Student Spotlight: Connecting Cultures
Get to know MSW student Natasha P. (SSW ’29)
As a former Boston University undergraduate, a working professional with eight years of experience, and a current part-time MSW student, Natasha P. brings a unique perspective to the University in a non-faculty role. Shaped by her own experiences growing up across different countries and cultures and further informed by her work with international and multicultural students at BU. Natasha aims to work in outpatient care with multicultural individuals, a population she recognizes as underserved in social work.
Describe your background to me. What are your interests outside of work and school?
I think I’m probably one of the older students at school. My undergrad was here at BU, and I’ve worked here now for eight years in a professional capacity. My roles here have been in STEM and global studies. I worked in the BU African Studies Center for five years as their administrator, and now I work in computer science doing communications, industry relations, and DEI outreach. So, I kind of have a very eclectic background.
Outside of work, I am a third culture kid. I grew up all over the world. I’ve lived in Singapore, Malaysia, and the US, but I’m also a British citizen, and heritage-wise I’m Indian and Pakistani, so I have a very diverse background culturally. Because of my upbringing, I have always been really drawn to work in diversity, global relations, and cross-cultural work, and that’s been the common thread throughout my career. Outside of school, I really like to do dance classes and check out theater shows in Boston.
Why social work? What drew you to the field and how did you become interested?
While I was working in the African Studies Center, I was also considering an M.A. in international affairs, but if I had taken that pathway, I believe I would have been led to more program administration-type roles. I realized that while I do love higher education and programming, I also wanted the capacity to do something more technical in the future. During the COVID pandemic, we were working with a couple of very specific groups of students in the African Studies Center. We had students who we sent from BU to various countries across the African continent to do research. Then we had exchange students and researchers that had come from abroad to BU, and they had to figure out how to get home or to find housing, because everybody got kicked off campus during COVID.
I became exposed to helping professionals through trying to find students’ housing or resources. We ended up clearing out space in the African Studies classrooms to give space to students to store their belongings because they didn’t have the funds to be able to put their stuff into storage after they moved off campus.
Then we created a couple of student support groups. We ended up doing monthly check-ins with one of our graduate students at this time as well. I found the work, even though it was under very sad circumstances, quite fulfilling, and that led me to think, “Okay, maybe I should consider something like social work or like therapy going forward.”
What’s your most outstanding memory or experience in your academic career at BUSSW?
Undergrad for me was a while ago, but I explored different kinds of classes, like environmental development and public health. I got a really great breadth of experience and exposure academically, whereas I think in grad school it’s more focused. Especially in social work, you’re trying to get a credential to a degree.
I shifted fields completely. While a lot of other social work students have either a BSW, or an undergrad in psychology, I haven’t taken classes related to either of those subjects before. I feel like I’m catching up on parts of the curriculum that I didn’t know about, like behavioral health, adult psychopathology, and diagnosis. But a lot of my experience is in DEI and in social science, so classes like Welfare Policy and Racial and Cultural Oppression were very familiar. It’s interesting because I think there are a lot of subject matters that other students haven’t been exposed to, I have a lot of experience in and vice versa.
In terms of graduate experience, I really liked the size of the classes. I also enjoy that a lot of the students share the same mindset. Given a lot of changes in the world right now, I have gained a very supportive community at the BU School of Social Work. Everyone is very invested in trying to be a competent and helpful social worker. I really value the common identity and shared goals amongst the students.
What makes social work worthwhile to you?
What brought me to social work was my background in doing cross-cultural work. I’ve been in a lot of professional contexts where I’ve worked across different cultures, or oriented people in a new country or culture. Since I’ve done it myself several times throughout my life, I’ve now recognized that moving and acclimating to new cultural environments is a big challenge and is something that could be supported through therapeutic work. My main focus going into social work and graduating is to do outpatient work specifically with cross-cultural people or multicultural people.
I think we have a growing number of practitioners who are trying to provide services to clients who share their cultural or linguistic background. For example, an American-born Indian therapist providing services with other American-born Indians within the US. That’s great! But I think that there is a lesser number of people that work with people who have multicultural identities. And so that’s where I would like to focus.
What work from your academic career are you proud of?
I am proud of the fact that it changed my life trajectory, while still being able to take my prior experience and apply it here. It doesn’t feel to me like I’m necessarily leaving international relations or program management, but I’m just gaining more skills that I can apply in that context and have the option to specialize in one specific area.
What are your favorite courses, professors, and events at BUSSW?
I really enjoyed Race and Cultural Oppression with Malika Mims, she’s great. I was in the affinity section of that course, which I was excited about because of my professional background. Having an affinity section of the course was great because we dug a little bit deeper and it was nice because I learned a lot, even though it’s an area I already work in.
I valued the positionality papers assigned in that class. It was almost like you did an autoethnography on your life; to study your life events and understand major impacts that those events may have had on you, and how you may bring that experience to your practice as a social worker and what you have to be mindful of when you are working with your clients. For example, when I hear someone has moved countries, because that is something that’s been really, really big in my life, that’s the first thing I pay attention to because I identify with it. But I must hold space for the fact that their move may not have been so defining for them.
I really appreciated the exercise because it encouraged us to say, “Okay, let’s really examine what these oppressive factors in our lives might have been.” or “What decisions that were out of our hands that may have impacted us? How does it impact us as practitioners too?” I thought that was really valuable and quite deep.
I also really liked Adult Psychopathology and Diagnosis with Robin Quinterno, because I haven’t taken anything in psych before. I really appreciated her perspective because she was very culturally sensitive. She made the material very digestible for someone who has not taken a lot of psych, while also encouraging us to think critically.
In that class, we were given a case for the final paper, and we had to use our knowledge from the class and our structural knowledge to write a potential diagnosis for this client. I thought that paper was really cool, because it really exemplified the complexity of diagnosis and the different combinations of diagnoses that could have been submitted for any singular case. In the same vein as the positionality papers, our diagnosis may have depended on what I picked up on first. Did I pick up on the fact that this person was a person of color, and did you emphasize that her treatment may have made her less likely to seek help? Or did you read those same sets of circumstances as depression? I think it really highlighted that you have to [think] critically in this work, and there isn’t often one answer.
What are you most looking forward to after graduation and what fields are you interested in?
I’m hoping to get some experience in outpatient care; hopefully in a multicultural environment or with multicultural clients, next year for my internship. My goal would be to move into that environment afterwards or maybe work in a refugee center or something like that. That’s all I have right now in terms of a goal.
I will say, the benefit of changing careers is that I have eight years of experience learning what I don’t want to do. It gives you a little bit of guidance, in [the] process of elimination.
What is your dream job in the field of social work?
I would love to be a cross-cultural counselor at a university one day. I feel like I would really enjoy it because I also really like working with young adults and I currently work in higher education. Given my professional experience and my interests, I feel like that would be the perfect combo for me.
What is your advice for other MSW students?
Learn to prioritize. I think that that is a skill that you have to learn and hone as you get older. One interesting part about grad school is that there are folks who are right out of undergrad, and there’re folks that have been out of school for 10, 20, or 30 years.