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Career Goals
Career Goals
At the start of my internship, I was unsure of what I wanted to do but had the general goal of working towards a career on the research side of psychology since I have always enjoyed science so much. I am still a little unsure of what I want to do, but I am more confident in making decisions related to my career. I still enjoy working with data, but this experience has helped me to understand that it is not my passion. I really resonated with the counseling side of things more. I am excited to get more involved in this career path this summer as a volunteer for a helpline. While I do lean towards the introverted side of things, I still enjoy working with other people, and having all independent work has been a little difficult for me. I am perfectly capable of working on my own, but I think I can do even better with more group work, even if it is only occasional collaboration. Later down the line, I would like to get into a master's program, though I have yet to decide on a specific one.
Internship Goals
Internship Goals
Learning Goal #1: Gain a better understanding about the process of researching mental disorders.
Relevance: This will give me more experience to fall back in in future internships and jobs and narrow down the topics within psychology that interest me the most.
Action Plan: Playing an active role that contributes to this specific research project through transcribing therapy sessions and listening in on training sessions for the therapists.
progress: I have learned a lot about mental health and research in psychology. It has helped me understand that I don't want to pursue a career in research but would rather go the route of counseling psychology.
Learning Goal #2: Expand my list of transferable skills and further my expertise with ones I already have.
Relevance: Preparing me for future job interviews and allow me to be more capable of accomplishing unexpected tasks that may be asked of me in classes and/or future jobs.
Action Plan:
Learning to use redcap to organize data from various studies.
Helping to organize the office in preparation for a new research team that will be joining the office.
Completing HIPAA and other training modules.
Progress: All training modules and organizational tasks have been completed, and I have been learning how to write a literature review on other scientific studies.
Learning Goal #3: Growing as a professional in the sense of getting used to being in a work environment with others and expanding my professional connections.
Relevance: Becoming comfortable dressing in proper work attire and collaborating well with others is vital for success in any group projects or jobs relying heavily on teamwork for both work and school.
Action Plan: Dressing in business casual attire every time I go into the office and maintaining a good professional relationship with the people who work around me. I will also be attending regular meetings with my supervisor.
Progress: I have organized and attended check in meetings with my supervisor every month and gotten to know the people I work around pretty well. My professional style has evolved quite a bit, and I feel more prepared for the internship showcase than I was at the start of the year.
Learning
Learning
The skills that I have worked on the most are Independence, integration, and application. There are people in the office available for me to ask for help, I mostly work on my own and have to decipher the therapy sessions by myself and try my best to understand whenever a sentence is muffled or too quiet. I also have to review and annotate research papers which requires me to apply my previously gained experience to access the IU library database to find reputable sources to back up any points I bring up in my reviews.
Communication is the skill that I most need to work on. Since I work independently on a pretty flexible schedule it is not needed too much. It would be helpful to improve this skill anyway since I will likely need it in the future. The biggest task that will help me with this is my literature review. It will help me to take and appl my supervisors feedback while expressing my own thoughts on other research studies.
This internship has given me a greater understanding of how research is done in psychology and the processes involved with it. It takes me beyond the textbook definitions and symptom lists that I learned in classes and has exposed me to real people who have experienced mental health problems in their lives firsthand. Transcribing therapy sessions has helped me to understand how things like schizophrenia affect people in different ways and how to actually apply course work knowledge in a way that accounts for variation, individuality, and unexpected results for research purposes.
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