Before she enrolled at Fordham to become a social worker in the area of palliative care, Eleanor Smith had already learned firsthand about the value of this kind of role, especially for those at the end of life.
She had spent a year as a hospice volunteer, learning to provide support to seriously ill patients and their families. She started working with four patients per week, but soon found herself working with 10 per week because the work was so rewarding.
“It’s a privilege to be able to see people in that time and provide them support,” she said. “It was fulfilling in that sometimes you could see that, even if just a little bit, you were making this very difficult process a little easier for some people.”
A Scholarship in Memory of Meredith Barnhart
Pursuing her Master of Social Work at the Graduate School of Social Service, Smith is learning in depth about helping people work through the myriad issues and questions that come with serious illness, such as end-of-life planning. As a recipient of the graduate school’s Palliative Care Fellowship, she takes part in specialized seminars and workshops, and she interns in palliative care at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.
She’s received crucial help from fellowships and scholarships—including the Meredith J. Barnhart, Ph.D., GSS ’20, Memorial Endowed Scholarship, named for a woman who earned her doctorate at the Graduate School of Social Service.
Barnhart’s family established the scholarship after she passed away suddenly at her home in 2020, just four months after she had earned her doctorate. The scholarship is designated for someone who has an interest in palliative and end-of-life care or oncology.
“The Barnhart scholarship is really helpful—I’m paying for my graduate degree myself, so it made it more financially accessible,” Smith said. She has also received the graduate school’s Kathy and Brian MacLean Scholarship in Palliative Care.
After receiving the Barnhart scholarship, Smith met with Barnhart’s fiancée, Jeffrey Knapp, and attended a presentation on Barnhart’s doctoral work, focused on serving families in which cancer strikes a parent and a child at the same time. Smith said she’s honored to carry on Barnhart’s legacy and her passion for “serving people in this really difficult time in their lives and their loved ones’ lives.”
Discovering Social Work
Smith first got the idea of being a social worker around the time of her graduation from Barnard College in 2022. When she learned that her grandmother needed more health care support, she researched government programs that might help her, just as a social worker might connect a patient with services. She found she liked the work. And then there was the memory of her late grandfather and the social workers who helped him during hospice care.
“Thinking about how there were people who were there, to make sure he was comfortable and helping, made me feel better,” she said.
During her time as a hospice volunteer, at Constellation Health Services in her home state of Connecticut, “I was able to sort of do for other people what had been done for me,” she said.
Being with people at the end of life means a lot to her. Sometimes, she said, “you could just really see some of the patients didn’t have anyone else.”
