Major career change, cosmetology to MSW/LMSW

[Jonathan Whatley]

No time limit on AP is HUGE news! In order to put together a degree timeline what's the best way to go about doing that? I saw in a thread someone had put together a list of the courses/credits they needed to get a degree in a google doc. Am I overthinking it or is it that simple?

It is that simple! The first step is listing the APs and, if any, courses you have credit for already.

Also what kind of time-frame range would getting a bachelor's take? I know with a master's there are other factors involved so I'm expecting at least two years to complete that.

UMPI YourPace and many of the other programs popular on degreeforum are broadly self-paced and highly accelerable. It's within reasonable possibility you can complete such a bachelor's less than one year from now.

By contrast, a BSW or MSW will not be self-paced in the sense of highly accelerable. Even if it's online it will follow fairly traditional academic semester schedules and practicum schedules, conforming with CSWE accreditation requirements. At some schools more than others you could use self-paced tactics to accelerate the non-social-work parts of a BSW degree. How you would do that would depend on practices at the specific school (e.g., what alt-credit they would accept or not accept in transfer).

I wasn't even thinking about that you apply to a master's program instead of transferring into it. At Wayne State they offer an accelerated master's program because there's a lot of overlap between a BSW and MSW so in my head I was thinking I'd get an associates, then transfer to WSU and apply to the BSW/accelerated MSW program.

The degreeforum community has worked out tactics and found from experience that programs like the UMPI YourPace bachelor's are so self-paced and accelerable that the time savings, compared to a traditional schedule, from accelerating a non-BSW bachelor's, then applying to a non-accelerated MSW, seem likely to equal or exceed the time savings from taking a traditional-schedule BSW, then an accelerated (advanced standing) MSW. The first option also seems likely to have cost savings.