This paper examines the impact of post-graduate education on the changing attitudes, values, concerns and occupational choices of a cohort of 35 social work students attending a two-year professional training programme at University College Dublin. A four-year longitudinal study, begun by the researchers in September 2001 has monitored the attitudes of a cohort of full-time students as they moved through the two years of their professional training and their first year in professional practice. This study has closely monitored the group's changing responses to the academic and theoretical aspects of their education both during their time at university and retrospectively in the early days of their professional practice. The research has also looked at aspects such as the financial pressures on these students, their choice of weekend/holiday work settings and the extent of support that they received from family and friends.Using both questionnaires and focus groups, this study has examined students' attitudes towards the various areas of social work education. The students' assessments of the relevance of different areas of the programme curriculum have been gathered at regular intervals over the past four years and these have been measured against their previous academic/practice background, their fieldwork training setting and their post-graduate academic scores. Focus groups have been used to examine these attitudes in more detail, particularly the students' reasons for choosing to train as a social worker and their perceptions of the usefulness of university education both while in college and in their early days of their professional practice. The study has also looked at their plans for the future and, in the last year, the level of burnout and stress being experienced by the research participants .The data collected in the first phase of the longitudinal study show that students' perception of the relevance of the course in general varied significantly according to the time of year in which the data was gathered. Students consistently rated the counselling social work skills module of the curriculum as highly relevant to their professional development, followed by the module on child protection and welfare and on social work and the law, while the more academic modules on social policy and community social work were consistently seen as less relevant. Since graduation their perception of the relevance of different areas of the curriculum is related to the particular area of practice in which the graduates are employed. In particular those currently working in the field of child protection perceived the course modules dealing with child protection and family law as having been particularly relevant to their practice. More worryingly 31% of the graduates recently reported that they had experienced violence in the workplace "fairly often" or "regularly" in the first year of professional practice and a number of graduates have commented on the need to deal with this element of the profession while at university. The research concludes that the students' initial motivations and attitudes to professional social work noted at that start of research has changed significantly in response to specific educational inputs and fieldwork experiences. The students significantly underestimate the levels of stress that they will experience in practice while their estimation of the level of professional expertise needed in practice has dropped since entering the profession. The findings of this study are currently being used to inform curriculum review on the social work programme