Thanks to a generous grant from the Laspa family, I had the opportunity to spend my summer working in Yale University’s Psychology Department as an intern for Cognition and Development Lab.  I sought out this internship because it offered the chance to experience an intensive research environment and develop many skills important to an academic and researcher.  This opportunity filled my summer with opportunities to glimpse day-to-day life of a graduate student, as well as provide opportunities to strengthen my skills as a researcher.

My internship allowed me to experience all parts of research in developmental psychology.  Starting on day one, I was already cold calling families in order to secure participants for ongoing studies, who I would later help run through stimuli to gather data.  By the end of my first week, my co-workers and I had already developed and illustrated the first iteration of stimuli for a new study. Throughout the next few weeks, we were responsible for collecting the data for the same study. My research group’s regular trips to museums (the optimal location for gathering child participants and data) gave me invaluable amounts of experience interacting with child participants.  Dealing with the idiosyncratic explanations of a five-year-old can only be learned through the ample practice, as I learned from gathering data three times a week this summer.

Because of the high exposure my internship offered to participants, I also had the chance to focus on many studies and projects, not just repeat one procedure or task endlessly for eight weeks.  Instead, my days were mixed between developing online adult pilot studies, creating stimuli for children’s studies and analyzing and discussing our collected data relating to studies that varied in topic from children’s understanding of medicine’s efficacy in the body to understandings of how people gain knowledge and learn new things.  This variety kept my days interesting and prevented my days from involving simple rote memorization of experiment procedures or organizing and analyzing data endlessly. Even within our data collection trips, different families’ or children’s responses or behavior during our studies allowed for discussions of different issues or trends in the data, instead of just watching the same pattern of child behavior repeat itself daily without variation. 

I was most surprised by how much more prepared I feel to begin my senior thesis because of this internship.  Being able to observe all of the ‘tricks of the trade’ my lab used to engage with families of young children gave me a very strong blueprint of what does and does not work for collecting participants.  Various members of my lab group also offered to share and recommend resources and recruitment strategies should I need them throughout my thesis process, which really demonstrates to me just how collaborative and encouraging of an environment I spent my summer in.

Yale’s Psychology department also offered the unique opportunity for all the lab interns to attend a Professional Development seminar twice a month.  This seminar focused on the reality of applying to, getting into, and attending graduate school.  The program really helped me to reexamine why I want to go to graduate school, what is required of me to get there, and how I am going to go about achieving my goals.

I also got to spend time with real life graduate students.  They were always more than wiling to share their experiences and advice.  Hearing from people who had gone through the experience and lived to tell the tale has given me much more confidence in the fact that not only can I make it, but that with planning and hard work, I absolutely will.  All of these people who came into work every day, ready to do research and pursue knowledge, served as proof that my dream was more than just a dream, it was attainable and I could get there.  I will get there.