Why Social Work?

Hi, my name is Gianna and I have been the teen parenting program intern since August of 2021. I am a Master’s student studying school social work student at Dominican University after graduating with a B.A. in Psychology from Concordia University Chicago in May of 2021. My college experience was anything but average, and I didn’t even start out in social work. When I graduated high school in 2016, I started college at Illinois State University (ISU) as a Business Management major. After one semester, I knew that business, and ISU, were not the right path for me. I came home and started taking classes at Moraine Valley Community College, without a clue what I wanted to do in life.

Community college often gets a bad reputation. I remember comments in high school saying that people who go to community college “give up” or “aren’t smart enough for real school.” There was even a nickname for Moraine Valley; “Moron Valley.” These comments deterred me from attending Moraine in the first place, even though I didn’t want to go away for school and didn’t know what I wanted to do. When I started attending Moraine, I was so sad and felt like I wasn’t going to amount to anything in life. After taking some classes there, however, I realized that Moraine was not a dumb school, and it ended up being one of my best decisions I could have made.

I took a variety of classes at Moraine, including theater appreciation, film appreciation, and numerous psychology courses. I realized with each psych class I took, the more and more I enjoyed it. I loved learning about the brain and counseling and different disorders, and eventually asked my professor in General Psychology, “What could I do with a Psychology degree?” The answer he gave? Endless options. I graduated Moraine with an Associate’s Degree in May of 2019, and immediately started at Concordia that Fall. This time, I had a sense of who I was, and what I wanted to do.

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