PHD Social Work Mental Health Counseling Example

My professional research interests are primarily in empirically based mental health treatment models to assist children and adolescents with mental health issues and delinquency behaviors. __U is my first choice for earning a Ph.D. because I am a good fit for your program. While I admire all the social work faculty in your program and find myself especially inspired by the research of several faculty members, Dr. ____’s work on the identification and program evaluation of evidence-based clinical interventions is precisely the area in which I hope to make my mark in life and distinguish myself as a social work professor and researcher.  Working with and learning from ____ would help me develop advanced research skills in creating, implementing, and evaluating clinical models, especially for clients of color.

PHD Social Work Mental Health Counseling Example

Originally from India, I am the first in my family to earn an undergraduate, much less a graduate degree. Coming from the humblest circumstances in India, life was hard for us in our new world, New Jersey and Queens, NY. Yet, my humble beginnings and the financial struggle of my family in inner-city America served as excellent preparation for a social work professional, as I see it, because it has resulted in my sympathetic understanding of and creative thinking about techniques for survival and uplift of minorities in our inner cities. I am one of them, and I identify as such. Truly blessed to have had the privilege to travel throughout much of Europe, Morocco, Australia, and most of South America, I have come to appreciate and celebrate diversity wildly and to understand the complexity of cultural factors that underlie behavior.

I date my intense passion for studying Psychology and Human Behavior to about the age of fifteen. By the 11th grade, I was hooked. My psychology teacher even sent a letter to my parents highlighting my potential in this area and how I had gone “beyond my peers” in this subject. My love for research took off in leaps and bounds as an undergraduate student, 2007 -2009. For 14 months, I was involved in a pilot research project working with Dr. XXXX, assessing a random sampling of people and their attitudes concerning factory farms, studying the relationship between preconceived notions of factory farms and the person's decision to consider or act upon that knowledge.  Dr. ____ gave me enormous responsibility in assisting with his research, and I felt most honored by his trust.  I collected in-person surveys, analyzed data, and scripted a research paper. While the subject of this study was not within my area of principal scholarly interest, I gained invaluable experience in the fundamentals of conducting a clinical research project. This experience will help me to excel with a doctoral dissertation one of these days, hopefully at __U.

PHD Social Work Mental Health Counseling Example

After earning my Ph.D., I look forward to a long professional lifetime examining the efficacy of treatment models for clients of color searching and assessing for successful outcomes. In addition to program implementation and evaluation within community-based organizations, I also intend to remain engaged throughout my career with creating evidence-based modalities that can be delivered within the school system since my focus is on children and adolescents. I completed my Masters's Degree in Mental Health Counseling in 2012 and became a Licensed Mental Health Clinician in the State of New York.  I have now worked in the field of mental health treatment for about eight years, serving as both a clinician and a supervisor. I am convinced that this extensive experience will help me to excel in your distinguished doctoral program at __U. As a multisystemic therapist, I have worked with parents, teenage children, and defense attorneys to make a case for evidence-based mental health treatment as an alternative to incarceration.

I am an Indian woman who is very much concerned with the unique mental health challenges that tend to confront recent immigrants to America, particularly people of color, especially Asians. I hope to become a crusader with my Ph.D. from __U to help make mental health care more accessible for populations that tend to be excluded from our mental health systems. In New Jersey and New York, in addition to growing up in India, I have witnessed the stigmas and barriers that that tend to prohibit members of communities of color face from accessing culturally sensitive mental health support.  I have seen my mother battling depression and acculturation stress due to immigration and separation from her family of origin.  I have become retroactively aware of how my 12-year-old sister was a victim of constant bullying for two years because neither her parents nor the school system was able to engage effectively to protect her.  These days, when I hear my clients suggest that the “system does not work for us,” I know exactly what they mean.

I feel strongly that the mental health community in America should be entirely representative of the population to the extent this is possible. There is widespread agreement that we need more clinicians and leaders in our field who are people of color. While earning my Master's, I worked in Queens, NY, one of the most diverse places in the world, for four years, serving with the Queens District Attorney’s Family Justice Initiative. Seeing how trauma affected children up close and in a sustained fashion helped me to understand the strengths as well as the failures of our system. I am happy that being a woman of color helped me gain the confidence of many of the traumatized children of color that I sought to help.

After earning my master's, I decided to immerse myself in culturally-inclusive, evidence-based teaching and in October of last year, 2015, I became the Program Director for ____ in New York, overseeing our school-based Mental Health Services Department, operating 12 programs in NYC schools with 11 clinicians implementing best practices that have changed the negative trajectory of several families and adolescents of color who otherwise would have ended up mired in the justice system. As a result, I have gained a deeper and more macro-level understanding of how important it is to provide evidence-based mental health treatment on a state and national level to lower the numbers of young people going from school to the prison system. My commitment and zeal for advocating and supporting families, leadership skills, and knack for organization enable me to excel at what I do, and I have confidence that I could distinguish myself at __U.

The ____ School of Social Work is my first choice for graduate school because I see it as the best fit with my passion and goals for the future. I am in love with NYC and cannot imagine a more exciting place to live and work. I see your especially rigorous program at the ____ School as the best option to prepare me for a lifetime of model development and implementation, teaching and supervising future clinicians, enhancing my leadership skills, and helping me to better appreciate the complexity of social justice issues and the need for outcomes that meet acceptable standards of social justice. I aspire to build upon my current program development and implementation skills to obtain leadership positions on both state and national levels, joining in policy debates and advocating for additional funding for evidence-based mental health programs in school. I also hope to teach with special attention to the training of clinicians of color and issues of cultural sensitivity.

Thank you for your consideration of my application.

PHD Social Work Mental Health Counseling Example