When Elizabeth Mulvaney was an undergraduate intern at a large state psychiatric hospital, a supervisor pulled her aside with an observation that would eventually redirect her career. Her supervisor noted that Mulvaney had a particular talent for engaging older patients, “better than anyone else on the team, including really experienced professionals,” she recalled in a recent interview. That got her thinking about a career in gerontological social work.
Her first practicum experience as an MSW student nudged her toward her eventual calling. She was placed in a family preservation program designed to “keep families together when there’s a risk for children to be removed from the family situation. By the end of the experience, I felt, ‘You know what? These kids are fantastic. A lot of their problems stem from factors affecting their parents or grandparents, but that’s not where I get to focus my energy. It was frustrating.’” A second practicum with older adults sealed the deal. “By the end, I felt, ‘Yup, this is my niche. These are my peeps.’”
That combination of self-awareness, clinical precision and warm directness has defined both Mulvaney’s career and her approach to training the next generation of social workers. For the past 14 years, as a practitioner and now as a faculty member at the top-ranked University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work, she has been quietly dismantling some of the profession’s most entrenched assumptions about aging, AI and what it really means to help another human being.
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Preparing Students for Practice Across the Lifespan
The Pitt MSW program’s Direct Practice specialization — which comprises roughly 80% of master’s students — trains graduates to work with individuals, families, couples and treatment groups across an enormous range of settings: hospitals, schools, prisons, community mental health centers and child welfare agencies. The curriculum is designed to develop a specific, sophisticated skill set that includes evidence-informed intervention and the kind of reflective practice that separates effective clinicians from merely credentialed ones.
“We’re training them how to do in-depth assessments that are strengths-oriented, that are person-centered,” Mulvaney explains. That includes teaching students about diagnostic tools like the DSM, but “with the understanding that that’s just one piece of information. You also need to recognize that people bring so many strengths, so many ways they’ve coped and managed challenging situations. Our practice needs to recognize, center and honor that work.”
The curriculum is case-driven. Students might be asked to consider how different therapeutic frameworks — a cognitive-behavioral approach versus a contemporary psychodynamic one, for instance — would shape their engagement with the same client. “Mrs. Jones presented with this set of challenges and this set of circumstances and this set of strengths,” Mulvaney describes, walking through how she teaches students to reason through a case. “Social work training suggests that behavioral therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy both might be possible choices. Let’s talk with her to figure out what approach would be more effective for her.”
This kind of deliberate, evidence-informed decision-making is the hallmark of what Pitt is training its students to do: not just to apply a protocol, but to think.
Learning Alongside Other Professions
One of the most distinctive features of Pitt’s approach is its deep commitment to interprofessional education: training social work students in active collaboration with students and practitioners from medicine, nursing, pharmacy, occupational therapy and more, rather than in isolation.
“There are very few agencies where our students do their practicums where social work is the only profession,” Mulvaney notes. The immersive nature of those placements means that “our students are learning day-to-day about interprofessional practice in their practicums.”
Pitt formalizes this further through structured experiences, including an annual Interprofessional Forum that spans four campuses and brings together more than a thousand students in carefully composed small groups — each with representatives from seven to eleven different health professions — to work through a shared case. Online students can and do participate. “It’s all over Zoom,” Mulvaney says. “So it’s not so much a simulation as a shared case learning.”
What social workers bring to those interprofessional rooms is, Mulvaney argues, genuinely distinctive. “What we bring that is really the most unique is our firm perspective on ecosystems. We are distinctly aware that, often, folks who present with challenges are experiencing those challenges not because of anything that’s wrong with or problematic within them, but because of the contexts and the systems that they have to interact with.”
She illustrates the point with a common scenario: a patient who isn’t following through on a physical therapy recommendation. The rest of the team might interpret that as indifference. A social worker is trained to ask different questions about transportation, money and what it actually takes to get on and off multiple buses with an injured leg. “We bring this sense of how systems work, how they interact. How they glitch, when they don’t interact.”
It’s a lesson that became personal when her mother’s health declined in her final years. “I remember my sister saying to me, ‘What do families that don’t have a social worker in them do?’ Because I would know things that other families just wouldn’t know about how to get the system to do the things that we really needed them to do.”
Countering Ageism in the Classroom
One of Mulvaney’s quieter but most important contributions to the Pitt program is the example her career establishes. Most incoming MSW students arrive, she says, oriented toward children and families or toward mental health with middle-aged adults. Older adults rarely feature prominently in their imaginations of the work.
“By bringing into the classroom my experiences working with older adults, I can counteract the ageism our students pick up from the culture,” she says. “They realize, ‘Oh — I could work with older adults too? Because that’s not what I thought it was.'”
The program uses an experiential curriculum called Ageless Wisdom, developed through Pitt’s Aging Institute, to deliberately disentangle aging from disease, challenging the assumption that memory loss, cognitive decline or diminished capacity are inevitable features of growing old rather than the effects of specific conditions. The program includes a hearing simulation exercise that Mulvaney describes as one of the most consistently effective tools for building student empathy. “After that experience, most students are really able to empathize, to think, ‘Wow, I could be helpful to people trying to navigate the changes that come later in life.’”
On dementia specifically, she is emphatic about correcting the all-or-nothing misconceptions that students absorb from the broader culture. “People retain the capacity to inform and be involved in their decisions very, very late into the disease,” she says. “From the point of diagnosis to death can be eight to ten years. Yes, these are fatal conditions, but they are not immediately fatal or life-limiting conditions.” The work of a gerontological social worker, she argues, is to help individuals and families understand that, and to access the services that can make those years as rich as possible.
She is equally pointed about who tends to fall through the cracks in that system. Communities of color and lower-income communities tend to receive dementia diagnoses later, limiting their access to early supportive services. And caregivers of all backgrounds are routinely overlooked. In a 2016 study she cites frequently, only 16% of caregivers said that anyone — any doctor, nurse, social worker or therapist — had ever asked them what they needed while navigating the health and social service systems. “If all of those family caregivers stopped, went on strike for a day,” she says, “the whole system would shut down.”
AI, Technology, and What Stays Human
Mulvaney doesn’t shy away from the profession’s most pressing current anxiety. Artificial intelligence is moving fast, and some of its advocates are proposing AI-driven avatars and applications as alternatives to traditional therapeutic services, a prospect she views with measured skepticism and some genuine concern.
“A big piece of what we do, a big piece of engagement is about being real and present and connected to other people,” she says. “While AI says things that make it sound like it’s real and present and connected, it’s not.” At least one preliminary study comparing AI to experienced clinicians in suicide risk assessment found that the experienced clinicians performed better.
But she’s not dismissive of technology’s potential role. The more immediate challenge, she argues, is helping students understand what gets lost when AI takes over certain tasks, particularly documentation. The act of writing up a session, she explains, has never just been recordkeeping. “When you translate what you did into the record, you’re also processing your work. You’re thinking about how you delivered your services, what was effective and what was maybe not as effective. It’s helping you to formulate where the work should go.”
The curriculum, she says, needs to ensure students retain that reflective capacity even as transcription tools and AI-generated summaries become commonplace. “We still have a responsibility to help students understand the skill set so that they can make informed choices about revising what AI might generate, and about how to utilize what AI is generating to promote strong practice.”
She’s also genuinely excited about thoughtful applications of technology that extend the reach of skilled practitioners, such as apps that use geolocation to support clients with gambling disorders in real time, connecting them to coping tools and support networks when they’re needed most.
A Program Built to Last
The Pitt Online MSW — ranked #12 by U.S. News & World Report and carrying more than a century of institutional history — is designed for students who need flexibility without sacrificing depth. The program is fully asynchronous, part-time and available at the in-state tuition rate, regardless of residency. The program offers a specialization in Direct Practice with Individuals, Families and Groups as well as certificates in Children, Youth and Families; Integrated Healthcare; Mental Health; or Gerontology (Mulvaney serves as the gerontology chair at Pitt).
Two supervised practicum experiences — arranged through Pitt’s extensive partner network, and potentially fulfillable at a student’s current place of employment — provide the grounded, real-world application that Mulvaney considers non-negotiable.
“It’s nice to have a variety of people on our faculty,” she reflects, “so that as a student goes through our program, they should end up having somebody who’s bringing those practice experiences across the lifespan into the classroom.” The goal, ultimately, is to produce graduates who not only know social work but who practice with the presence, judgment and genuine human connection the work requires.
For prospective students ready to explore whether the Pitt Online MSW is the right fit, or who simply want to learn more about the program’s curriculum, certificates and pathways, the School of Social Work’s enrollment advisors are available to help. Learn more about the program by connecting with an enrollment advisor. If you’re ready, you can start your application online today.