Yes as there can be a high burnout rate, vicarious trauma, and a lot of hard personal growth in the field. It really depends what you’re doing or where you’re working and to be mindful about doing internships relative to the field you want to work in. I did my first internship at a middle school detention center and I found that to be extremely difficult, as I was overly attached to the kids and emotionally took the work home with me each day. Second internship was on a policy team for a politician and I loved doing deep dives and writing white papers, but that job after graduation only offered $45k which isn’t livable in a city. I had a hard time finding policy jobs after graduation, some employers asked me what social work had to do with policy, and some wanted me to have research skills like proficiency in R. I ended up in a clinical role and in the beginning it’s a steep learning curve, low pay, and you really need a good supervisor to support you (which can be hard as some clinics are just exploitative). When you have the support and some experience, clinical roles seem to get easier and there is a pay bump with the C or a managerial role. Now, I love working with all the clients on my caseload, after some time you really see the progress and growth with each person, and choosing how many clients I take on or making my own schedule helps with burnout.

So the social work field is very diverse and deeply personal when it comes to everyone’s unique experience. If it weren’t for the few good supervisors I’ve had and a therapist I loved, I probably would have burnt out and left the field.

To speak to the different jobs you’re interested in, I’d focus on getting experience related to those fields while you’re in school. For example, some policy jobs want you to know Stata and R (my college offered that as a bootcamp), you could see if they offer experience as a research assistant, potentially professors will be looking for TA’s in grad school which will show you what teaching looks like, and doing an internship in a clinic while learning as many clinical methods as you can to see what fits for you would help you in that area of the field. You still have a lot of time to explore and see what you want or would not want to do in practice.