Developing my first solo-authored publication was one of the most formative experiences in my growth as a researcher and writer. The project began while I was working on my chapter on Stanley Milgram and thinking more deeply about the relationship between psychology, physical space, and digital environments. Around that time, Professor Nelida Quintero encouraged me to respond to a call from the Journal of Urban Design and Mental Health. She suggested that I could submit an opinion piece, a review, or an ongoing study related to my emerging interests in urban psychology. At that point, I was still finding my grounding in this area, but I knew I was becoming increasingly interested in how psychological theory could help explain the way people experience, navigate, and attach meaning to urban spaces. I eventually developed two manuscripts. One was redirected toward a more public-facing, news-style venue, the Urbanity and Sanity Forum. The other became my solo-authored publication, “Community Hubs as Essential Infrastructure in Proximity-Based Urban Design.” This piece gave me a way to bring together several areas I had been thinking about: urban form, proximity-based design, equity, green infrastructure, stigma, belonging, and the psychological consequences of how space is organized. In the manuscript, I examined the proposed model of the microcity and considered both its promise and its limitations. Proximity-based urban design offers clear potential benefits. It can reduce navigational barriers, increase access to daily resources, support walkability, and expand access to green zones and social infrastructure. These ideas matter because urban design can shape health, stress, social connection, and quality of life. At the same time, I wanted to think critically about who benefits from these models and who may be excluded from them.

Drawing from equity-centered work on the racialization of physical space, including Courtney Bonam’s scholarship, I considered how communities are built, who they are built for, and whether residents are meaningfully included in decisions about the spaces they occupy. I became especially interested in how histories of racial discrimination, structural inequity, and place-based stigma can shape whether people feel welcome in, attached to, or excluded from particular spaces. Urban spaces carry histories, meanings, and burdens that affect how people move through them. One issue I felt was especially important to include was the tension between green infrastructure and green gentrification. Adding green space to urban environments can offer meaningful psychological, social, and health benefits. These improvements can also increase property values and contribute to displacement, especially in lower-income communities that have already experienced high levels of urban stress and underinvestment. This raised a central question for me: if urban design interventions are meant to improve well-being, how do we make sure that the people most affected by urban stressors are able to remain in and benefit from the spaces being improved? Although community hubs are not the primary focus of my current research, writing this piece became an important entry point into urban psychology for me. It helped me understand how psychological questions can be brought directly into conversations about urban form, infrastructure, and community life. My Milgram chapter had already pushed me to think about the connections between physical and digital environments, especially how people navigate overload, social behavior, and attention in different kinds of spaces. This publication expanded that thinking by helping me examine how built environments can shape belonging, access, stigma, and health equity.

The process of writing a solo-authored publication was very different from my previous collaborative research experiences. At the time, I was entering a new area of theory and literature largely on my own. The people I worked with were supportive, but many were not directly immersed in this specific literature or had prior obligations that limited their ability to contribute. That meant I had to take responsibility for building the argument, locating the relevant scholarship, understanding the debates in the field, and deciding how to structure the piece. It was challenging, and it gave me a new sense of independence as a researcher. Submitting the manuscript was the first time I had ever submitted to a journal and gone through the peer review process. Receiving a revise and resubmit was both exciting and intimidating. I had two weeks to complete the revisions, respond to reviewer feedback, and strengthen the manuscript. The reviewers offered theory-based feedback that pushed me to think more carefully about how I was communicating my argument. Some parts of the manuscript made sense to me because I had been immersed in the literature for months. I was seeing everything through the framework I had been reading. The reviewers helped me realize that my argument needed to be clearer to readers who were entering the piece without the same background. That realization changed how I thought about academic writing. A strong manuscript has to guide the reader through the logic of the argument, explain why the literature matters, and make the contribution visible to someone who is new to the conversation. The peer review process taught me to step outside of my own familiarity with the material and ask whether the structure, transitions, and claims would be clear to a broader audience. I found the peer review process incredibly meaningful. The criticism I received was constructive, thoughtful, and genuinely useful. It challenged me as a writer and as a developing scientist. Instead of feeling discouraged, I felt more motivated to revise and submit future work. The experience reshaped how I view peer review. I began to see it as part of the collaborative life of scholarship: a process that helps writers clarify their ideas, strengthen their evidence, and communicate their contributions more effectively. Going through that process helped me become more comfortable receiving feedback and more aware of how much stronger a manuscript can become through revision.

This experience also helped shape the next stage of my research trajectory. Writing about community hubs, proximity-based design, and the psychological dimensions of urban form deepened my interest in how built environments shape behavior, well-being, and access. That interest later informed my work with Dr. Richard Wener, where I began studying how institutional environments, including prisons and jails, shape behavior and psychological outcomes. My work with Dr. Wener has extended into more specific questions about adolescent carceral contexts, but the intellectual connection is clear to me: I am interested in how environments become psychological systems. Whether the setting is a neighborhood, a community hub, a digital platform, or a carceral institution, I want to understand how design, structure, and social meaning shape human experience.

Overall, developing my first solo-authored publication taught me independence, humility, and revision. It pushed me into a new literature, forced me to clarify my own ideas, and gave me my first experience with journal peer review. It also helped me see urban psychology as a field where psychological theory can speak directly to real-world questions about equity, belonging, infrastructure, and well-being. This project became a turning point in how I understood my own research interests and the kind of scholar I am becoming.

Presenting at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Conference (SPSP) was an important experience in my development as a researcher because it showed me how a conference can become more than a place to present completed work. It can also become a space for collaboration, idea-building, and discovering new ways to connect research to real-world problems.

At SPSP, I presented a poster and also had the opportunity to attend many other poster sessions and talks. Although I was not presenting my urban psychology work, I found myself in conversations with researchers who were interested in questions that connected directly to physical space, identity, health, sexuality, and belonging. These conversations helped me see how urban psychology can intersect with many areas of social and personality psychology. Even when people were not explicitly studying cities, many were studying experiences that happen within places: how people form identities, seek community, navigate exclusion, and create spaces where they feel protected or understood.  Being in Chicago made these questions feel especially concrete. In several conversations, I found myself thinking about how LGBTQ+ communities create and maintain physical spaces, such as neighborhoods, bookstores, bars, and community gathering places. These urban forms are not just backdrops for identity; they can become protective spaces, sources of belonging, and sites of attachment. I became especially interested in what leads people to engage with, protect, and feel connected to these places. These discussions helped me think more deeply about how identity does not exist separately from the built environment. Instead, identity, community, and physical space constantly shape one another.

One of the most meaningful parts of SPSP was the opportunity to begin developing international collaborations. I connected with researchers in Canada who were interested in related questions, and those conversations helped me imagine how my research could grow beyond a single project or institution. Like my experience at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, SPSP showed me that presenting research is not only about explaining what I have already done. It is also about asking what we can build together. The most exciting conversations were not only about publishing or answering narrow research questions, but about how research can be used to better understand lived experience and inform action in the real world. SPSP also expanded the way I think about research methods and collaboration. I met people working in areas very different from my own and found unexpected points of connection through my experience using Reddit data and R. In several conversations, I shared how I use the RedditExtractoR package and discussed the challenges of collecting and analyzing digital discourse data. I also connected with graduate students studying statistics who were learning R package development, an area I have been interested in for several years. Since then, these conversations have helped me think more seriously about developing tools that could make digital discourse research more flexible and sustainable.

This methodological interest comes from a practical problem I have encountered in my own work: digital platforms, APIs, and data collection tools change over time. Website limits, API restrictions, and package updates can make it difficult to collect online discourse consistently. These challenges have pushed me to think not only as someone who uses existing tools, but as someone who may eventually help build better ones. Developing my own R package, or contributing to tools that improve how researchers access and analyze digital discourse, would allow me to connect my substantive research interests with methodological problem-solving. Overall, SPSP was meaningful because it helped me see myself as part of a broader research community. Presenting my poster was valuable, but the experience extended far beyond the poster itself. I attended sessions, learned from other researchers, built new connections, discussed urban psychology from multiple perspectives, and shared methodological ideas with people outside my immediate field. The conference reminded me that research develops through conversation: through the questions people ask, the connections they notice, and the collaborations that begin when people realize they are approaching similar problems from different angles.

Leaving SPSP, I felt more confident in the direction of my work. I also felt more aware of how much I still want to learn. The experience deepened my commitment to studying how people experience social life within physical and digital environments, and it encouraged me to keep building bridges between theory, method, and real-world application. SPSP helped me understand that my research interests are not isolated; they sit at the intersection of identity, place, belonging, health, technology, and community.

Presenting at the 2026 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Washington, D.C., was one of the most meaningful moments in my development as a student researcher. At the Marriott Marquis, I gave my first oral conference presentation in an undergraduate education session, presenting on how students explain failure in mathematics and how those explanations shape what they believe they can do in math. I was the only undergraduate presenter in a session made up primarily of professors and graduate students, which made the experience both intimidating and deeply affirming.My presentation focused on students’ attributions for failure in mathematics: how students make sense of struggling, whether they view mathematical ability as something fixed or developable, and how those beliefs influence their engagement and identity as learners. 

Although mathematics education is not my primary research area, this project has been meaningful to me because I collaborated with Gabriel Chavez at Arizona State University and because of our shared interest in students’ experiences navigating mathematics and mathematics-related anxiety. What stood out most was how different an oral presentation felt from presenting a poster. In poster sessions, conversations are often brief: someone may ask a question, discuss the literature for a few minutes, and then move on. This session felt different. In a room of about twenty people, the presentation opened into a much larger conversation. Faculty members discussed how mathematics curriculum might shift, how instructors can better reach students, and what strategies they have used to reduce mathematics anxiety and strengthen students’ mathematics identity. The discussion moved beyond my specific project and became a shared effort to think through a broader educational problem. That conversation helped me see the value of oral conference sessions in a new way. Posters are important because they allow researchers to share work widely and engage in focused one-on-one discussions. But sitting in a room with people who care deeply about the same issue created a different kind of intellectual energy. It felt almost like a think tank: a group of educators and researchers bringing different perspectives together to ask how institutions can better support students. We talked not only about individual students’ beliefs, but also about structural issues in K–12 education, policy shifts since the No Child Left Behind Act, and the broader challenges mathematics departments face across the United States. This experience reminded me that research is not only about producing findings; it is also about entering conversations that matter. The questions raised in that room showed me that mathematics anxiety and students’ beliefs about ability are not isolated concerns. They are connected to curriculum, educational policy, classroom practice, identity development, and institutional responsibility. 

Presenting this work helped me understand how research can create space for dialogue across disciplines and roles, bringing together undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and educators around a shared problem. Most importantly, this presentation strengthened my confidence as a developing researcher. Being the only undergraduate in the session could have made me feel out of place, but instead it showed me that my work could contribute meaningfully to a professional conversation. I left the session with a stronger appreciation for the collaborative nature of research and a deeper understanding of how academic conferences can become spaces for reflection, critique, and collective problem-solving. This experience helped me see myself as someone learning to participate in the larger conversations that shape education, policy, and the psychology of education.

Serving as a teaching assistant for Dr. Sinha’s Advanced Research Methods course was one of the most meaningful teaching and mentorship experiences I have had as an undergraduate. The course asked students to move beyond learning about research in the abstract and begin practicing the skills that make psychological research possible: developing research questions, reviewing literature, designing studies, collecting and structuring data, running statistical analyses, interpreting results, and communicating findings in APA-style writing. My role as a teaching assistant allowed me to support students across each of these steps, often working with them from the earliest stages of project development through their final papers. Much of my work focused on helping students understand statistics and research methods in practical, applied ways. I supported students as they learned to use SPSS, structure their datasets, run analyses, interpret statistical output, and explain their findings clearly in writing. Many students could produce statistical results, but needed help understanding what those results meant and how to connect them back to their hypotheses. I worked with students on translating output into interpretation: what a correlation, regression, mediation, or group comparison actually says about a research question, what it does not say, and how to communicate those limits responsibly.

Because some students encountered issues with SPSS or wanted to learn more flexible statistical tools, I also helped students use R with the professor’s approval. Since the psychology department does not currently offer a formal course focused on coding in R for psychological statistics, this became an opportunity to introduce interested students to a tool they might use in future research. I helped students write and run R code, organize their data, conduct analyses, and understand the logic behind the code rather than simply copying commands. For some students, this included learning how to calculate or test mediation models in R when SPSS was not meeting their needs. I found this especially rewarding because it allowed me to share methodological skills I had developed through my own research and help make statistical programming feel more accessible.  Another major part of my role involved supporting students’ writing. Over the course of the semester, I reviewed 53 papers, including final papers and publication-style assignments. My feedback often included line editing, organization suggestions, APA-style corrections, clarification of arguments, and guidance on how to better connect literature reviews, methods, results, and discussion sections. I helped students refine their research questions, strengthen transitions, improve their use of citations, and make sure their writing met the expectations of the course. This work taught me that research mentorship is not only about helping students run analyses; it is also about helping them learn how to make their thinking visible on the page.

I also supported students with literature reviews and source use. Several students were interested in topics that overlapped with areas I had previously studied through my work with Dr. Katie Grobman and through my book chapter on sleep. Because I had already conducted literature reviews in related areas, I was able to point students toward major theories, foundational citations, and useful search strategies. I helped students identify relevant sources, understand what kinds of articles would strengthen their arguments, and cite those sources appropriately. This part of the experience reminded me how valuable prior research experience can be in a teaching role: the literature I had once studied for my own projects became a resource I could use to support other students’ development.

A significant part of my work also involved helping students design their studies. Although the course primarily leaned toward observational research, some students wanted to pursue experimental designs, replication studies, or measurement development projects. I helped them think through what their designs required, including how to structure surveys, operationalize variables, collect appropriate samples, and choose tools that matched their research questions. In some cases, Google Forms was not flexible enough for the kind of study students wanted to conduct, so I introduced them to other survey platforms such as Qualtrics. These conversations often required students to think more carefully about what their study was actually measuring and whether their design could answer the question they wanted to ask.

One of the most important parts of this experience was the direct mentorship I provided outside of class. I hosted weekly Google Meet drop-in hours from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. so that students who worked during the day or had other responsibilities could still access support in the evening. I also made myself available through email and phone when students needed help troubleshooting an analysis, revising a paper, or catching up after falling behind. In some cases, I worked with students on weekends so they could regain momentum and stay connected to the course. This taught me that accessibility is a major part of effective teaching. Students often need support at the moment when they are actively struggling with a task, and having someone available to help them work through that confusion can make the difference between disengaging and persisting. More than anything, this experience cemented my desire to become a professor. As a teaching assistant, I worked with students who were struggling in very real ways. Some were at risk of failing the course at different points in the semester. Others had strong ideas but were still developing the written communication skills needed to express those ideas clearly in academic writing. Working with them one-on-one allowed me to see growth happen gradually: in revised drafts, in stronger interpretations of statistical results, in clearer research questions, and in the moments when a concept finally clicked.

Those “aha” moments were some of the most meaningful parts of the semester. I saw students move from confusion to confidence, from feeling overwhelmed by research methods to beginning to see themselves as capable of conducting research. In some cases, I reviewed the same paper multiple times before a deadline, helping a student revise sentence by sentence, reorganize their argument, clarify their methods, or strengthen their interpretation of results. That kind of sustained work taught me that students can grow tremendously when they are given time, feedback, structure, and encouragement. Being a TA also taught me an important lesson about mentorship: support has to be available, but students also have to choose to engage with it. I could reach out, offer help, hold evening office hours, and make myself accessible, but the most transformative progress happened with students who actively accepted that support. Many of the students I worked with were deeply proactive. They wanted to improve, and in many cases, they wanted to go beyond the basic requirements of the course. Some were interested in research as a future career path, so I helped them learn about research opportunities on campus and connected them with faculty members I knew who could help them begin developing their own research identities.

This experience strengthened my own identity as both a researcher and a future educator. Teaching SPSS, R, literature review skills, research design, and APA-style writing forced me to articulate skills that I had developed through my own research training. It made me more aware of how much I had learned from my mentors and how valuable those skills could be when shared with others. Supporting students through their projects reminded me that research is collaborative at every level. Even when students were working on individual papers, their ideas grew through conversation, feedback, revision, and encouragement. Overall, serving as a teaching assistant for Advanced Research Methods was meaningful because it allowed me to connect research, teaching, and mentorship. I helped students navigate statistics, writing, literature reviews, study design, R, SPSS, and Qualtrics, but more importantly, I helped them see themselves as capable of doing research. Watching students improve over time, especially students who had initially struggled, made the possibility of becoming a professor feel more concrete and meaningful to me. This experience showed me that I do not only want to produce research; I want to teach, mentor, and create spaces where students can develop the confidence and skills to pursue research themselves.

Serving as a teaching assistant for Introduction to Psychology gave me a different but equally meaningful view of teaching, mentorship, and what it means to make psychology accessible to students. Unlike Advanced Research Methods, which focused on students already working deeply with research design, statistics, and APA-style writing, Introduction to Psychology brought together a much broader group of students. Some were excited about psychology and already imagined it as part of their future. Others were taking the course only because it fulfilled a requirement. Working with both groups taught me how important introductory courses are: for some students, they are the beginning of a professional identity; for others, they may be the only formal psychology course they ever take. I served as one of four teaching assistants for a course of more than 80 students. In that role, I helped facilitate group discussions, supported students who were struggling with course concepts, tracked attendance, moderated digital discussion, and responded to students’ weekly reading comments. The readings, selected by Dr. Dyer, gave students opportunities to engage with psychological research in a more direct way, and part of my work involved helping students move from summary to interpretation. I encouraged students to ask what a study meant, how it connected to their lives, and how psychological concepts could help them understand behavior, identity, relationships, stress, attention, health, and social life.

One of the most meaningful parts of this experience was going beyond the standard responsibilities of a teaching assistant. During the social psychology portion of the course, I gave a short talk on my own urban psychology work and on my book chapter about Stanley Milgram for Dr. Takushian and Dr. Tarnow’s Elgar compendium on Milgram. I spoke with students about Milgram’s work, crowd behavior, urban psychology, digital environments, and the connections between physical space and social behavior. This gave me an opportunity to show students that psychology is not limited to textbook definitions. It is a living field that can be used to study cities, digital life, social interaction, belonging, overload, and the ways people navigate complex environments. I also talked with students about what it means to be a researcher. I shared what it is like to attend conferences, present research, develop questions, revise ideas, and build a research identity over time. For many students in an introductory course, research can feel distant or abstract. I wanted to make it feel more concrete. I mentored 10 students as they developed their own research proposals, helping them think through research questions, possible methods, variables, and how to connect their ideas to psychological literature. This was especially meaningful because it allowed me to help students see that research begins with curiosity. A student does not need to know everything before asking a meaningful question; they need guidance, structure, and encouragement.

In addition to my smaller talk on social psychology and urban psychology, I delivered two guest lectures. One focused on the impacts of green space on mental health and well-being. In that lecture, I drew from environmental psychology to discuss how natural environments can shape stress, mood, attention, and psychological restoration. I wanted students to see that mental health is not only shaped by internal traits or individual choices, but also by the environments people move through every day. This connected directly to my broader interest in urban psychology and the question of how physical spaces can support or undermine well-being. My second guest lecture was a full class session, approximately two hours, on mindfulness, rest, meditation, and the attentional demands of modern life. In that lecture, I connected urban psychology, digital environments, selective inattention, cognitive overload, and the ways people cope with the constant demands of contemporary life. We discussed how people manage overload in cities, but also how similar processes appear in digital spaces. I wanted students to think about attention as something shaped by environments, technologies, and social demands. The lecture gave students a way to connect research literature to their own daily experiences of stress, distraction, rest, and overstimulation. To make these concepts more concrete, I also ran a mock study with the class. Students completed a pre-measure of perceived stress using the Perceived Stress Scale, went outside for a nature walk, and then completed a post-measure afterward. I used the activity to show students how a psychological study can move from a research question to data collection to analysis and interpretation. I then demonstrated how to calculate whether students’ pre-post changes in stress were statistically significant using Python. This activity allowed students to experience psychology as a process rather than just a body of information. They were not only learning about research; they were participating in a simplified version of it. This teaching experience also allowed me to help students understand the breadth of psychology. I spoke with students interested in clinical psychology, forensic psychology, medicine, engineering, architecture, and other fields. Some students were pre-med, and I helped them think about how psychology connects to health, patient care, behavior change, stress, and communication. Some were interested in engineering, and I introduced them to human factors psychology. For students interested in civil engineering, architecture, or design, I connected their interests to urban psychology, environmental psychology, and questions about how urban form can shape belonging, safety, accessibility, and equity. Drawing from scholars such as Courtney Bonam, I talked with students about how physical spaces are not neutral. They communicate value, history, identity, and inclusion.

This became one of the most important lessons I took from teaching Introduction to Psychology: psychology can connect to almost any field because human behavior is everywhere. For students who already loved psychology, my role was often to help them go deeper. For students who were only taking the course because it was required, my role was different. I had to learn how to reach students who did not initially see psychology as relevant to them. I learned to ask about their goals first and then show how psychology could connect to those goals. If a student cared about medicine, we could talk about health psychology. If they cared about engineering, we could talk about human factors. If they cared about cities, we could talk about environmental psychology and urban form. This helped me see teaching as translation: taking the language of a field and helping students recognize where it already appears in the lives and careers they care about. Beyond lectures and class discussions, I also created additional study supports for students. Although it was not required of all TAs, I developed Quizlets and practice tests for every exam. I wanted students to have tools that helped them review material actively rather than simply reread notes. I also hosted weekly Google Meet study sessions every Friday from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. throughout the semester. These sessions gave students a consistent space to ask questions, prepare for exams, review course concepts, talk through readings, and discuss their broader interests in psychology. The Friday meetings became more than exam review sessions. They also became a space where students could talk about their concerns with the course, their study habits, their adjustment to college, and their developing academic interests. Many students in the class were first-year students or students still finding their footing in college. Some needed help understanding course material, but others needed reassurance that struggling in an introductory course did not mean they were incapable of succeeding. I used those sessions to help students build confidence, develop better study strategies, and feel more comfortable asking for help.

This course also taught me something I had not fully understood as a student: teaching introductory students requires a very different approach than mentoring upper-division students. In Advanced Research Methods, I could work with students who were already deeper in the field. We could focus on theory, methodology, statistics, literature reviews, and the technical skills needed to conduct psychological research. In Introduction to Psychology, the work was different. Many students were encountering psychology for the first time, and some were not planning to enter the field at all. That meant I could not assume that students would automatically care about the material or already understand why it mattered. This was one of the most valuable lessons of the experience. If I want to become a professor and communicate psychology to students, researchers, and broader audiences, I need to be able to bridge the field to people’s own interests and experiences. With introductory students, teaching became a more relational and instructional process. I had to ask: What does this student care about? What field are they entering? What example would make this concept feel relevant to their life? Instead of beginning with disciplinary depth, I often had to begin with connection. This helped me understand that effective teaching is not only about knowing a subject well; it is about translating that subject in a way that helps students see themselves in it.

That difference was striking to me. With upper-division students, I could draw directly from my research training and help them build more advanced methodological and analytical skills. With lower-division students, especially those just entering college or taking psychology as a requirement, I had to focus more on accessibility, relevance, and trust. This experience helped me see that becoming a professor will require both forms of teaching: the ability to mentor students deeply in research and the ability to introduce unfamiliar students to a field in a way that feels meaningful, approachable, and connected to the lives they are already building. Working with students in Introduction to Psychology reinforced my desire to become a professor because it showed me the importance of meeting students where they are. Some students came into the course with a clear interest in psychology. Others came in skeptical, disconnected, or unsure why the class mattered. I found both groups meaningful to teach. The students who were already excited reminded me how powerful an introductory course can be in shaping a future researcher, clinician, or psychologist. The students who were not initially interested challenged me to become a better communicator. They pushed me to explain why psychology matters beyond the classroom and to show how psychological thinking can inform medicine, engineering, policy, education, design, technology, and everyday life. This experience also helped me understand teaching as a form of mentorship. I was not only helping students prepare for exams or complete assignments. I was helping them imagine what psychology could be and how they might relate to it. Whether I was responding to reading comments, leading a discussion, explaining a theory, helping students develop research proposals, or talking with them one-on-one over coffee, I aimed to help students build intellectual confidence. I learned that introductory teaching requires patience, flexibility, and creativity because every student enters the classroom with a different level of interest, preparation, and self-confidence.

Overall, serving as a teaching assistant for Introduction to Psychology was meaningful because it allowed me to share the field I care about with students at the beginning of their academic journeys. I helped students understand course concepts, engage with readings, prepare for exams, develop research proposals, explore career interests, and see connections between psychology and other disciplines. Through guest lectures, study sessions, mock research activities, and one-on-one mentorship, I learned how much I enjoy making psychological research accessible and relevant. This experience strengthened my commitment to becoming a professor because it showed me that teaching is not only about presenting information; it is about helping students discover why ideas matter and how those ideas can connect to who they are becoming.