I would like to be detailed, but usually it's unnecessary because it's likely the person who asked either 1) doesn't care or 2) doesn't understand. What I've learned to do is give a vague sentence-long description or shorter, and if they were interested, they could follow up with another question. After a while, I stopped explaining completely unless I could sense they had a connection to my line of work. A few days ago, I realized this isn't always a good strategy if you know you're going to see the person again.
I made some life-career changes recently. I left my "education nonprofit" job and decided to pursue an MSW at NYU in the spring. In every sense, I couldn't be happier in my decision, but it did take a long time for me to recognize that it was the right decision. Leaving my job was an even better decision, which I will write about later this week.
A friend asked me why I had decided to pursue a career in social work. This idea has always significantly and insignificantly been looming around my head since the middle of my undergraduate years.
Less than two months after graduating in 2012, I knew that I was going to devote a large chunk of my life in the public sector, influencing under-resourced and under-represented populations in some way. Deep down, however, I had a blurry disdain for affluent heirs and heiresses. To my core, as an inevitable product of capitalism, I despise it. I don't have a solution for it, and I can't say that I think it's "wrong" either, but all I know is that right now, I think it has created a system of inequity, and I want to do all I can to do something about it in my own way.
Public service came almost too easily to me, more so than the natural and compelling lure of writing-as-career that I had desired since high school. Not only is social work the appropriate "next step," but I also believe it to be exactly the kind of skill set I would be honored to have (and hopefully will be able to obtain). My goal is to promote equal rights and independence in making choices for one's own life. But just because I want to work with vulnerable populations, doesn't mean I should have such a minor but detrimental bias for or against an entire social class.
I had to ask myself-- and someone had to tell me-- that what I ultimately want is for all people to be treated equally, yet I was using the vengeful Malcolm X war tactic, and not the peaceful MLK approach. The way in which I approached social work stemmed from what I like to compare to the feeling of picketing at a rally: radically cool and tragically temporary.
I know this attitude is an ephemeral one, and I am thankful to have some time to be able to think about why I am committing the rest of my life to living with an expensive, three-letter professional acronym that will indefinitely haunt both the rest of my mundane and my bigger life decisions. But I can't start school with the allusion that my catalyst for change is simply a vendetta towards capitalism.
