Social Work majors commonly ask whether a minor is "required" and/or "a good idea." First, social work majors are not required to have a minor. With your elective credits, you may choose to take whatever courses you find interesting, assuming you have the necessary pre-requisite courses. Second, is it a good idea to have a minor? On the one hand, social work faculty know of few, if any, social work majors who found employment or were accepted into graduate school because they had taken a particular minor. In other words, it is not necessary to have a minor. On the other hand, minors are very useful organizing and advising schemes to use, should you find yourself interested in other disciplines. Declaring a minor will help you find your way into the important key courses of another discipline. In this respect, minors are a good and useful thing to have.

Students interested in having a minor often ask for recommendations about what minor to choose. The answer? A minor depends largely on your interests and/or your ideas about what kind of social work practice you might be most interested in doing some day. So, for instance, some social work majors minor in Spanish because they want to be fluent in the Spanish language (note: if you minor in Spanish, you will be taking a fair number of Spanish literature courses). Other students want to combine social work with missions (hence, a Missions minor), with global social work practice (hence, a minor in Third World Development Studies), or with public policy (hence, a minor in Political Science). The possibilities are limited only by the number of possible minors and the length of time you wish to remain at Calvin.

Many social work students choose a minor in Sociology . Such a minor provides a theoretical underpinning to many of the issues and populations that social workers encounter. Consequently, sociology courses such as Family (Soc 304), Urban Sociology (Soc 302), Deviance (Soc 306), Gerontology (Soc 316), Death and Dying (Soc 317), and Intercultural Communication (Soc 253), to name just a few, are very useful to social work majors.