Gianni Semorile
By Zoë Eitel
Pivoting a career in education to one in social work just made sense to Gianni Semorile. With his job teaching at an alternative charter school, Gianni was already doing much of the work of a social worker. He much preferred the work he was doing outside of class to help students adapt to different situations in their personal lives, so getting his Master’s of Social Work was a natural segue for him.
This brought him back to DePaul and to the Social Work program about five years after getting his undergraduate degree in Secondary Education, making him a Double Demon.
“The [Social Work graduate] program at DePaul is pretty small which is a good thing because you get as much support as you advocate for and I think the professors were super accessible,” Gianni says. “It’s super accommodating if you want to work full time or when you’re completing your internships because all the classes are at night.”
After completing his graduate program in 2019, Gianni started working as a Student Services Specialist for Year Up Chicago—a career readiness and opportunity development nonprofit organization that works with young people who graduated high school and are looking to explore their opportunities in corporate America—to provide support and clinical intervention to students going through the year-long program.
Student Services Specialist at Year Up Chicago
BA Math and Secondary Education 2013
Master’s of Social Work 2019
Gianni was drawn to this role in part because it fulfills supervision requirements he needs to obtain his LCSW (Licensed Clinical Social Worker) certification, but also because he saw it as a nice intersection of his previous work as an educator and now as a social worker.
Before working at Year Up, Gianni held two clinical social work internships as part of the field experience placements for the Social Work program: one at Refugee One and another at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. The internship at Refugee One appealed to him because of his history of volunteer work.
“The ability to learn on the go, learn from other people who have been in your shoes in the education setting who have then applied what they’ve learned to the workplace setting is almost as important if not more important than the academic piece.”
“I have volunteer experience working in Sub-Saharan Africa with similar populations, so I wanted to see what that was like on the American side of things,” Gianni says. “I was doing similar clinical case management, seeing how people adapted to living in America after living in some sort of refugee state of living for several years.”
Gianni would work with Refugee One’s members to help them establish themselves in the city by doing things like traveling with them to the Secretary of State’s Office and helping them learn the CTA. At Northwestern, he did clinical in-patient social work on the cardiology floor and in one of the Intensive Care Units to help facilitate patient discharges.
When Gianni is thinking about going into a new role, there are a few different factors he evaluates before making a decision.
“I do a lot of pre-planning, so I think about what skills I might be able to bring to the table at an organization, what skills I might be able to obtain and how that might develop into a role I might see myself in in the future,” he says. “I’m a big structure person, and I definitely ask questions about that in my interviews. I like when there’s clear expectations, when there’s clear direction and just a clear vision from the top down.”
Gathering titles and joining prestigious organizations is less important to Gianni than the skill-acquiring and skill-building he can do in a particular role. He advises students to be open to opportunities as they come and to follow their paths even as they change. He never thought he would go back to school and change his career path, but when he realized teaching wasn’t a good fit anymore, he made the change to social work and is happy with the choice.
