My Internship

Here at Adams Lab, we are committed to improving the quality and accessibility to community behavioral services!

Adam's Lab (6).pdf

The Lab's Role


This lab contributes consequential findings that further our understanding of adolescent anxiety within violence exposure, improve the quality of behavioral health services, and increase the accessibility to said services. These two things are necessary for the betterment of the health of our community and children. The project I have focused most of my attention on during this internship analyzes the common facilitators and barriers found in fidelity monitoring across the nation. In doing so, we can further our efforts in creating an efficient measure of assessing clinicians' services (fidelity monitoring). 

My Role 


Through this internship, I have assisted in a few projects mentioned below. My primary role was to transcribe interviews with directors and behavioral health professionals from nationwide evidence-based practice centers and then to perform rapid-qualitative data analysis of this information. Other roles consisted of scanning therapy manuals for the psychiatry access program's clinicians and computing quantitative data on the relationship between violence exposure and adolescent risk of anxiety. 

Project Summary


The Indiana Fidelity Monitoring Initiative (IFMI) seeks to improve the quality of mental healthcare services and patient outcomes by ensuring that evidence-based practices (EBPs) are delivered as intended (i.e., fidelity) in community behavioral health settings. Behavioral health professionals are encouraged to deliver EBPs based on research-backed standards to promote positive clinical outcomes. The clinical field lacks a widely accepted and feasible strategy to routinely measure therapist fidelity to best practice standards. This gap prevents the ability to monitor the quality of services provided in community settings, which limits opportunities to intervene with coaching, training, or other remedies. To address this gap, IFMI strives to establish a statewide procedure to monitor EBP fidelity among community-based behavioral health providers. To guide the development of this statewide program, we conducted interviews with directors of existing national EBP implementation centers and behavioral health professionals. We have collected data on various approaches, challenges, and outcomes of implementing different EBPs and monitoring fidelity. Findings will inform standard operating procedures for IFMI programming.


IFMI showcase

Other Current Projects of the Adams Lab

The lab has several projects underway. The ones below I have had direct involvement with. 

BeHappy

BeHappy Clinic is a youth psychiatry access program that works to provide clinicians and therapists assistance in caring for clients. It offers educational and referral support, provider-to-provider consultation, and recently direct services such as counseling. I helped scan therapy manuals so the BeHappy team of clinicians could have easier access to useful resources. 

Charleston Resiliency Monitoring (CHARM) 

The Medical University of South Carolina partnered with Dr. Adams on this project to assess the relationship between violence exposure and the development of mental disorders in adolescents. Uncovering how stressors such as violence, impact the neuropsychological and psychological systems can help further our understanding of long-term stress management.


Learning and Skills 

During this internship, I want to gain knowledge and new skills that will leave me better prepared to take on graduate school and treat any future clients once I am a licensed counselor. I plan to incorporate my collaboration and communication skills learned from previous experiences along with my curiosity and interest in this topic to help integrate myself into the team and their work. By learning about the lab's projects and each of their goals, I have already started to gain a new perspective on mental health care and the logistical components that go into it. 

At the beginning

When completing menial tasks, such as scanning manuals and editing interview transcriptions, I focused on gaining foundational knowledge about current challenges within the field and this lab's approach to these issues. This has elevated my baseline knowledge of the field and helped me to begin to procure my own perspective on these issues with the goal of making me better suited to be a competent team member and a professional in mental health care. My favorite experience so far has been to transcribe interviews with directors of centers around the country that offer training in evidence-based practices and implement fidelity monitoring practices. Before this internship, I was unaware of what fidelity monitoring was and its impact on the quality of mental health services. Now I have been able to learn its importance in the field of mental health care and how complex it can be at times to execute efficiently. Through listening to these interviews, I have gained an understanding of a portion of mental health that is beginning to make its way into the clinical world. It is very exciting for me to see the background work of ensuring quality services as I will soon be offering those services!

Spring semester

 I plan to actively work with managing and analyzing data along with expressing my perspective and concerns with projects. This will allow me to gain skills in data analysis, management, and organization which will be specifically useful later in my career when I own private practice. On a broader scale, practicing data analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data will help me practice how to make connections. To be an owner of a business or any type of manager, leadership skills are essential. Through this internship, I want to grow my leadership ability among those with more authority and knowledge than me and strengthen my professional communication skills. I will make the most of opportunities to ask questions to deepen my understanding of the given data and the necessary skills and offer my opinion. By doing this, I will become a more independent and knowledgeable team member. 

Integration of Internship

A course I am taking this semester is Cognition in psychology. Recently, we have been learning how adaptable our brains can be especially in relation to memory encoding and retrieval. Something I learned from this course is that each time a memory is recalled, it is vulnerable to manipulation. So each time you think of a past memory, you allow the opportunity for that memory to be altered. This fact is monumental as most therapy and mental health services require some level of memory retrieval. A clinician in psychology needs to be qualified and adequately skilled to be the person who helps someone relive and redefine some of their memories. The Fidelity Monitoring project I have been following and assisting in is working towards ensuring therapists and other psychology professionals are up to skill with their practices. 

Application of Internship

This work has confirmed what I want to do in my career. I love learning about how to improve and implement better practices of behavioral services. Both my skills and weaknesses have shown through this work.A reason that Counseling is the direction I want to follow is because 

Workplace

Thus far, in my internship, I have not worked with any other students. This was not an initial goal or expectation I had of the internship coming into it; however, working as the lone intern has made it a little more challenging for me to find my place within the team. Each full-time team member is heading a project and has their own set of skills, goals, and achievements for the said project. As I have now become a consistent member of the fidelity monitoring project, I have built more of an identity within the lab. I have been a crucial contributor to organizing and analyzing that data. Within the workplace, there is a great balance of hard work, opportunity, encouragement, and fun which make for great leads to better team collaboration. Dr. Adams crafts each of his team and personal meetings by ensuring we are all on the same page, giving everyone a chance to say their own piece, offering leadership opportunities, and adding a fun question to have us connect.Although within my project, there is not much diversity in my coworkers' backgrounds, we still learn a lot from each other's various perspectives from our differing ages and academic background. As I am the one with the least amount of education, I have capitalized on the resources and knowledge of my supervisors and project heads. Their openness to hear and consider my opinions has grown my confidence and place within the team.As a professional, I want to welcome mistakes and challenges as stepping stones to success rather than defeats. I also desire to spend more time independently applying and adapting prior information and experiences to new and more complex situations. This will propel me further toward my goal to become my own boss by strengthening my independence as well as being an innovative therapist. 

Successes and Challenges

Successes

During the meeting with Brandi, I shared the various tasks I have been working on since starting my internship. I found myself pleasantly surprised as I shared all I had contributed to the lab and all I had learned. I have completed many menial and low-responsibility tasks that have pushed the lab's research forward. Through doing these tasks I have also been able to learn so much about what goes on in the background of ensuring quality service and how research is done. Setting the goal to gain a foundational understanding of what research, services, and tools this lab provides as well as ask my supervisors what to keep in the front of my mind to help me get through these repetitive and seemingly unnecessary tasks.

Another thing that I would count as a success in this internship is my growth in understanding these important concepts and practices in both the research and clinical fields of mental health care. 

Challenges

Time management and organization have been the most difficult things for me in this internship. I have made schedules and checklists for myself to organize priorities, but I am still finding a system that works for me. I have reached out to my head supervisor and a couple of my professors to ask if they had tips or resources for me to become better at these skills. My supervisor suggested categorizing my priorities into tasks I have to block time out for and tasks I can get done in 10 minutes. Although this is a helpful tip in everyday life or schoolwork, I find myself not having many tasks that only will take 10 minutes in my internship which leads me to remind myself to build a structured schedule and stick to it. I will plan to bring up these concerns in check-in meetings with both supervisors and ask for their help in making a schedule and setting weekly priorities with me.