Lynn Cormier-Sayarath, M.S.W. ’01, credits her education at the Smith School for Social Work with starting her off on her own healing journey.
“I got into therapy while I was at Smith, and I haven't stopped since for the most part,” Cormier-Sayarath said. “There was no way you could get through Smith without digging through your own stuff, which was really important in my development as a clinician.”
As it turned out, her development as a clinician was not just crucial to her own professional life; her two younger cousins, sisters Erin Conlan, M.S.W. ’11, and Gadria Kalinowski, M.S.W. ’24, both followed in her footsteps. Since Cormier-Sayarath lived in Templeton, MA, about an hour’s drive from the college’s Northampton campus, she was able to host Conlan and Kalinowski years later, as they forged their own SSW paths into social work careers.
“It’s wild to me that we’ve all followed this path,” said Cormier-Sayarath, who teaches psychology to undergraduates at William James College and does clinical work with a focus on treating eating disorders. “When Erin came to Smith, my children were very little at the time. We would just talk clinical stuff like it was nobody’s business,” Cormier-Sayarath said. “When Gadria came to live with me, I had teenage children. I didn’t even know which way I was going half the time.”
Still, having an in-house alumna to commiserate about Smith’s uniquely rigorous summer terms – while modeling one of the many ways a social work career can look – was invaluable to Conlan, who was 14 when Cormier-Sayarath earned her M.S.W. degree, and Kalinowski, who was 12 when Conlan did.
“I have always known that Lynn’s been a social worker and that she went to Smith, and then I very distinctly remember when my sister went into the program and the structure of it,” because she missed Conlan while she was away for the summer terms, said Kalinowski, who graduated this past summer and just started a job on a mobile crisis unit in Albany, NY, traveling to and triaging community mental health emergencies. She is also a yoga teacher and a doula-in-training with a focus on supporting birthing parents through her professional work as A Precious Treasure Doula.
“Birth work is what I get most excited about and that’s where my passion is. I’m excited to be in that role looking to really go head to head against the black maternal health crisis our country is dealing with,” she said.
Her relatives grinned with pride.
“She’s setting herself up to be able to kill it, whether it be in the group setting or independently operating with all of these facets,” Conlan said.
The family connection to the work goes even deeper than familial love and housing. Conlan and Cormier-Sayarath both stated that their Catholic upbringing, with the faith’s emphasis on service to others, influenced their desire to enter the social work profession. And Conlan and Kalinowski’s family experience – their parents fostered and then adopted Kalinowski from the age of three months during Conlan’s youth – impacted both Cormier-Sayarath and Conlan by exposing them, early, to the powerful potential of social service and case management work.
“I knew I was going to be a social worker before I thought about what I was going to be,” Conlan said. Today, she lives in Gainesville, FL, where she does geriatric care management work and parents her five – soon to be six – children under age 10. “I applied to other graduate schools but the only one I was waiting on was the Smith packet.”
Cormier-Sayarath’s journey, like Conlan’s, started in childhood, observing her mother’s work for the Massachusetts state Department of Developmental Services, which supports residents with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
“My mom would bring me to all kinds of events to hang out with the people that lived there,” she said. It led her to get a job at a residential facility during college, a precursor to her post-masters career later mirrored by Kalinowski before her own matriculation at Smith.
“Now, I’m someone that’s very much like, ‘take the time’” rather than rush into degree programs, Kalinowski said. “I was with the girls – I was in one of the cottages,” she said of her pre-Smith work last year. “You see a lot of what’s going on, sometimes more than the clinicians see.”
The three women all live hours apart, but their connections, to each other and to their shared Smith experience, are palpable.
“I’ve always been tremendously proud of both of them,” Cormier-Sayarath said.
