What one can do to help others can sometimes feel overwhelming. Especially in the world today, it seems like there are so many people who need help. This has become a struggle for me as I pursue a bachelor’s degree in social work from Michigan State University. I decided to pursue social work to help communities in need, yet as my first year at MSU draws to a close, I still find myself conflicted about which community I wish to help. One community that I was drawn toward working in was foster care with youth in the foster care system. I became drawn toward working in the foster care system because I know that often finding your place in the world is difficult. And it is a thousand times more difficult when you feel out of place at home. I have heard so many stories of children in the foster care system who struggle, and as someone whose family, biologically related or not, is their whole world, I can never imagine struggling through life without a place to call home. One way I would attempt to impact the community is through advocacy. I support advocating for others who may not have a voice of their own, and for children, who are often seen as “immature” and “ill-informed” when they advocate for themselves. Often, a social worker can act as a beacon to raise the concerns that the children have. One other community I have recently been doing work in is the refugee community. In the fall semester of 2024, I began volunteering at a local nonprofit called the Refugee Development Center in Lansing, Michigan. While originally it was a project for a class, I ended up enjoying my time there so much that I applied for an internship position for the spring semester of 2025. Since then, for nine hours a week, I am a teacher's assistant for an adult English class. After working in some form with the Refugee Development Center for the past year, I have begun to be drawn to working with the refugee community as a social worker. The people who come to the classes have fought tooth and nail to make it to the United States from around the globe. From Cuba, Haiti, Afghanistan, Palestine, Somalia, Bangladesh, and so many other places. And yet, every one of them will greet me with a smile and a “Hello teacher.” While I would love to work with this community, I am less sure of what it would entail. Regardless, if it involves working with new refugees to get housing, jobs, and education, I would love to do it. I am a social worker because I want to help others. In the social work profession, there is a term called “self-empowerment.” While its concept is very simple, it is still so important. Self-empowerment is done by the individual. The individual can tell a social worker their goals, and it is that social worker’s job to get them to be able to reach their goals by removing barriers and helping them access what they need to reach those goals. It is never the social worker’s job to “do it for them,” in a sense. As a social worker, whether it is in foster care or with refugees, my goal is to always help them reach their goals by removing barriers, helping with access issues, and encouraging them. That is how I will help those in need in my community.

Looking to my future, I always knew that I wanted to help people in my community. At first, I thought that I was best suited to work in the academic field, working with children with special needs as they learned in school. However, after volunteering at an elementary school for a few days, I quickly realized that I would never be able to keep up with the amount of energy those young kids somehow possessed. Then, I considered studying psychology and becoming a therapist. But something didn't feel right. I wanted to help people, but I wanted to help a greater scope of people than I could as a therapist. I wanted to help a larger portion of the community that needed my help. Then, I fell in love with social work. It had everything I was looking for; I could help a larger group of individuals without being overwhelmed by their energy, and there are so many options for different opportunities I could pursue, all within the reach of my field. It felt like everything just fell into place. If I am completely honest, I don't quite know what I am going to do with my degree. The field of social work is such a large one, and it's constantly changing as the needs of the community change. I cannot say for sure what I plan to do in the future with my degree because I do not know what the community around me might need in the future. But I do have some ideas. When I've told people that I am planning on majoring in social work, I often get one specific response. It's always along the lines of, "That will be a perfect opportunity to use your fluency in Spanish!" I have been in a Spanish immersion program since pre-K, and I am quite accomplished in that area. For both my junior and senior years, I have been taking upper-level Spanish courses at Calvin University to continue my learning. I have also earned the Seal of Biliteracy from the Michigan Department of Education for my Spanish. So, I would say that I am quite fluent in Spanish. I hope to use this Spanish in the future to help those in the community who are in need, and there are so many ways I could do this. I could work in a hospital as a social worker, working to translate between a patient who only speaks Spanish and their doctor. I could work for a nonprofit organization that specializes in assisting immigrants with the process of getting settled in a new country, one that they might not speak the language of. I could work as a school social worker in a more Hispanic neighborhood, allowing students to reach me in whatever language they prefer. My favorite thing about social work is that I can work to have a positive impact in so many different areas. With the addition of my fluency in Spanish, I can better work to help combat injustice by bridging the language gap between people in need and those people or things that they are struggling to reach. While I don't quite know the needs of the community or how best to reach them, I do not doubt in my mind that I will be more than able to rise to the challenge and work to help, whether they speak the same language as everyone else or not.

For me, the transition to high school was possibly the toughest patch for my mental health. While I'm definitely under more stress now as I finish my senior year of high school and continue to college, my last year of middle school was tough because I had no one. There was no one for me to talk to about the rising feelings of depression, anxiety, and frequent thoughts about self-harm and suicide. Between never feeling connected to my friends at school and then being isolated due to COVID-19, I was severely struggling. In my freshman year, my struggles continued. Instead of being isolated mentally from friends and physically due to COVID-19, I was now intentionally self-isolating. I was scared of the virus, but more significantly, my mental health had deteriorated to the point where I had begun to self-sabotage my relationships, believing that no one truly cared about me. That was three years ago, and ever since some friends helped me realize what was going on and helped me get out of the depressive state, I have committed myself to helping the mental health of others. I have found people who were feeling the same way that I was feeling several years ago and have sat down with them, talking about my experiences and how, through the help of wonderful friends, I was able to dig myself out of that situation and get the help I needed. I have taken my moments of pain and used them to help others. Even with friends who are facing different battles than I am, I work to offer a place of security and comfort as they work through their situations. Whether it's a coworker going through a rough mental health patch after a breakup or a long-time friend suffering from a panic attack, I always do my best to offer a safe space to rest. While I have not been able to have as much of a significant impact as I hopefully will have in the professional field, it is clear how my attempts to create a safe environment have worked. I have friends coming to me automatically when they know they need a shoulder to cry on; I have people that I barely know who come up to me to talk about their struggles with mental health; and people have shown me that they appreciate the safe space I have created. I am so proud of the fact that I have managed to get myself out of a bad situation for my mental health and that I have been able to help others out of bad situations that they're going through. I managed to do all of this in just four years, with consistent work on my own mental health and on being a safe space for others. As I venture into my next transition from high school to college, I find myself extremely thankful that I am doing much better now than I was four years ago. This transition has me thinking about mental health for a different reason, as I am very excited to be majoring in social work. On this path, I hope to continue helping others with their mental health, either through direct services focusing on mental health or through helping them through a different battle that affects their mental health, such as homelessness, foster care, and other life situations. Through struggling with my own mental health, I have committed through high school to offer a safe space for others to discuss mental health. I hope to continue to support mental health in the future through social work.