PSYC 492: Internship in Psychology (Spring 2021)

For my internship/ research degree requirement, I was part of a research lab in the psychology department. The lab was specifically called Therapy, Research, Anxiety, Clinical Science Lab (TRACS). I worked along with two other students and a professor for a semester. We met each week during the semester for 30 minutes to an hour and discussed our assignment for the week. Due to covid, we had to put the labs past research on pause and we focused on our next research project for the upcoming school year. Because of this, our weekly tasks consisted of research, reading scholarly articles, and brainstorming ideas. We narrowed our focus on the topic of intolerance of uncertainty and after the first couple of meetings decided to tie it in with covid-19. Specifically, how people reacted to certain situations when the level of stress was high/ low and whether or not the risk was explicit in implicit. This guided our last month of lab meetings and we decided to launch a pilot study in our professor’s health psychology class. Each lab member drafted one to two vignette scenarios that we discussed for two weeks in our meetings. After careful revisions, we made a survey that could be easily distributed to the students. While also working on this, we were writing up our IRB form so we could have this study up and running in the fall with new lab members.

I learned a lot working in this lab even though it was not what I expected. I thought I would be working with participants and furthering the research they had already started. But again, the virus changed how we approached things. Becasue of this, I was able to start the process of a research study from the beginning which is going to be valuable as I go into the fall semester and return as a research assistant. I will be the only returning member and will luckily have this experience to help guide me and help our new RA’s. I enjoyed working with other students as we brainstormed ideas. I learned a lot from the older members and I am grateful for all the work they put into the lab. Additionally, my knowledge in this field of clinical research grew which was one of my intended goals of being a research assistant. I want to pursue a career in clinical psychology and being an RA I believed would help increase my knowledge of the field and I would gain hands-on experience that would prepare me for graduate school. I can honestly say I have successfully accomplished these goals and I am excited to continue working on them.

Below are the two vignettes scenarios I came up with. These were geared towards Longwood students specifically. However, we did end up editing them for the final survey so they could be distributed to a larger audience outside of campus.