Social Work Grads Pursue Call To Work With Those in Need

By Barbara Jester

Graduating today from the Silver School of Social Work (SSSW) are Kate Barrow and Randy Mason, both of whom will receive master’s of social work degrees.  Their paths to this same accomplishment, however, could not have been more different.

Kate Barrow

Barrow grew up in New York and Annapolis, Maryland, and, as the eldest of six children, says she became fascinated by psychology at the age of 10 when she read a book on birth order. She earned a B.A. in contemplative psychology at the Naropa University in Colorado and, upon graduation, returned to Maryland where she was a legislative intern on Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) rights for “Equality Maryland.” She later worked with adolescents in Maryland’s foster care system.

      Realizing she wanted to expand her career opportunities in social work and needed an M.S.W. to do that, Barrow chose NYU, partly for the diverse fieldwork experiences it offered. She continued her longstanding interest in LGBT rights by running the mentoring program in a long-term housing center for homeless LGBT youth in Chelsea. She is also the outgoing president of the SSSW Graduate Student Association, where much of her time has been spent in student advocacy.  Her years at NYU, she says, have made her more of an activist, and she has been able to focus both on public policy and clinical work during her graduate study.

      Barrow’s interests for the future are in youth support and in international social work, concentrating on policy and program development.

Randy Mason

As a high school student in Queens, N.Y., Mason wanted to be either a physicist or a psychiatrist. She studied sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and attended medical school there for one year. Then she gave herself over to her other love: music.

      For the next 25 years, Mason wrote music, sang, and played guitar with a series of rock bands and as a solo artist in various clubs and nightspots in Philadelphia and New York City. She supported herself with a day job, doing data programming for market research, eventually rising to a vice presidency. Finally, she decided to follow her longtime interest in psychotherapy and chose to study social work. 

      Her field placements have been as unusual as her background; she worked with members of the Sheet Metal Workers Union and the Ornamental Iron Workers Union, counseling the new minorities whom the unions are now hiring, acquainting them with a “union culture” that at one time was seen to be racist and sexist.

      After graduation, Mason is especially interested in working with police officers, helping them to deal with the stress and sometimes traumatic events that characterize their work. 

      “I’ve always seen that police officers have a tough role,” says Mason. “They pay a high price, and at the same time they are resistant to therapy. They need someone who can work with them.”

      And in the meantime, she will continue to play her music, if only for herself.