Greetings from the exciting land of graduate school applications! Since I last wrote, the pace of my life has changed considerably. I’m writing to you now from my mother’s frigid house in upstate New York, where I’ve spent the last couple weeks wrapping up my first round of applications to graduate school for social work. I have a few straggling social work applications in the next month, and then six business school applications (I’m applying for dual degrees), and then I’m done with that, and I can continue my wanders (at least until next summer).
After I last wrote, I traveled around California, hiked for five days through Yosemite, and sat for 10 days at a silent meditation course. Each of these could (and maybe will) be its own blog post. I then settled in the Bay Area for some time to attend to family, took up a psychology course, started volunteering for a warmline for lonely seniors, and embarked on applying to social work school. Again, lots to say, but I think today I’ll write about my maddeningly thorough process of graduate school research.
Over the course of the past year or so, I’ve been circling the metaphorical drain of going back to school. School was one option of many, which also included finding a job somewhere. But without much sense of what sort of work was resonant with me, my focus went toward education. I thought about psychology, business, education. I knew what I wanted to do (i.e., incorporate all of my interests and abilities in one single radical program where I could learn to change the world), but where to do it? At some point, social work occurred to me, and as time went on, I think I just embarked on a process of subconsciously getting used to the idea of going back to school. Two years ago, if you’d suggested post-graduate education, I would’ve scoffed at you. Pay more money to work hard and be miserable? “No thank you,” I would have said in the midst of my corporate slog.
This time around, my biggest issue with such a path is the very nature of higher education as an institution. My radical education over the past 18 months has revealed to me the strong class system that exists in this country (and likely everywhere in the world) and the systems and structures that serve to uphold it. Higher education, and especially the top-status institutions that my ego implores me to pursue, are highly effective gatekeepers for social, class, and economic mobility. And once one of these institutions determines that you deserve to enter the upper echelons, then they are the culture-makers and -keepers, by establishing the shared intellectual languages and values that serve to demonstrate your true belonging in the upper class once you’ve left their hallowed grounds. Do I think that top universities provide a top education? Yes, I do. But I make this judgment based on my value system that, I must admit, values formal liberal education and learning above other ways of knowing and living. This is a value system that may popularly be referred to as “white supremacist,” although there is a whole lot of nuance to that. So the question for me was how I would feel paying (tens or hundreds of) thousands of dollars and spending years within the belly of the classist machine. With time, thought, and research, the answer turned out to be “Hmm, okay, yeah, I guess I could do this.” Social work was the only way this could work for me.
Social Work
Social work as a field is a problem. Social workers are predominantly white, middle class, and women; yet they work with a whole lot of individuals and communities that have very different lives and experiences. Social workers have also long been complicit in violence against people they are supposed to be helping. Violence like taking children away from their parents, and like perpetuating the carceral system. (Not even to mention the tragically large number of therapists and case workers who are just burned out or otherwise don’t give a shit about the people they are meant to be helping.)
Yet despite this, this core of what social work can be is very appealing to me. More than any other field, social work is committed to true social justice, wrapped up in iconoclasm, empathy, and critical thought. So if I were to go back to school, this would be the path to do it. I started to get excited about the idea of being around peers and faculty who share my views and awareness. But as my search got underway, my bubble burst just a little.
I probably was more surprised than I should have been when I found out that social work education is still a master’s program, it’s still part of the institution of academia, and it’s still populated by people with very diverse levels of awareness. I tried to find social work programs that were truly radical, not only in the curriculum, but also in the ways they are run. On the curricular side, most schools are only just beginning to come around to examining their entire curricula and considering how they are serving to perpetuate systems of oppression and missing opportunities to teach social workers to question the system more deeply, rather than simply acquiescing to operate within it. And to be clear, social work as a field absolutely operates within the system. And in doing so, it serves to perpetuate this system of late stage capitalism and exploitative culture. I recently spoke with a professor at BC, Sam Bradley, who blew my mind when he pointed out the idea that social work is a replacement for mutual aid. I couldn’t believe I’d never seen it that way, because it’s absolutely true. When the economic system necessitated the breakdown of the community so that people could go off and labor in the factory/office, the roles typically performed by the community (i.e., mutual aid) were sectioned out to various professions. Social workers were given a lot of the social welfare roles. (Police were given public safety.)
Anyway, beyond some work done to innovate curricula, I haven’t found any programs that are really themselves becoming radical in terms of how they operate. They are still hierarchical bureaucracies that move slowly, hoard resources, and play games with money and status. How can they not? I also realized that my peers in social work school are certain to be coming from very different levels of awareness of systemic racism, oppression, and their own privilege. Not everyone will have done mutual aid like me and begun the introspective process of examining privilege like I have. Meanwhile, I am also certain to be less aware of my privilege or blindspots than others I would be in class with. There’s simply no way to make sure that everyone comes in at the same baseline. (Well, there is, but wokeness admissions testing probably isn’t the way to go.) All of the programs I looked at are working to create required social work courses that bring everyone up to speed. Unfortunately, some people might be coming in up-to-speed, which might just be kind of a bummer.
As I came to understand what I truly could expect from social work school, I moved my hopes to finding some programs that at least offered a fertile substrate upon which seeds of more radical ideas might germinate.
My Process
Which brings me to my process and what I’ve been up to the past few months around grad school. I’ve been attending info sessions, and talking to current students, alumni, administrators, and faculty. Some schools were an absolute delight to interact with (hello, Brown School at Wash U, who even sent me a hand-written card after I attended a virtual campus tour). Other schools were, frankly, pretty unpleasant, and finding someone to talk to was like pulling teeth (not going to name names; although after I’ve chosen where I will attend, I do have a fantasy of writing a kind email to the schools where I was disappointed in the admissions/recruiting process, and offer suggestions for making it better and more appealing). I met with some truly wonderfully brilliant and woke people. And I met with some people who were a little less hip to the times. At one point, I had five to ten hours of calls or meetings per week. And each time I met with someone, I adjusted my ideas of what schools I was interested in.
I realized that, with social work, as with a lot of professional schools, people usually pick a school that’s located nearby and within their price range. They get a fine training, get their degree, and then they become social workers. Since I’m geographically untethered, have lofty goals beyond just getting a job as a social worker, and I still have some problematic attachments to achievement and status as validators of my self-worth, I ended up with a veritable list of programs that I based on the US News rankings (which are themselves based only on a survey that they send to different schools asking them to rank their peer schools – that’s it). So I spent a lot of time figuring out which schools to put on my list, and what factors were important to me. Oh, and then I added in the MBA.
My Ambition
To explain the MBA, I maybe should step back and tell you about what I’m hoping to achieve with this current pursuit. First off, I want to be a therapist, and my current idea is to have some specialization in working with seniors (again, that’s a whole other blog post I could write). I absolutely love providing meaningful support and insight to other people about their histories, lives, and ways of thinking. And based on lots of feedback from others, I seem to be pretty good at it.
My other ambition has its roots in when I left Gartner two years ago with a keen awareness about the inhumanity of corporate culture. Beyond the typical issues of HR being incompetent and bosses being ruthless, there is simply the fundamental culture in most of the business world that you are there to be an automaton. You are there to do a specific duty that creates value and money for the people above you. In the mission of the business, no matter what their corporate value statement says, you are not a human with hopes, dreams, emotions, challenges, nuance. You’re a thing that creates wealth. Well, most of us spend the majority of our lives working in or being impacted by these systems. How can we pretend that “work-life balance” is sufficient to maintain our humanity when we spend 40+ hours per week acting non-human?
When I left that world, I starting doing some networking trying to figure out how I could effect change. My path meandered quite a bit in the last two years, but it seems that I’ve returned to that very same issue.
So my goal is to change the culture of business. Instead of a business being a place where a bunch of people help the boss get rich, I think that a business should be a place where everyone involved pursues true meaning, growth, and purpose in their lives. There’s no separation between professional life and personal life. That’s a bullshit distinction that only serves to make people feel okay about doing things that they don’t truly care about as humans. Well, it’s all one life, and I believe that a business should be a place where workers can fulfill their personal desires just as much as they can in their family or social spheres. And companies should first and foremost serve the people who live their lives within it, and work to support them in their growth as multi-faceted humans. And guess what? When humans feel supported, safe, loved, and self-actualized, they are creative and productive and make beautiful things! So sure, the company can then sell those things in the marketplace.
So many businesses exist because they say they are meeting a marketplace demand. “It’s what the customers want!” That’s usually another bullshit argument, because it’s typically coming from the underlying desire to just get rich. And then people think of what they can possibly produce that people might be willing to pay money for, even if they never wanted it before it existed. (This is basically the idea behind using efficiency or convenience as a product. You have all these processes and experiences that people have in the world, and they aren’t particularly bothered by it. But then you have some guy who wants to make money, so he decides that he can shave 5 seconds off a process, and because faster is always better, he can make money off of it.) And then don’t get me started on marketing. Because if you happen to produce something that no one wanted before it existed, and by some failure on your part, still no one wants it after you’ve brought it into existence, then have no fear! You can hire dark-timeline psychologists marketers to weaponize human psychology to convince people to buy this garbage, while also skillfully allowing them to maintain the illusion of choice and free will. Brilliant.
Phew. Things just got heated.
Back on track. My goal is to work to transform corporate culture and heal it. I want to do it not by diversity initiatives or other CSR stuff that is ultimately justified by cynical capitalistic measures of productivity or profit. I want to work with business leaders to help them to heal. Help them to examine their own hearts and minds to understand how they are able to justify their perpetuation of these inhumane systems. I want to be a therapist and education to these folks, and I also want to guide them toward becoming reluctant (and maybe eventually anti-) capitalists. In that process, I want to work with them to think differently about the role of the corporation and think differently about the power they wield in changing it.
The MBA
So in September, after several weeks of exploring social work programs, I had a bright idea. What if I went to business school too? Business school would teach me soft skills (leadership, negotiation, influencing, etc.) that will help me in what I’m trying to do. But more importantly, spending time in the training grounds for the people I intend to work with one day will give me fluency in the language of business and will give me credibility when working with these people.
Ah yes, credibility. Another curve ball in my school search. Because, more than in social work school, prestige in business schools actually does matter for the type of work I’m trying to do and the type of people I want to work with. Thus ensued my process of cross-referencing social work school rankings and excitement against business school rankings. Meanwhile, I’ve been also trying to get a sense for whether I would be able to tolerate 1.5 years in business school surrounded primarily by peers who are really excited about doing all the business stuff. Yes, I acknowledge the importance and excitement of trying to solve big problems with the tools of business, which is probably how a lot of my peers would see it. But I expect to just have trouble being in that environment with people who are hesitant to be truly critical and interrogative of these systems, why they exist, and whom they benefit.
At the same time, I embrace the idea of being the challenger in the back of the room pushing myself and my peers to think differently. To question why we must prioritize efficiency over all else. To wonder about the human impact of a business decision. To examine our own presumptions of meritocracy in this system. The poke at the belief that business is amoral, and to ask whether perhaps it is far more immoral than we want to believe.
I found that not every social work program is able to be paired with a dual degree with business, but I ended up finding six schools that can be. MBA/MSW is a rare path, to be sure. But I never really was one who enjoyed following well-worn paths (see: my whole last two years). So here I am. I’ve just submitted five social work applications (as of today). I have two more to go in the next month, and I have six business school applications to submit by mid-January.
The process of writing, editing, and thinking about myself, the world, and my priorities in it has overall been wonderful these past few months. It’s been extremely challenging and full of doubt; but it’s also been activating and exciting. I frankly don’t really know my odds of getting into any of the programs I’m applying to (I suspect my chances are a lot better for social work school than for business school), which is part of why I’m applying to so many schools. But I have hope and some confidence that I will end up pursuing a dual MSW/MBA degree beginning next fall. And honestly, I feel more confident in my path and its alignment with my values and abilities than I maybe ever have. So while the future is always full of uncertainty for me, at the very least I’d say that right now, I’m feeling pretty equanimous.
Wander on, friends.
I feel that now I understand better what you want to do.