit about their employees, unqualified people being put into supervisory roles, systems not set up for service users to succeed, and/or violent aggressive clients. I say this as someone who is coming to terms with these realities on a daily basis and who has seen people flame out before they even walk the stage at convocation.

I realize my comment sounds really cynical, and in a lot of ways I AM cynical... but I also think social work is very challenging and even with the relatively low baseline educational requirement, it’s not something that should be taken lightly and unfortunately, post-secondary will likely not give you a very realistic expectation of what the jobs are really like.

/r/Calgary Thread