Background of My ASWB Exam Experience

I passed the Law & Ethics exam in November of 2016.  It felt great!  

Then I waited to hear from the BBS giving me permission to register for the ASWB Clinical exam.  Holidays passed and went into the New Year. I waited more.  Still nothing.  I tried to just register on the Pearson VUE (test exam site) and couldn’t.  I wasn’t in a big rush – my part-time job didn’t require me to become an LCSW, and I was still spending a lot of time occupied with my two small boys. 

Finally by April 2017 I decided to call the BBS and inquire why I hadn’t yet received permission to register for the Clinical exam.  Even though people say it’s difficult to have the phone picked up by a real live person, somehow it worked out for me on the first try. 

BBS said they didn’t have any specific reason for the holdup, but said that they would now mail me the permission to register and take next steps.

My PO Box is supposed to notify me via email when I get a new piece of mail.  I never got an email, but did get around to visiting the PO Box in June of 2017, and the letter was there.

I had always assumed that I would have to take the LCSW exam by November 2017, since that was a year’s expiration after passing the prior exam.  However, when I opened up the envelope, I saw that the BBS granted me an eligibility that expired in April 2018!

To my best guess, this is because they only officially served me the notification of my exam eligibility in April of 2017.  I reflected – did I want to procrastinate this process all the way out until April 2017?

NO.  I wanted to be done already.

Similar to the year before, the summer and the start of a new year in preschool for my older son was extra busy and chaotic, but in October I began to feel like there was an opportunity to get it done.

Not only was there a natural lull in life in mid-fall, but I began to feel a crunch of running out of time to study during naptime, as my youngest son approached two.  I was planning to study on the few afternoons a week when my older son was in part-time preschool and my younger son napped.  However, I remembered that my older son began to drop his nap shortly after he turned two. If I needed time during the day to study, naptime was when it happened, and naptime possibly was soon going to be gone.  I kicked studying into gear.

Yes, by the way.  The maternity leave’s ending for my second son which rushed me to take the law and ethics exam… that’s the same son who was about to stop napping, so I rushed to take the clinical exam. That is either an indicator of how long and drawn out I made this process for myself or an indicator of how quickly these children grow up.  Maybe both.

Fear is a great motivator.  Fear of losing the chance for naptime studying motivated me hard.  I started studying, and I’ll share more about how I studied in the next post.  While in early stages of studying, I also looked into the logistics of scheduling the exam.

Tip- after you receive your eligibility, log on to Pearson’s site just to begin to gauge the availability of test slots.  I remember there being several different days and times to select for the Law & Ethics (which is at the PSI exam center), so I thought it would be the same for the LCSW at a Pearson center.  Wrong.

Perhaps a complicating factor in my situation was that the ASWB was going to be changing the format of the Clinical exam slightly starting on January 1, 2018, so maybe extra people were rushing to take (or re-take) the exam in the format in which they were most familiar.

Between my local Pearson test center and the one about 20 miles away … there were only three or four testing times, total, open for the next four months!  This was unexpected and unwelcome news.

I ultimately registered for an exam date in January 2018. However, once a day for a week I kept logging back in to see if any other earlier dates opened up.  I began to see other dates becoming available that were earlier but wouldn’t work with my schedule. My best guess is that people register for a certain date, but because there is no fee to change the exam day as long as you do it within a certain time frame ahead of the exam, you can change it.  People postpone their time slots if they’re not feeling ready, and then those exam times become available for anyone else. 

One day while checking I saw an exam time open in late November at my very local and convenient Pearson VUE center.  I booked it.  It was official!  I was going to be taking (and hopefully passing) the ASWB clinical exam!

Did I pass that?  Spoiler alert, yes.  Next post, learn how!

My Early Interest in Mental Health

Let's say that you just failed to pass a licensing exam and will need to retake it.  You might be feeling discouraged and in need of a little extra motivation.  One way to pump yourself up is to go waaaaaay back and explore why you became interested in this field to begin with.

Mid-1990s, Chicago suburbs: My interest in the mental health field began in junior high school.  I read Reviving Ophelia, a book by Dr. Mary Pipher, which discusses her work counseling adolescent girls who are struggling to thrive in our culture and society.  As an adolescent girl myself, I was fascinated by the case studies.  

I loved reading about the girls’ lives and issues like sexual assault, substance use, family divorces, and eating disorders.  Dr. Pipher’s book inspired me to begin wanting to do similar work as an adult.  I realized today that I have kept this book on all my different bookshelves for the past 20 years.

Still on my bookshelf after 20 years.  (Image credit Kate McHugh Akbar.  Reviving Ophelia and all other books pictured credit to authors.)

Because of this book, I sought to learn more about mental health.  I found an old college psychology textbook at a church rummage sale and bought it for $.50.  To this day, I can still recall reading about Harry Harlow and seeing the image of the rhesus monkey clinging to the soft terrycloth “mother” instead of the wire mother-figure that provided milk.  

I also made use of the library to feed my interest.  I remember borrowing books about arachnophobia to try and understand why I felt the way I did about spiders.

In 8^th grade we wrote a big research paper, topic of our choosing.  My paper discussed if individuals suffering from multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder) should be held responsible for crimes committed by their alter personalities.  I found this paper in my parent’s house several years ago and it’s hilarious.

At age 14, in the yearbook, my classmates predicted that I would become a women’s activist, while I predicted for myself that I would grow up to be a psychologist or a clinical social worker.  I completely forgot about this until I rediscovered the yearbook in my 20s!  If that isn’t motivation to keep studying for the clinical social work exams, I don’t know what is.  

Come on self, let’s make 1998 Katie’s dreams come true.

That's my story, what about you?  Please share!

You’ve learned about my initial interest in the mental health field.  Come back tomorrow in honor of World Social Work Day to read more about why I specifically chose to become a social worker.