My Goal:My goal is simple, I want to help people. I’ve spent years trying to figure out how I can make a career of this, and the answer that I always come back to is that I must go back to school to get a master’s degree in social work. The main obstacle keeping me from this goal is funding. Please see my bio below to learn why I am passionate about helping people and why I have chosen to pursue an MSW to do so.
About Me:
As a child, I spent every vacation with my family camping. Upon arrival to our campsite my parents would have me and my brother take a look around to observe the state it was in. Upon leaving our temporary home, our parents would have us take stock of the condition of our site to ensure that we were leaving it in a better state than we found it. They would then remind us to “take only memories and leave only footprints.” While this may be just a small phrase to some, to me they are words to live by. The belief in leaving only good behind you, was further instilled in me by my grandmother, who taught me at a young age, the lesson of Tikkun Olam. Tikkun Olam is a Hebrew belief and ideal which translates into English as “To heal the world.” It is a deeply mystical and culturally integrated part of Judaism which believes that the world is broken, and it is every individual’s responsibility to repair it. Members of the Jewish community believe that the world fractures every time someone inflicts harm. However, we have the power to mend it. To heal it. It is our job in this life to take a needle and thread to the ripped fabric of our world and repair it. Leave only good behind you. Heal the world. These are the values I was raised with, which now are so ingrained in me that they have become the foundation of who I am.
When I was five years old my father was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. This diagnosis had a tremendous effect on my life, and my family as a whole. Because of MS, the financial stability of my nuclear family crumbled. When you grow up with a sick family member, finances are not the only aspect of your lives which become unhinged. So do your relationships, your access to resources, your mental health, your physical health, the strength of your family unit, your ability to succeed in work or in school, and the list goes on.
When I was eight years old, my parents and teachers began to notice some serious troubles with my reading ability. I could look at a page of text for hours and have little to no idea what I was supposed to be extracting from all the symbols on the page. For all intents and purposes, I could read; I could spell, I could form words, and understand sentence structure. However, when I looked at a page of text, the words would move and combine with each other. Entire lines of text would shift around the page and I couldn’t to make sense of what I was reading. I learned later in life that I am dyslexic. Because of the testing standards at the time and the limitations of my family due to my father’s disease, I was regularly denied help from my schools. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend private tutoring which taught me skills to manage my dyslexia, but it never fixed the problem. And, in the eyes of every English and History teacher of mine, I was just “lazy” and “not trying hard enough.” I would sit in my room for hours stuck on one word, or one sentence trying with all my might to make the words on the page make sense, but they seldom did. I learned ways to get through school with good grades, despite my huge disadvantage with reading. I learned to listen to lectures intently, take good notes, and participate in discussions to learn the information at hand, but never was reading the source for my accumulation of knowledge. I managed to get good marks in school because of these tools, and in 2011 began my college education.
In college, I was exposed to the field of Anthropology. I was absolutely fascinated. I wanted to take every course offered to me and completely immerse myself in learning about people. In addition to coming from a family of do-gooders, I come from a family of extremely sociable people. Their sociability has always fascinated me because I was a very shy child. When I discovered anthropology, I realized that I could take my passion for people and their social traits, and pair it with my love of observation, and analytics, which had been honed over a lifetime of learning without relying on reading.
In my second year of college my father’s disease began to progress quickly. Within a year he had largely lost the ability to walk, and within two years he could barely breathe or swallow on his own. I watched him deteriorate before my very eyes. All while trying my level best to succeed in school. My dad passed away on December 23, 2014, his 59th birthday, two weeks before I was supposed to begin the last semester of my undergraduate degree. It was two years before I felt as if I could breathe again. As if I could be a person again. In time, and with the implementation of many healing techniques learned through cognitive behavioral therapy, I began to feel as if I could turn my hardship into positivity. My experience with grief, growing up with a sick parent, and living an academically inclined life as a dyslexic person could be harvested and grow into something beneficial not only to myself but to others. I decided that I did not want leave sadness behind me, rather happiness and optimism. I want to share the good I’ve learned through trying experiences, in hopes that my understanding of tremendous difficulties, and ways to grow from them might be helpful to human kind.
After several years in the working world, it dawned on me that I needed to go back to school. I need to learn the ways of social work. I need to understand how I can apply all that I have already learned toward a degree which would help me help others. However, because I paid for my undergraduate degree with hard work and student loans, I knew it would be impossible to afford a higher degree in the United States.
At the end of 2019, I moved to New Zealand with a Working Holiday Visa. It had always been a dream of mine to live abroad in my twenties, so I decided to take the leap and head across the Pacific. I did a small amount of traveling before discovering a city called Dunedin. I quickly fell in love with this city and learned about the University of Otago. I began researching their Master of Social and Community Work and feel strongly that it was the program best fitted for me. I also learned that tuition at this institution is one third what it would cost if I were to return to the US and study there. In this program I will learn the theories and methods of social work, the practice of intervening and working with the lives of vulnerable people and communities, and management techniques of operating non-governmental organizations.
I hope to take my life’s experiences and apply them towards developing a career dedicated to helping others. My end goal is to help children and adolescents who are growing up with an ailing member of their nuclear family. I want to offer resources to those who desperately need them, and I want to be an open ear to listen to the stories and difficulties people are living through. I want people to know they're not alone in their struggle and that there are people, like me, out there who want to help them thrive. Too often kids take on roles that are far broader than their little shoulders can carry. I simply want to be a source for those children and by extension, their parents, to help redistribute the weight.
I humbly ask for your donation to my tuition. It will not only assist me but will serve as an investment in the lives of those who will one day benefit from my help.