A Story for Graduating Social Work Students—The Winding Path

by Katie Novick Nolan, LICSW

     First, let me say “congratulations” to you on this tremendous accomplishment. Graduations can be a time to look back and to look forward. As you begin to look forward, I’d like to share with you a few insights I have gained in the last 17 or so years since I walked across the graduation stage.

     Music has been one of the most important parts of my life for as long as I can remember. When I was younger, I would put on music and dance around my home, feeling as if each note, each reverberation, was passing right through me. As I moved into later elementary school and middle school, I started writing my own music. Sometimes I wrote alone, and sometimes I worked on songs with my dad. It felt like a powerful new way to tell stories, but it also felt like an important way to process and make sense of my own experiences. Sadness can be turned into a beautiful song, the hollowness replaced by a rich and saturated experience of feeling things deeply, or writing can feel like reconnecting to what feels like home when you’re feeling lost—at least, that’s how it was for me.

    In high school, I picked up the guitar and reveled in my power chords and callused finger tips. I kept writing music, and in college I started performing on campus and at small local spots. I loved the feeling of sharing an experience with an audience—that we were all listening to the same notes, sharing in the same experience. There was this palpable sense of connection that really drew me to playing with others and to performing.

      In college, I was studying English and psychology, and what I started to notice more and more was the similarity between the two. In my English courses, I found myself fascinated with characters’ lives—what they were feeling, thinking, how their earlier experiences were affecting their decisions in the present; how their environments and time periods were affecting their well-being; and even how they saw themselves. In my psychology classes, I found myself tracking themes in people’s stories and being awed by how metaphoric we are as human beings. In both disciplines, I was struck by the power of words and how, as humans, we tell stories to make meaning of our lives.

     When I graduated from college, I knew two things. I knew that I wanted to play music and that I wanted to help people. I moved to Boston, and I think it was around this time that I went to my first concert at the Boston Pavilion. It’s had many different names over the years, but it is this gorgeous, big concert venue right out in Boston harbor. That first time at Boston Pavilion, I stood out in the crowd, watching the band, listening to the music, feeling the bass, hearing the cheers. I decided right then that someday, somehow, I would be the one up there on that stage.

     Over the next year, I held my first human service jobs. I also kept playing music and passing out CDs of my songs in hopes of landing some gigs. What I realized during this year was that I really enjoyed working with people. I also developed a new understanding of social justice and how systems of oppression were having an impact on individuals I was working with, as well as entire communities. I decided to go back to school to get my Master of Social Work (MSW). My MSW program was clinical, intense, challenging, and so rewarding. All the intersections I had seen in my English and psychology courses came together as I learned about psychodynamic theory, person-in-environment, and our paths through human development. I also kept playing music. I sometimes still performed. Music continued to help me understand my experiences.

     The sense of connection that I so appreciated about performing was something that I found even more rewarding about my work with people. I was humbled by the trust, by the willingness of clients to allow me to share a path with them for a bit, and by the collaboration and therapeutic relationships that we built. There was something about working with people as a social worker that reminded me of playing music, especially playing music with others. What was special about social work was that instead of me writing the songs, writing the stories, I was helping to empower clients to examine their own stories—what society said about them, what they said to themselves, what they believed their own stories could be, what they thought the next chapter should bring.

     Slowly, social work took more and more of my time, particularly after I graduated with my MSW. Over the years, there were times when my guitar was played almost every day and times when it gathered dust and my calluses faded away (see: Katie had a baby and life changed dramatically).

     In 2015, after doing some adjunct teaching at a fantastic college, I applied for a full-time teaching position in the social work department at another university. I’m still not sure exactly how it happened, but I got the job. Everything I loved about working with clients, I also loved about teaching—sitting in a classroom with students and collaborating around a problem that needed solving, supporting and empowering students to trust in their own experience, expertise and knowledge, and looking together at the metaphors in our shared human experience. When I would break a class into small groups for discussion, the collective hum of conversation was like its own song—the sound created reminds me of an orchestra warming up. Life got really busy (see: Katie has a toddler and a full-time job). I didn’t play my guitar very much.

     Then something extraordinary happened. As the end of my first-year teaching approached, I was informed that I should participate in graduation. I put on my cap and gown and took the T (what Bostonians call the subway) down to the waterfront, because it turns out that the university’s graduation is held at the Boston Pavilion. I lined up with my fellow professors and prepared to walk out for the start of graduation. As the line of faculty slowly inched forward, I realized that I was about to walk on stage at the Boston Pavilion. I took another step, and I was standing on stage, just as I had promised myself I would do so many years earlier.

     I had done it.

     But the path that had brought me here, to this stage, was not something that I could have ever imagined when I first graduated college.

     These days, I’m still teaching full time, and I still love music. I wish I played my guitar more, but I’m working on it. When I play, it remains one of my most powerful self-care tools. Social work is a field that encourages and embraces creativity, so I’ve always appreciated how my interest in stories and my interest in music have been allowed into my practice. Being a great social worker often involves maintaining professionalism while also bringing forth our own greatest strengths and creativity, in service of the work that we are doing with others.

     One of the things that has been most interesting to me in life is how our paths can wind and twist in exciting and unexpected ways. As you embark on this graduation, I encourage you to stay open to the paths ahead, to be curious about where they lead, to stay open to their possibilities, and to appreciate the strange and beautiful ways that paths can also bring us home again—wherever that home is.

Katie Novick Nolan, LICSW, is Associate Professor of practice and BSW Program Director at Simmons University School of Social Work, where she teaches in the BSW and MSW programs.