The two fields approach human experience from different directions. The overlap between them is where the strongest clinical work happens.
Psychology and social work are not substitutes for each other. They cover adjacent territory from different angles. A psychology background without social work training produces clinical understanding with limited tools for real-world intervention. A social work background without psychological depth can produce capable case management without the insight to understand what is actually happening in the room.
Two Different Disciplines
Kayla Bonkowski has both. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Rochester College, earned Cum Laude, and is completing her Master of Social Work in Sterling Heights, Michigan, with a focus on hospice and palliative care. The combination was deliberate.
Psychology, at the level she studied it at Rochester College, is a science discipline. It asks how the mind works. How do people process loss? How do family systems behave under stress? How does trauma alter cognition and communication? The undergraduate curriculum covers abnormal psychology, developmental psychology, research methods, assessment, and the major theoretical frameworks. The Cum Laude distinction reflects sustained performance across the full degree, not a strong finish.
Social work is an applied field with a systems and policy orientation. It asks what a person in a specific situation actually needs and what real resources exist to provide it. The MSW curriculum includes clinical intervention, field placement with supervised practice, ethics, and policy analysis. It trains people to be useful in the moment rather than to understand the moment from a distance.
Neither field fully answers the questions the other raises. That is the point.
What the Combination Produces in Hospice Settings
In hospice and palliative care — the specialization Kayla Bonkowski is building toward — both operate constantly. A family in a hospice setting is not simply sad. It is a system under extreme stress, reverting to established patterns that intensify under pressure. Grief in that context follows documented structures and responds to specific interventions. Patients whose cognition is altered by illness, fear, or pain medication communicate differently and need to be read differently.
A hospice social worker without psychological depth can identify that a family member is struggling. One with that background can identify that the struggle matches a specific pattern — complicated grief, anxious attachment, unresolved prior loss now reactivating — and select a different response than a generic supportive one. Those distinctions produce different clinical outcomes.
What the Psychology Degree Changes at the Clinical Level
The psychology degree she carries into the MSW program also changes the quality of assessment at the clinical level. Assessment in hospice settings is not a one-time intake. It is ongoing, repeated at each contact, recalibrated as the patient’s condition and the family’s situation change. A social worker who understands how prior loss history reactivates under the stress of a current loss will notice things in a family’s presentation that a social worker without that background may not flag. That difference — between what is noticed and what is missed — changes what gets addressed. And what gets addressed changes the quality of care the family receives.
Kayla Bonkowski trains in CrossFit in Sterling Heights and has lost more than 70 pounds through consistent effort. She fosters and rescues dogs. These facts are not credentials for clinical work. They illustrate the same orientation visible in her academic choices: she builds things with intention and sustains them over time.
The Route That Fits the Work
The combination is also not common. Most MSW students arrive without a prior degree in psychology. Most psychology graduates who enter clinical work do so through a different licensure path. Kayla Bonkowski’s approach is specific to the work she has identified as meaningful. It is not the most direct route to any single credential. It is the route most likely to produce a clinician who can do the specific work in hospice and palliative care settings at the level those settings deserve.
More from Kayla Bonkowski: What Palliative Care Is — and Why It Is Not the Same as Hospice and What Hospice Social Workers Actually Do All Day. Full background at About Kayla Bonkowski.