To assist with developing your learning plan, review the specialization (formerly known as "concentration") descriptions along with Policy/Services and Methods course offerings and specialization requirements. All courses are available as electives to students outside the specialization on a space-available and schedule-permitting basis. Click on each specialization to learn more about required courses, faculty contacts, and potential practicum placements.

 

  • Administration and Policy Practice

    Prepares social workers to take on leadership roles in human services organizations and policy arenas. Practitioners learn how to define social problems, analyze policy and create program alternatives, influence policy decisions and lead diverse organizations in program planning, design, implementation, evaluation and change. Students may also choose to build skills in resource development, fiscal management, legislative advocacy or community-based evaluation.

  • Community-Centered Integrative Practice

    Prepares practitioners to be partners and leaders in transformative social work practice across micro-, meso- and macro-levels of practice. Skills include intergroup dialogue, social justice group work, constructive engagement of difference, conflict and inequality, community planning, partnership and organizing, just policy analysis and advocacy, grant writing, and mental health assessment and practice skills within diverse and marginalized communities both local and global, including traumatic effects of violence.

  • Clinical Social Work

    Prepares students for direct practice with individuals, families and small groups. Students develop comprehensive engagement, assessment, intervention, and evaluation skills to enhance the well-being and empowerment of clients across the lifespan. This specialization equips students with the theoretical and applied learning needed to work effectively with a diverse clientele in a variety of settings.

  • For students entering in 2022 or later, we offer one specialization: Clinical Social Work.

    CLINICAL SOCIAL WORK

    Prepares students for direct practice with individuals of all ages, families and small groups. Students develop comprehensive engagement, assessment, intervention, and evaluation skills to enhance the well-being and empowerment of clients across the lifespan. This specialization equips students with the theoretical and applied learning needed to work effectively with a diverse clientele across the lifespan and in a variety of settings -- such as in mental health, schools, hospitals, child welfare and youth justice, aging services, addiction facilities, hospice, shelters, community centers and agencies, and more. To learn more about individualized pathways within the CSW specialization, please click on the righthand sidebar to be taken to the specialization's page. 

 

  • Students who entered prior to 2022 focus their second- and third-year studies in the following:

    Multigenerational practice with Children, Families, and Elders

    Prepares MSW practitioners to work with, and advocate for, children, families and elders across the life course within diverse communities. This groundbreaking approach integrates cross-generational issues with topics such as resilience, trauma, family violence, disparities and cultural relevance. This specialization prepares practitioners for a range of settings including, but not limited to, child welfare, schools, mental health, juvenile justice, assisted living, and elder and family services.

  • Integrative Health-Mental Health Practice

    Prepares MSW practitioners to work across diverse health and mental health settings, to gain particular expertise in environment-mind-body-spirit-cultural integrative practice (mind-body complementarity). Utilizing an interdisciplinary, multi-component framework for health-mental health practice, this specialization integrates key perspectives of trauma/crisis/loss, stress-coping, bio-ecological-environment interaction, and resiliency and recovery in order to introduce MSW practitioners to culturally relevant interventions, empirically supported interventions, and promising practices.