As the academic advisor for the BSW program at the USF School of Social Work, Justine Leigh advises students to pursue their passions and develop soft skills necessary for job acquisition and stresses the importance of exploration.
In this episode, Justine Leigh discusses how she helps undergraduates navigate the future, how she supports them in their professional and personal growth, and the wide variety of career paths possible with a degree in social work.
Learn more about the School of Social Work at the University of South Florida here.
Chris Groeber: Hi. I’m Chris Groeber, and I’m an associate in research at the University of South Florida’s College of Behavioral and Community Sciences School of Social Work. Welcome to the Remark-a-Bull podcast.
[Instrumental music]
Chris Groeber: Welcome back to our Remark-a-Bull podcast. I am excited to introduce you guys, to what I think would consider a real bright spot in our school. Guys, if you have not met Justin Leigh, I'm excited to introduce her to you and those of you know her probably will know her better when this is done and so I just really want to spend some time talking with her about her journey and how she has gotten to where she's at. Part of the reason I want to do this is because I sat meetings with her and there's just these little drops of kind wisdom that I think she puts out there. There's energy that is really, really nice; especially when you’re struggling, which many of you are when you go and see our advisors. So Justine is our student advisor for our BSW program, but she is so much more than that. So Justine, welcome to being remarkable, you really are. So tell them a little bit about who you are, who are you and kind of how did you get to where you are right now.
Justine Leigh: Sure, and let me just say thank you for having me, Chris, and for thinking of me and I'm really excited to be a part of this project, as well. So, let's see a little bit about my journey. I am a first-generation college student. My parents were basically like, “just get through high school and come home with C grades and will be proud of you.” They set the bar super low, I guess they didn’t have expectations of me going any further than that. So, I’m the first person in my family to actually earn a higher education degree. I started out at a community college, actually Hillsborough Community College, right here in Tampa, Florida, and I really wanted to start in a smaller environment. And I got a full tuition scholarship from the Honors program when I applied there, so…
Chris: Cause you didn’t have Cs all through high school, right?
Justine: Yeah (laughs).
Chris: You beat that bar. Good for you.
Justine: Exactly, so. The thing is I was trying to reflect back and think about what made me want to go to college and ... because it obviously wasn’t my family. But I feel like when I look back now, whenever I was in school, I felt like it was a safe environment, an environment that provided some structure that I didn’t necessarily have in my personal life. And I did find myself excelling and making friends, and getting involved in different ways and doing things that I don’t think I ever thought I could do and definitely my parents never thought I could do, so I think that's why I decided I wanted to continue on for college, even though nobody else was really going in that direction. And so I got my two years Associate of Arts from HCC and then I decided that I ... well, social work was not my first major.
Chris: Okay, you know most of us have had three or four before we found it, so that's okay.
Justine: Exactly, and I think that's a message I want every single college student to know. College is a time of exploration where you should be exploring multiple different careers and majors to find your right fit.
Chris: Don’t you think? I want to stop right there on that point for a second because I think it's a really important point to bring out, especially with so many students getting college credit in high school. So basically, a lot of them come out as a second semester sophomore, and you think about that growth period between your freshman year and your sophomore year and, like you said, you discover all these hidden talents and abilities. To expect a 20-year-old to know what they want to do for the rest of their lives is a really unfair expectation, don’t you think?
Justine : I completely agree, yeah. I think it's unfair and also I think we need to shift the perspective around deciding what you want to do with the rest of your life, because the truth is it’s very rare that somebody majors in something, gets a career in the exact field, and stays in the field for their entire lives. Like that's the rarity. So, as an academic advisor, what I always recommend for students is following where their passion is at the current moment and maybe where your passion is at the current moment is something that people are telling you is impractical, you know, like a theater degree or a psychology degree, philosophy, humanities. But you know what those are going to be what interest you right now; they are going to be your stepping off point and they do provide a lot of soft skills, soft transferable skills that are required for a career in anything. And there's a lot of careers out there that don’t require a degree in a specific area, so.
Chris: Well, you know, I think one of the things with that soft skill thing, we say soft skill and sometimes I hate that term because it doesn’t seem to be as valued as hard skills, but I’m telling you what I see in the workforce, what people are lacking are those soft skills around their emotional intelligence, around their ability to be self-reflective, around their ability to think about really using learning as a coping mechanism and all of that. So, I think those soft skills you talked about are so fundamental in being a decent human being.
Justine: They really are and so, yeah, college is that time to not only grow professionally but to grow personally because as you said there's so much growth that happens during your traditional college student age range but even for our non-traditional students that are coming back to school at a later time, you are growing so much as a person and a professional, as well, just because you're exposed to all these new situations and things.
Chris: And they’re brave. I think they’re brave. I think these non-traditional students that come back, I love to teach them because it takes guts . You know, to go out into the workforce and then decide “ehh I’m going to go get a degree,” because the cost are so high, “what if I fail, what if I’m not smart, what if I can’t take tests.” And you know I just think non-traditional students are brave, I really do.
Justine: Yeah, I love my non-traditional students, they bring a completely different perspective into the classroom, into my advising appointments with them. And they really make the environment well rounded, right , so you got to find…
Chris: There's life experience. It's so funny, I was talking with a student the other day and she was talking about her peers. And she said, “I am not going to tell a 35-year-old woman as a 22-year-old woman to look at her emails, I’m not going do that because she’s raising a kid.” And I just really appreciate the respect that this young woman had for her peer and really trying to grasp where the older peer was in her life. And I thought, you know that's really good for the younger woman to realize the pressure that her older peer is under, you know.
Justine: Definitely enriches everything.
Chris: It does, so tell me then, so why in the hell, how did you get to social work?
Justine: So I think many people will say that they started off as a psychology major and then what I realized was that psychology was very focused on theory in the classroom and there weren’t so many classes that had tangible skills of how to work with people. And there was also some incorrect rhetoric about how in order to do anything with a psych degree you need to get a PhD, which, again, I want to emphasize its an incorrect rhetoric, but it’s still something very common that people like to say. But, regardless, I started looking at social work curriculums because it was another way for me to help people because that's what I ultimately said, “I want to help others, I want to try to make a difference in this world in some small way.” And I believe that we can do that through human relationships, so I wanted to stick with something within the social services realm and social work caught my eye. And I did like how the curriculum itself was going to provide me with a mixture of theory and tangible skills of how to work with people. I also really love our theory set of human in the environment because me, personally, I really identify with looking not just what happens within the individual but the environment they grow up in, that they have no choice but to navigate their way through and that affects people just as much as their biology does.
Chris: Absolutely, yes, yes. Well so why USF?
Justine: Well, I actually got my bachelor’s degree in Social Work from Florida International University in Miami and that was a really fun adventure.
Chris: Miami always is. I love a good weekend in Miami.
Justine: And then when I graduated from there, at the time the partner that I was dating lived in Tampa and my family lives in Tampa and so I just kind of said, “well, let me go and you know get my Master’s in Social Work at USF.” And it was a good fit because obviously from a money perspective it allows you to still live locally and not have to live on campus, which a large portion of the money that I spent in Miami was just living on campus and having that college experience, which let me tell you, I would not give that up for anything in my life. The two years that I lived on campus were absolutely like amazing, exciting, and invaluable, but they were expensive, so that's something you have to pros and cons you know way. But yeah, USF attracted me really just because of the location and they did have, you know, an in person MSW which for me that's what I wanted, I wanted that in-person classroom energy.
Chris: So did you work during that time? How did you survive?
Justine: I was not on scholarship during my MSW which is still a sour moment, so that's actually something that now that I’m employed by the school’s Social Work at USF, I am looking for different ways to increase our scholarship opportunities because that was my major complaint when I was a student in the program. I took out loans, of course, and then I did work on the weekends. I worked at the Publix Bakery (laughs).
Chris: Oh the best cake.
Justine: Yeah. I actually loved working at Publix, it's just a really great employer. But yeah, so I worked on the weekends, Saturday and Sunday, and then Monday through Friday, I was taking my classes and I was also doing my field placement.
Chris: So you were advanced standing.
Justine: I was.
Chris: Okay, alright. For those of you who don’t know, if you have a BSW degree, you can apply for the advanced standing program, which is shorter than the traditional MSW program, by about half, right?
Justine: Yes, it's only 35 credits instead of the full 60. And we do have part-time and full-time options. I completed the full-time options, so I was actually done in a year.
Chris: Which is really great, especially if you gone on with your BSW right into your masters, it’ll get you into the workforce a lot quicker. We used to have a limit on how many years; there was a time limit on how many years, before you could apply for that. But we have taken the time limit away, so you can make the argument if you got your BSW seven years ago, you can come back for advance standing, which is a fairly new thing that probably a lot of people don’t know about which I think was a really good rule to implement.
Justine: Oh, 100%.
Chris: So tell me about your work experience then, so you get this MSW, then what? Then what happened to you?
Justine: So I have kind of a bit of an interesting social work trajectory because I do consider being an academic advisor as a type of social work, but it's definitely a non-traditional social work position. It's not one, I mean I’m not even called a social worker, I’m called an academic advisor. But, like when I was doing my social work internship and my bachelor’s, and even when I was doing my masters, I kept saying, “I’m interested in working with teenagers,” and then I tried it and it wasn’t the best fit. I was interested in working with the homeless and then I tried it and I was like not the best fit. And then I tried working in a hospital setting and, you know, I didn’t find my passion there either. Like, I was trying these different things, which everybody should do, but I wasn’t connecting in that passionate way that I really wanted to make sure that I did. Because I think we all know, we do this for the passion, we don’t do this for the money, right?
Chris: Right, right, but you know I’m all for money. So, if you can do it and make money, then you go, you're not a sellout. I tell people that all the time, you know when they are in interviews. Ask what the midpoint is, don’t accept the first thing they offer, you know, market yourself.
Justine: Exactly, yeah. And I think that's why I wanted to try hospital social work because it's kind of a known fact that that's at the top of the salary range. I was like, it would be really awesome if this worked out, unfortunately it didn’t. But yeah, I started like when I was getting close to graduating with my MSW, I started thinking to myself like, “where have I had the most enjoyment, where have I found my most passion?” And I actually did some research on college student issues during my bachelor’s and my MSW. And then I started thinking about how much of an impact education had on me personally and professionally. And then I even started thinking broader about how education, itself, really is a tool that you can use to help people elevate themselves. And it's even one of those tools that has a far reaching generational impact, right? Because if you, yourself, go to college, then your children are more likely to go to college and their children, etc. So, I was just seeing, “why can’t I work in higher education, helping people, and making sure that people who don’t normally have access to higher education get access and make sure that they navigate the system that can oftentimes be really confusing and be really tough and make sure that they get a better lives for themselves?” And so that's what I did, I kind of immediately went and applied for a staff assistant position at Hillsborough Community College after I graduated and I got it. And then from there I moved to being an academic advisor at Hillsborough Community College for five years, and then I moved to being an academic advisor at USF.
Chris: I’m so glad you did. I mean your story makes it so doable, for anyone, right? Because I can remember when I was doing my bachelor’s and I was actually going to medical school. And my advisor, I look back on her today, like, I hold her on some god-like esteem, because she as an MD said to me, “You know Chris, I know you like this other side of what we do, the more people, the softer skills–if you will– side as oppose to the harder science side. You know you have a sociology degree.” So the person in my bachelor’s in biology in pre-medicine directed me back to sociology and I ended up graduating with a bachelor’s in sociology because she found it for me, because she knew that I just wasn't finding the fulfillment in the harder science area. And so, I think about the power that she gave me, right? The privilege that she gave me because she was watching out for me and I love watching you work with students because I’ve talked to several students and you’re watching out for them individually in your role as advisor, which I think is just an incredible gift. I mean, I’m sure your job is like super fulfilling.
Justine: Oh my gosh, 100 percent. I absolutely love what I do with a passion and I loved how you said that you have to find fulfillment in your classes. It's the same thing when I’m meeting with students and I’m seeing that their grades are coming back as Cs or even not passing, that’s an indicator that like there's a fit issue and the whole goal is to find the right fit and sometimes students need permission like the advisor gave you to just kind of go towards something that is going to be a better fit but maybe some other people had asked you, “well what do you expect to do with a sociology degree?” Right? You know and that kind of creates this whole self-doubt, little voice that gets stuck in your head and I’m extremely privilege that I have a small enough caseload in social work to where I really can focus on students individually and meet with them every semester and make sure that they are not falling behind and that they are finding their right fit. And it’s really exciting to see how students’ journeys kind of continue to evolve and progress from, like, freshman into senior year.
Chris: Isn’t that the best? I told my class last night, I was teaching last night and I told my class night, the best thing about my job is when they’re colleagues and they reach back in and say things like, “hey, professor can I have some help with this, can I have some help with that?” That to me, as an educator, as a professor, is probably my hallmark of, “man I made that connection and that person appreciated it enough to reach back in.”
Justine: Oh my gosh, yeah. I love it when I hear from like graduated students who give me updates on like, “hey, I just got into my graduate program or hey, I just started my first social work position,” and sometimes they’ll even say like, “I remember this one time where you said this one thing to me…”
Chris: Absolutely, right?
Justine: And it's just, ohhhh, even if it's just one sentence, you know it's amazing. It makes you feel so fulfilled.
Chris: And so gratified that you know, I tell people all the time that it helps me more than it helps you to hear you say that to me. So what’s next Justine? What’s like your dream goal for your future, what’s it look like?
Justine: I’m going to say right now that I don’t have a dream goal for the future and it's taken me a bit of a journey to get to making that statement, which is why I actually think it's so profound for something like that to be coming out of my mouth. As somebody that has felt so comfortable being in academia, it's very natural for me to want to pre plan my entire life and have 5, and 10, and 15 year goals and to be constantly be saying, “what are you doing right now to work toward that, why are you just sitting here, what else could I be doing better, how can I be improving myself?” It's a very like type-A personality, fixed mindset and I’ve actually…
Chris: The illusion of control that that can actually happen. You got to be a little controlling.
Justine: Oh my gosh, yeah! And so the past couple of years I’ve been working very diligently on changing my mindset and trying to embrace more of a growth mindset and to just let things happen organically and so I will say that I love the idea of pursuing second masters in maybe Women and Gender Studies and I’ve even thought of pursuing a PhD. I even took one class as a non-degree seeking student for the communications PhD program, just to see what it was like.
Chris: Right, right.
Justine: And FYI, students you can do that. You’re allowed to take a graduate level course as a non-degree seeking student to just get your foot in the door and make sure that it's the right fit. And I really enjoyed my time but what was ironic about that class, it made me realize that I’ve spent so much time of my life pre-planning and just wanting to like to learn and achieve my goals and I haven’t necessarily done enough living. And so I think that for right now, I am in a place where I am trying to actually live life outside of being in a classroom and if I do go back into the classroom, I think first is going to be to take some classes for fun like I’m currently – my partner is fluent in Portuguese – and so I would really love to like learn some Portuguese and take you know Portuguese class and maybe Intro to Women and Gender Studies, since you know I was thinking about that, too. So, I think that for right now I just like, I do, I want to have an emphasis on living and still growing as a person, but having less emphasis on that be working towards a specific end goal.
Chris: That is such mic-drop wisdom. I mean I appreciate that so much because even as my advanced age, I am loving this season of my life and just living it and being ... I know there's certain things about myself, I know that I’m never going to do and I’m okay with that because I like what I’m doing so much and so aren’t we fortunate, really, to be in a position where we like the work so much and it's fulfilling enough? I’m just trying to enjoy the season and not anticipate the next one. One of the things that thematically that I hear from you, and I think it's really powerful and I think it's really, really important is that you got kind of this win or learn mentality. And so, if things don’t go as you plan, guess what, I still learn from it and I gained from it, so that way it's never a win, lose situation, it's a win and learn. And you just seem to be both a winner and a lifelong learner, which makes life so much fuller, I think, for people when they’re willing to say I like to learn this because I just want to learn it.
Justine: Yeah and I did not get here easily. And this has definitely been a more recent evolution in my personal and professional being and so it's something very intentional, and I will say that as students coming into an academic environment, that is not the mindset that is drilled into you.
Chris: No, absolutely.
Justine: That is not the environment of higher education and so I hope that, at some point, maybe we do incorporate more of a balanced, you know, thought process of how to be a whole person and how to live a more balanced life while being in school. But at this time, that's not how higher education works, so it's something that you kind of really have to work at after you graduate and when the pendulum starts swinging the other way when you’re outside of school, but for us that work in higher education, we are always in that setting, so for us it has to be very intentional to want to change that mindset.
Chris: Absolutely. And incorporate it into the implicit curriculum. You know, that we are not teaching students, we’re teaching people and with those people, you know, comes a fullness of all ranges of emotions and situations and crisis, and you know people talk about work-life balance all the time and I think I’ve said this in the another one of these podcasts, but it’s really about work-life integration, because you can’t ... balance would indicate that somehow, someway you would control what happens to you and I don’t think that’s true. I think life happens to you and you don’t necessarily control it. So how do I integrate it if I’ve got a crisis, if I’ve got a sick kid, a sick significant other, whatever at home, how do I balance that with my educational process? And I think a lot of our students’ anxieties that we hear about, that you advise on, come from that lack of accepting and normalizing that integration.
Justine: Oh one-hundred percent. And I love that, I love that integration, I’m going to totally steal that from you with your permission. Um, but yeah that's one of my biggest things that students and I are constantly working on, is making sure that their personal life and there school life are working in conjunction with each other, in a way that’s going to allow them to be successful and not go crazy and also sleep more than like four hours at night, you know, and it takes practice and it takes intentionality.
Chris: Well, and I think it takes people like you who can give perspective to it. And like you said, I like what you said, sometimes people just need permission. You can be a grown adult and still need permission to chase your dreams, to be someone different. You know the great thing about life, I think is it’s full of restarts and each day is an opportunity to say, “you know what I’m going to be different today and I’m going to change things up.” And so, to me, I think that's one of my favorite things about life is that I can get up today and decide, “I’m going to get a PhD, I’m going to take a Portuguese class, I’m going do these things,” and you are such a testament to that. I really appreciate this conversation. Let me ask you before we part ways, what’s your best advice for people that are considering a BSW or a MSW or even a PhD?
Justine: I would say, if the curriculum and the social work values speak to you, they resonate with you on a personal level, then that’s going to be an indicator that this is the right major for you. Sometimes it can be a little nerve wracking trying to decide what you want to do with the rest of your life, but again, like we talked about earlier, it doesn’t have to be for the rest of your life and also a social work degree is a very, very flexible degree. Like, I love talking to season social work professionals and hearing how in one point they worked with children and how at one point they worked with the elderly, and at another point how they are teaching at the university and so if you are a person who is nervous about getting pigeonholed into doing one thing for the rest of your life, please know that the social work degree is not going to be that at all. And so, as you continue to evolve personally, this profession will continue to evolve with you because there’s just a wide variety of different things that you can do with it.
Chris: I think that is such nice advice because I tell people all the time, your job is not your career, social work is your career. And we talked about money early on. I mean I know social workers who make good six figures salaries and I want to say to our people that are doing field right now, I want to go back to Justine said earlier about struggling, I keep hitting our field placements up to prepaid placements and the reason I say that they are getting experience, yes, but we need to assign a value to that experience. And I think unless we’re paying people, we wonder why people turn over and unless we’re really investing in people, I think we’re going to continue to see if we do what we’ve always done, we’ve got what we always got, so I want to challenge the CEOs out there and the agency leads out there to think a little bit about if they really created a learning environment, sometimes that cost them a little bit to really pay those students, and I’m not talking about an absorbent amount, but just to show the appreciation for what those students bring to the party. And that really, that neutral appreciation, I think goes a long, long way to engaging and connecting potential employees.
Justine: One-hundred percent and I would love to see more of my students dropping down to like a small part-time job at a Publix bakery because they are getting their paid internship and getting income from that and so now all of a sudden they’re not so stressed out with the job that is not related to social work at all, so I think there's no cons with it, I think it's all pros, we just need to get everybody on board.
Chris: Absolutely, and with a partner like you, sitting where you’re sitting, I think that's entirely possible. I just want to thank you, I love doing these things because you get to know people in a different way and I just want to know I came in with an appreciation of how you got to where you got to but I really having your story really does make you remarkable and I’m really glad you’re my colleague, so Justine thank you for this time you’re sharing with us.
Justine: Thank you Chris, it was such a joy and thank you for allowing me to put my story out there.