MSW InternAt — College Track
College Track is a college access program serving high school and college students from low-income communities who will be the first in their family to earn a bachelor’s degree. As an MSW intern, you will be an instrumental member of our staff and Wellness Team that nurtures our students’ social-emotional wellbeing by building the kinds of strengths and competences that lead to college completion and a life of opportunity, choice, and power. We accomplish this by fostering an environment at our centers that is optimized by learning and healing through trauma-informed practices and by providing evidence based wellness education and counseling in individual and group settings. By being a mental health professional in a non-mental health setting, our MSW interns will have the unique opportunity to develop curriculum, design instruction, evaluate best practices, and collaborate with agency staff to support the holistic needs of our students.
Our MSW interns will leave this placement with a wide range of skills and feel prepared to enter the job market or their advanced year internship. MSW interns will carry an individual caseload of 8-10 students and facilitate 1-2 groups per term. In this process, interns will learn how to plan for, facilitate, and evaluate the effectiveness of their 1:1 and group work with their students. This includes learning and implementing a wide range of formal and informal assessment tools and evidence based intervention practices. Additionally, interns will feel confident collaborating in a cross department team and being a voice for the mental health and wellness needs of our students and agency as whole.
The National College Track Wellness team holds onboarding and training sessions in August before internship begins. This provides an introduction to College Track systems, technology, students, and staff as well as explicit trainings in facilitating groups, getting started with 1:1 students, crisis response, understanding and implementing our Social Emotional Health Survey, case notes/documentation, and specific modalities used with our students (e.g., MI, CBT, Narrative Therapies, Solution Focused Work, among others). Additionally, training continues for students throughout the semester on site and through self-study tasks.