A student’s perspective on being a part of research at Wediko...
Wediko Children’s Services’ summer program is a wonderful opportunity for undergraduates interested in psychology. It is a short-term residential treatment program for children and adolescents with serious emotional and behavioral problems, and it provides staff members with clinical experience that is rare for undergraduates. Many students who work at Wediko do not major in psychology, but if you are a psychology major and are interested in research as well as clinical work, a dual role as a counselor and member of the research team might be right for you. Being on the research team offers the opportunity to gain both clinical and research experience, which is valuable not only on a personal level, but also in terms of gaining skills necessary for graduate programs in psychology.
The boys and girls in the Wediko summer program range in age from 7 to 19, and each counselor is assigned to work with a specific group of children or “clinical team.” A typical day for a Wediko child includes two hours of school, an hour of group therapy, several hours of activities such as athletics and art, and mealtimes. Research team members spend about half their time with their clinical teams and half their time working on research. At Wediko, research and clinical work are inextricably linked; through the research we seek to understand how children interact and how their behaviors and social environments change over time. Findings are shared with Wediko administrators and supervisors to help inform their clinical decisions.
The Transitions Project described in this website involved assessing children’s social adjustment through a variety of measures. Parents and teachers completed standardized assessments in the spring and fall, and counselors completed parallel assessments during several “research nights” of the summer. Additionally, at several times each day, summer staff used palm pilots (with software designed for this project) to record fine-grained observations about children’s overall behaviors, social events they encountered in their interactions with peers and adults, and their reactions to those events.
This research has been exciting and challenging for me, and it has helped me and many other undergraduate students prepare for careers in psychology. In addition to working at Wediko during summers, several students have continued to analyze the Wediko data once back at school, leading to Senior Honors Theses and posters presented at psychology conferences. Several members of the Wediko research teams from recent summers are now enrolled in PhD programs in Clinical Psychology. You can find more information about students’ projects on the Conferences and Student Theses pages of this website, and you can find more info about students’ graduate programs on the Announcements page.
Best of luck with your future endeavors!
Sophia Choukas-Bradley (Brown '08)
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