While many feel like different people than they were before March 2020, Alicia Figliuolo essentially is a different person than she was at the start of her Master of Social Work program.
In 2016, using the benefits she earned as a U.S. Marine, Figliuolo enrolled at WNMU thinking, “Let’s go see what this rural program can teach me.”
Seeing herself as unfit to be a clinical social worker but recognizing her affluent connections and sphere of influence, Figliuolo aimed to continue working in policy and go into national politics. She worked to get straight As and was on track to achieve her dreams. But in 2017, she suffered a traumatic brain injury. “My character changed. My mannerisms changed. I was dependent on my wife and my friends,” she said.
Instead of finishing her master’s in 2018, Figliuolo was re-learning to walk and talk, create short term memories, and be independent. After years of effort and persistence, she was medically cleared to try graduate school again. Even that decision was made with extreme amount of thought. “If I’m never going to get to be who I was, who am I now?” she remembers asking herself.
When she was reevaluating her personal identity as well as her career goals, Figliuolo realized she now possessed some of the qualities and had endured the sorts of experiences she believed a truly effective, empathetic, advocate—or clinical social worker—would have. And, based on her personal experience, she saw board games as tool that could be incorporated into trauma processing therapy. Alicia decided her new self would share that modality with others, specifically veterans and those with TBIs. She needed to finish her MSW.
In spring of 2021, Figliuolo was readmitted to the WNMU School of Social Work conditionally and allowed to take only a limited number of courses. By summer, she proved capable of holding a full course load, and her grade point average has remained a 4.0.
Though she lives in Pennsylvania and does her internship far from our main campus, Figliuolo hopes to visit campus for the first time in May to receive her credentials from the school that is embracing her for who she is in 2022. “While my brain injury was the worst thing that happened to me, it gave me the greatest gift and some of the most amazing opportunities to learn that I can be a clinician,” she said.