Goals and Learning

• I am interested in many aspects of psychology, specifically child psychology, and research. I don’t know a lot about research, but I am fascinated by it. Gaining experience with research data and learning about it in an internship setting will help me solidify my understanding and help me explore my options within research as a career. Learning more about research as well as partaking in it will directly impact the career path I choose to go down. If I continue with research in my future career, having the experience with it now at my internship will be crucial for me to understand how research works and what my role is within the research field.

• I have done CITI Training, HIPAA Training, and study-specific training. These modules expose learners to the ethics of research and prepare them for their time in research studies. 

• I am involved in the follow-up of participants in the Risky Decision-Making Research study (R01, PI: Dr. Leslie Hulvershorn). I also send birthday cards to facilitate participation and survey completion. I participate in meetings and other social events with other LHSI students within the Adolescent Behavioral Health Research Program (BHP). Learning about other labs, tasks, and projects in the process. 

Goal Process:

• Completing the trainings I mentioned above as well as interacting with my research team and participants has helped me gain insight into the research process. Working as a research assistant has helped me understand that there are many moving parts in research. Not just data analysis, but survey designing, participant interaction, coming up with solutions as a team, spreadsheet updating, emailing, keeping up to date with research in the field, and more aspects I didn't think about until I worked as a research assistant.

• To be a successful professional, I need to be able to communicate effectively with my peers and professionals in the field of psychology. This will not only help me in a professional setting but will contribute to my personal growth as a person as well. I want to know people who I can connect with for future opportunities like grad school, jobs, and internships. Other than that, I would also like to connect with people who share the same passion for psychology as I do and create meaningful relationships. In any future career, communication skills are important, but especially in psychology. I need to be able to effectively communicate with clients, patients, and coworkers. I want to be able to make my patients/clients feel comfortable, especially if I’m going to be working with children and their families in the future.

• I have been provided with a plethora of networking opportunities at our various BHP events. These events include the Works in Progress (WIP), Weekly Staff Meetings, Psychiatry Grand Rounds, and research-specific lab meetings. The BHP program houses a wide variety of faculty (both junior and senior) who collaborate on different initiatives. This often yields opportunities to listen and learn about other programs housed under the BHP umbrella. There are three other LHSI students within the BHP which also provides opportunities to learn professional skills with shared experiences.

Goal Progress:

• Because of my internship, I have made new professional contacts in the field of psychiatry -- specifically child/adolescent psychology which I am most interested in. Hearing about how these professionals have made their way through this career field has helped me refine my plan to become a child psychologist. I began volunteering at a lab in the Stark Neuroscience Center as well as completed several interviews, all of which the interviewers were impressed that I worked in the Hulvershorn lab. Networking with the professionals on my team has brought me many new opportunities. 

• My communication skills have grown due to my internship allowing me to interact with so many people. I feel much more confident about sending emails and responding to criticism or issues that arise.

• I am very passionate about adolescent/child psychology and want to go down the path of becoming a licensed clinical social worker and child therapist. As much as I love the idea of this as my future career, I haven’t had a lot of hands-on experience with psychology outside of a classroom yet. I need to learn how to communicate with patients and coworkers, how to work with data and other general things that I just haven’t had the chance to interact with. My future career will be directly influenced by the opportunities I have now working in child psychology. I will be exposed to this career field through my internship, so I will carry these experiences from working with children and data from my site into my career path.

• I have been learning best practices on how to communicate with pediatric research participants through follow-up mailings. Lab meetings yield conversations with pediatric psychologies who are both practicing clinicians and researchers. BHP faculty as a whole focuses on pediatric psychiatry initiatives, producing publications and grant applications. 

Goal Progress:

• This internship was a great first step to help me understand the field of child psychology more deeply. I am more interested in child psychology now, especially after learning more about ADHD and risky decision-making in children. I have a fascination for research and have greatly enjoyed being a research assistant, but I believe being a therapist is a better fit for me than conducting my research in the future. I now understand that the field of child psychology is very wide, and includes social workers, researchers, doctors, research assistants, and many more professionals. 

• • Communication: This is my strongest skill because I use it so much in my internship. Every week I join Zoom meetings and send emails to research participants and my supervisor. I have improved at professional communication and learned about etiquette with emailing participants. I've improved at asking questions and building relationships with other people at my internship.

• • Balancing Independence and Teamwork: I don't think I lack teamwork skills, but my internship is often remote and I complete a lot of my work independently. There are opportunities for me to network and spend time with other interns and workers at my site, and I have been getting better at reaching out. There are events where people at my internship site present their research and other events where I know I could interact with people in the field. 

• • This fall, I learned more in-depth about what data is. Not just how to get data in a study, but what can be done with it and how versatile it is. Research was just a vague concept I thought I'd never understand, but now I get to see spreadsheets with statistics from the follow-up procedures I am a part of, as well as data from the researchers at my internship site. I took a data analysis class fall semester and a statistics class, and I was able to connect the concepts from those classes to things I saw at my internship meetings every week.

  • After learning more about data last semester and connecting it to my courses, I have turned my focus more to the clinical side of psychology. I have become more interested in patient interaction and how to be a good therapist in the future. Taking psychology classes this semester like Drugs and Behavior and Lifespan Development while learning about research at my site has helped me see the behind-the-scenes of how we acquire the information we learn in our classes. Researchers, professors/academics, and clinical workers all work together to enhance psychology as a whole.

• • In the fall, the main skills I built upon were independence and time management. College has helped me improve at being independent and figuring out how to make the most out of my time. I've been able to split my time between classes, homework, studying, and my internship hours, as well as time for myself, social time, and relaxation. I loved getting to create my own schedule with my flexible internship site. I felt very proud of myself and my progress in organizing a schedule that worked best for me to be productive.

• After improving my independence and time management last semester, now I have been working to network more and challenge myself with more work. I have improved my communication skills by reaching out to professionals within my internship site as well as others on campus for summer and academic year opportunities. I went through the process of becoming a volunteer at a lab at the Stark Neuroscience Center in January, and am going to work at the Jaguar Summer Day Camp on campus as a camp counselor. Reaching out to professionals to discuss future opportunities has helped me feel more confident in my communication and presentation skills.