Katie Schendel

I started my clinical career in 2017 answering calls for a suicide hotline, which really kicked off my path in mental health work. I've been working in the clinical field for a long time, but since I graduated with my Master's in Social Work from Fordham in 2025, I'm trying to break out of doing exclusively therapy work and move into advocacy. I've always worked with kids before, but in school I made a point to try everything I hadn't done before, so now I work with children, older adults, and people of all ages. Right now I'm co-editing two textbooks with some social work professors and other renowned social workers on topics that are very important to me: social work ethics and multicultural practice and working with families. My biggest project is a mixed methods research study on the experiences and outcomes of survivors of abusive youth residential programs, what's colloquially called the troubled teen industry. These are for-profit, unregulated wilderness camps and boarding schools with very little oversight where children are essentially trafficked across state lines or even international lines. Many have been shut down for cases of death or child abuse, but because it's not federally mandated, they thrive in other states and are even trying to expand to other countries. There's not really any quantitative evidence stating the scale of the abuse or the impact on survivors, so the goal of our study is to provide hard data that is peer-reviewed and can be used by lawmakers to help advocate for the closure of these programs and for more oversight in all youth programs. I'm still looking for my dream job right now - I've been interviewing for court-based social work positions, which I would love to do, but I'm still just doing clinical work. I'm at a crossroads where I want to gain some work experience in the field, then eventually go back to school for either a JD and go the legal advocacy route, or a PhD and go the research professor route.