So Young Choe, Ph.D. in Psychology

Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Trainee Support Group

at the University of Rochester & University of Rocheter Medical Center

I founded this group in recognition of hateful incidents against AAPI persons and struggles that AAPI trainees face in academia, to improve training for AAPI graduate students and postdoctoral scholars ("trainees").

I have been hosting and planning two types of events:

1) outreach events for everyone to increase awareness of the AAPI issues in training. The outreach events entail cultural gatherings (Lunar Thanksgiving/Onam, Lunar New Year, and AAPI heritage month celebration) and AAPI Faculty Panel Discussion sessions.

2) internal events for AAPI trainees to share struggles and support one another. The internal events include AAPI Trainee Support Zoom monthly meetings and AAPI Trainee Support meal gatherings.

We announce our events on our website (https://blogs.rochester.edu/support_aapi/) and also via email to our listserv (Support_AAPI@lists.rochester.edu).

Parenting and Family Dynamics preconference

at the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)

I started this preconference about parenting/family and personality/emotional/social psychology before I earned my doctorate. I did not see many parenting sessions at conferences, so I decided to create a forum to showcase this research. It is a lot of work to organize an all-day conference almost single handedly, and it also involves a lot of planning and advertising via email. But the end result is worth it: we get to have a day about parenting and family research, and attendees have seemed to enjoy it.

To remove the barriers for new researchers to enter the field, I encouraged and accepted poster submissions from international students, students from low SES backgrounds, and people from diverse ethnic groups. Moreover, I organized group discussion sessions that include all levels of researchers (rather than a mentored luncheon that only allows students to meet other students) to help people network. Further, I arranged quantitative method sessions in R – a free statistics package – so that anyone can use the R code from renowned professors in the field to analyze their data and publish the results. In addition, I arranged a schedule to encourage longer discussion than usual conference talks: 10 minutes for Q&A after every presentation. I organized 3 successful (annual) meetings so far, the pre-conference has doubled in size from the first to the third meeting and is evolving, and many professors and students told me that this meeting was the most organized conference they have ever attended.

I hope to establish this preconference annually and eventually make this into a full conference about parenting/family and personality/emotional/social development. Here are the links to the programs of each preconference that I created and organized:

2020 PFD preconference

2019 PFD preconference

2018 PFD preconference

Making protocols and documenting procedures/details

I am committed to writing down details/procedures and sharing these with others to prevent others from going through the same trouble I went through. Sure, it takes my time, but it saves many people's time collectively, so I am willing to do so.

During my first year in my doctoral program, I wrote a long guidance document regarding whom to ask what and how to get help (e. g., where to contact to increase/decrease the temperature of the office, where on-campus massage chairs are, whom to contact for certain issues, etc.). I shared it with others so that nobody needs to feel lost or ask others a lot of questions when they arrive, and the document has been shared with new professors and incoming students every year.

After receiving an access to a program through my collaborator's server, I wrote down all the procedures/details and shared it with the collaborator so that the next person can just get connected without needing to ask others for help.

Mentoring

I try to think in students' perspectives and to satisfy their (academic and professional) needs.

I led a team of over 40 undergraduate student workers at the biggest psychology conference in South Korea. I made a system to rotate to prevent fatigue, spoke up for their needs, and made sure that they would get nutrition and rest while working for several days. Those students thanked me later that they liked working with me as their team leader and appreciated my leadership.

I also have been mentoring undergraduate students and graduate students in the U.S. while researching and also teaching statistics labs. I taught them the skills they can use to get a job, heard them about their struggles and their needs, and connected them to the professors and labs where they can get more experience. Then I told them honestly about hardships of attending graduate school and being in academia and encouraged them to think about their values in their lives and whether they think they would tolerate the hardships in graduate school. They made informed decisions for themselves, and I am glad to be a part of their decision-making process for the lives they value.

Ad hoc reviewer

I have been reviewing manuscripts for peer reviewed journals since 2015. I usually write strength of each manuscript first and then the areas that need improvement.

Public Service

Workshops for a general audience

Cathedral Couples in Christ, Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angeles, January 2020

Educated current and future parents regarding parental psychological control and psychological need satisfaction at the married couples’ gathering.

Talks for a general audience

Family Housing at the University of Southern California, December 2017

Educated current and future parents regarding parental control at the “Show, Share, and Dine” event.

“What research shows about parental control: psychological control and behavioral control”

Google Sites

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