Volunteer Experience
Starting fall of my senior year, I began volunteering at the Nemours Children’s Hospital in Wilmington. This was excellent exposure to caring for clinical populations, especially considering that I am still unsure if I want to work with children or adults in my future occupation. This role also connected me to psychologists working in hospital settings rather than in private practice or in school offices. During my time at Nemours, I supported the physicians, nurses, and medical assistants by filling out patient paperwork before their appointment, helped to clean out examination rooms before and after doctors saw their patients, and performed basic administrative tasks with the secretaries. One of the best parts of working in this particular hospital was that there was a therapy dog working every day named Talon, who provided comfort and cuddles to any patients experiencing distress, for example, because they needed to get a shot. Although my role at Nemours was merely supportive, I gained a lot of valuable experience working with healthcare professionals and watching them carry out their duties.
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Nemours Children's Hospital
My experience working in the CRH Lab truly embodied the intersection between research and community service. This lab seeks to study relationships, primarily romantic, and understand their impact on endocrine and immune function, and our overall long-term health. One experiment that I worked on, MINDv2, had couples from the local Newark community complete a stress reduction program at home for two weeks, and come into the lab before and after the program. This experiment was an opportunity for couples to test if this measure could possibly help reduce stress levels in their relationship, and helped our lab to investigate the impact of the stress reduction program on couples’ health (e.g., heart rate, blood pressure). I am and always will be a strong proponent of evidence-based interventions - the work that this lab does both helps participant community members with their relationships while being able to gather data that will eventually serve to benefit the broader community, both near and far, in the long-term. My time in the CRH Lab marked a point in my career where I was able to appreciate the significance of research-informed practices when providing mental health care for any group or population. It is my aspiration to become a psychologist who is well-versed in evidence-based practices and is familiar with new and upcoming research that could open a new path to treatment. It is my belief that a good healthcare professional is well-versed and up to date on current scientific literature as well as compassionate towards their patients and active in helping their community. As I continue my journey to become a licensed professional in psychology, I aim to immerse myself in research labs in graduate school that will not only help the immediate community, but gather data that will further improve therapeutic interventions for the general population.