Author: samado

Last Reflection on My Summer at Yale

As a psychology major, my academic goal this summer in my internship was to expand my knowledge of developmental psychobiology and psychopathology through understanding the current state and gaps of the clinical and developmental neuroscience literature. In the weekly lab meetings and clinical case conferences that I attended, there were presentations by lab members on articles on psychopathology and current projects. I reached my goal through exposure to current research in these meetings as well as through engaging in discussions with lab members and academics. I was assigned to present a research article in one of the lab meetings, which gave me more exposure to the literature, and helped me improve my presentation skills. I thought the experience helped me grow so much that I requested to present another article, and it really helped me with gaining confidence.

Clinical assessment is a very essential part of child clinical psychology and this internship gave me the opportunity of training in clinical assessment and administering tests which is very rare for undergraduate students. I administered and scored the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence-Second 
Edition (WASI-II) to children, adolescents, and adults as well as administered questionnaires about anxiety. I definitely reached my goal through this exposure to clinical assessment questionnaires and through entering information collected from clinical interviews. I was exposed to patients with different levels of affective symptomatology, trauma exposure, resilience, emotion regulation, stress, family functioning, and executive control. Anxiety Disorders are the most common mental illnesses, and being exposed to diagnosis, learning about assessment tools, and contributing to the research for a very promising future treatment method for these disorders was very exciting and useful for my future career. Through participation in this internship I realized that I am specifically very interested in diagnosis and treatment of anxiety disorders and depression in children and adolescents.

Through administering intelligence tests, helping anxious and non-anxious children, adolescents, and adults feel comfortable, working directly with participants to ensure positive experiences throughout their participation, and through phone screens I reached my goal of improving my communication skills with people in general.

I would advise anyone who is looking for a Research Assistant internship in the field of psychology to email the Principal Investigators of labs.   You should choose the area that you are the most interested in and make sure you reflect your enthusiasm about the research and the lab in your email. When you are working in the lab environment, I learned that it is very important to look for more responsibility and to ask for the specific things that you want to be exposed to. I really liked working at Yale University as an institution because they really cared about the interns in terms of supervision and in terms of becoming a part of the culture of the university. They were also very careful about patient/participant confidentiality, which made me feel like a part of a serious health care facility. I would recommend this internship and I would love to do it all over again! Thank you Hiatt Career Center for giving me this opportunity!

Selen Amado  ’18

Reflecting on Research at CANDLab

So far, my internship at the Clinical Affective Neuroscience and Development lab has been an amazing experience. I have always loved the lab environment, a place where everyone is continually learning and helping each other grow, but this lab has a particularly great environment. Everyone is supportive of each other, the graduate students are a source of positivity and advice for the interns and the lab manager is always looking out for the interns to get more out of the internship.

It is very different to work as a summer intern research assistant compared to being a research assistant during the year. As a summer intern, I can see what a full time research assistant job would be like in terms of the hours and work that is done. I am a part of a team, and I see how, in the world of work, interactions with your co-workers are extremely important and valuable. It is different from the academic life in that you are not working for your own goals and achievements, you are working with people for a common goal. As a person who likes working in a team, I am really enjoying this aspect of the work.

A career in child clinical psychology requires a very long process starting from an undergraduate psychology degree to the postgraduate internship after your PhD. First of all, the experiences you have as an undergraduate majoring in psychology are very important. In order to be a good candidate for getting accepted to a PhD program in clinical psychology, which is what I want to do in the future, you need to have a lot of experience in the research field. This internship is giving me exposure to clinical research in the field of anxiety disorders and also giving me exposure to anxiety disorders in children. It is the most challenging lab I worked at, and I had the ability to get trained on things that will be extremely important in my future career as well as in future jobs right after college. I  administer intelligence tests, trauma questionnaires and anxiety inventories. These skills will help me in my future career. Another experience that is important to have in undergrad is clinical experience with children. This internship is giving me the opportunity to interact with healthy children and children with anxiety disorders. It is an amazing chance to improve my communication skills with children and their parents. This has been one of the best aspects of this internship and I think it will give me an advantage in the future when applying to jobs.

Selen Amado ’18

 

 

My First Week at CANDLab

My first week at Clinical Affective Neuroscience and Development Lab at Yale University was amazing. On my first day, after a 15-minute walk from my apartment through the beautiful buildings of the Yale campus, I arrived at the Psychology building on Hillhouse Avenue, a street so charming that both Charles Dickens and Mark Twain have described it as “the most beautiful street in America”. I went in and met the lab manager, Jason Haberman, who is a Brandeis alumnus, the graduate students and the interns. The lab environment was very nice, with two rooms for running participants and a waiting area, a common area for working, computers for the research assistants and graduate students, and the office of the lab manager. Everyone gave me warm welcomes, and introduced themselves. There were students from many different colleges and backgrounds; together to help understand the brain circuits underlying anxiety disorders to enhance the treatments for these disorders.

Psychology Building, Hillhouse Avenue

Anxiety Disorders are the most common mental illnesses, and very little is known about the brain circuits underlying these disorders. In these two months, I will be working on the lab’s main project: “Novel Mechanisms of Fear Reduction Targeting the Biological State of the Developing Brain,” which is funded by two grants received by Dr. Dylan Gee, my supervisor, the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award and a Brain & Behavior Research Foundation NARSAD Award. The project aims to examine the neural and psychophysiological mechanisms of safety signal learning. Learning of safety signals encompasses learning processes, which lead to the identification of episodes of security and regulation of fear responses. So to put it simply, safety signals inhibit fear and stress responses, and inability to produce these signals are related to excessive anxiety. This study adapts a paradigm used in animal studies to test the efficacy of safety signals across development in healthy children and adolescents and those with anxiety disorders.

My first week was a week full of training, and I learned a lot of exciting things. I got trained on building participant packets and binders, which included the clinical interview questionnaires that are used to scan for the various anxiety and other disorders that the participants might or might not have. Then, I learned about the questionnaires that are administered to the participants and their parents for different things like emotion regulation, anxiety, depression, resilience, and trauma exposure. Later in the week, I was trained on administering the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence, which is an intelligence test that we administer to all participants to make sure our subject pool has a an average or above the average IQ. The test takes 1-2 hours depending on the participant’s age, level of anxiety and other factors. It was my first time learning about WASI, and it was very exciting to see how a standard intelligence test is administered for different age groups. After the training, I administered the test to myself, and another intern later in the week. To be able to administer it to participants, I need to administer it to the lab manager successfully, observe a graduate student, score the test and discuss the scoring. I am looking forward to going through these steps and administering it to an adult participant, and eventually administering it to child participants.

Photo by: Rebecca Crystal

As a psychology major, I want to expand my knowledge of developmental psychobiology and psychopathology through understanding the current state and gaps of the clinical and developmental neuroscience literature. In the lab meeting, the clinical case conference and the journal club meeting that I attended this week, there were discussions on current projects, articles about related research on psychopathology and on cases of participants. It was amazing to be in these discussions with such knowledgeable students and Dr. Gee who is a very experienced researcher. I am looking forward to having these discussions every week, to improve my eloquence and discussion skills and to leading a discussion next week.

 My personal goal for this internship is to build on my existing communication skills with children, adolescents, parents, and adults. Through administering intelligence tests, helping anxious and non-anxious children, adolescents, and adults feel comfortable in the fMRI scanning environment,  and working directly with participants to ensure positive experiences throughout their participation, I hope to reach my goal of improving my communication skills with people in general.

 I have learned so much already in my first week and I can’t wait to learn more and apply my knowledge and training! It has been an amazing week and I’m sure the following weeks will be no less!

Selen Amado, ’18’