Spring 2018
I took this picture immediately after applying to the psychology major--I was just too excited, and I didn't want to forget the feeling of finally submitting the record of all my hard work. I would find out not long later that I did get into the major, another very exciting moment! I have always known I wanted to study psychology in college, and this was a big step towards achieving that goal.
This quarter went really well! I took psych 209, soc 371, and honors 222, which are research methods, criminology and pain. Academically, my grades were all where I wanted them to be, which I’m super excited about! I loved research methods, and I finished the class with a 104.25% because I enjoyed it so much. After finishing that class I was able to apply to the psychology major, so hopefully within the next few weeks I will find out whether I got in or not! It says on the website that applying in the summer is more selective, so hopefully I’ll still get in, but if not I’ll just take a few more classes and reapply! Criminology was also an amazing class. I had to work super hard and study a lot, but I really enjoyed it, and it's actually what made me want to do something with LSJ. I think that an LSJ minor will be perfect, because I don’t really have the room in my schedule to double major, but I’ll still be able to get access to the major classes and educate myself on law. Pain was also a very interesting class and it was much more hands-off than any other class I’ve taken in college so far. I really enjoyed our class discussions, but I also relished the opportunity to take my own direction for the final paper. I loved being able to apply psychology to the information from the course, and I ended up with a research paper I was really proud of.
This summer I have been accepted to the internship I applied for with Catholic Charities in Minnesota, and I’m very excited about it! I haven’t started yet, but they told me that I will be able to sit in and help with therapy, examine patient files, sit in on progress meetings, and eventually lead my own group therapy sessions with other undergrads. I will also work at a Lindt store simultaneously since the internship is unpaid. I’m going to be living at my family lake house alone, so this summer should be very educational for a variety of reasons! Hopefully I will be able to get a good sense of what it’s like to live alone and also what it’s like to work in treatment centers. I have been considering job paths recently, and I’ve been struggling to decide if I should stay on a track for general psychological research, or if I should go into something like therapy, or even law. I am already excited for next quarter and all the opportunities that come with it! I will be starting the psychology honors program, the honors course I’m taking is psychology-based (which is VERY exciting to me), I will hopefully be an official psychology major, I’ll be a TA for Professor Graham for psych 202, I’ll be working towards my LSJ minor, and I think I’ll be trying to get a job as well! I’ll definitely need to budget my time well, but I think I’ll be able to do it all.
This button takes you to my term paper from my class on pain. This paper allowed me to combine elements of what we had discussed in class with topics that I had interest in, and to explore these ideas in depth to see how they intertwine. It also forced me to grow as a student, because it is a very long and in-depth research paper about a topic that I did not know very much about. Despite spending a quarter learning about pain, I still felt like a newcomer to the field. Pain is too complicated to really grasp all of its caveats after only 10 weeks, so I felt cautious going into the final knowing that I might struggle to understand the research, or make incorrect statements if I generalized results too much. By the end of this term paper I felt much more comfortable thinking about/discussing/researching pain, and I was very proud of that! It shows that my education is really pushing me to stretch my comfort zone, and it's paying off with new knowledge and areas of interest!
This button takes you to the final version of my application to the internship with Catholic Charities. This application was followed up with a phone interview, before I committed to spending the summer in Minnesota and working with them most weekdays. I really struggled to find an internship that actually put me in the field of psychology to get hands-on experience, so it was extra exciting to be offered the position. I felt that it was important to find a position that gave me real-world experience so that I could get a feel for the potential job options in my future before graduating and locking myself into something.