Liberal Arts Voices

Read the perspectives of our current students

Liberal Arts Alumni Networking Event – A Student Reflection

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Alumni Networking Event

On March 21st, I went for my first ever networking event – Liberal Arts Alumni Networking. Networking is a word that almost everyone has either heard or used. It is thrown around casually but no one actually realizes just how important it can be or even how scary.

The idea itself sounds simple; meet people, talk to them, ask them questions. While this is the basic idea of networking, there is a certain etiquette that needs to be maintained, and for those who don’t already know how to behave professionally yet casually at the same time, this can be extremely intimidating.

Luckily we had Randolph Houston, current President of the Liberal Arts Alumni Society Board, talk to us briefly before the event began. He gave us some very helpful tips and explained how we should talk and how we could make an impact on someone and get them to remember us. It was very insightful and reassuring and definitely calmed my nerves.   If you missed this event but are looking for networking tips, check out this video interview with Randy, where he shares lots of useful advice about how to network.

Some of the important tips he shared with us were:

  • Always maintain eye contact when talking to someone.

  • Even though you are trying to get people to remember you, it is important not to make yourself the center of the conversation.

  • If you do not remember someone’s name, do not panic. That is what the nametags are provided for.

  • Have a firm hand shake.

  • If you have any unique talents or interests, you should try to mention this because it helps people to remember and identify you.

  • Most importantly, establish common ground and build the conversation from there.

After Mr. Houston gave his speech, we dispersed into small groups and began to speak to other alumni who were present there that day. Being a psychology major, I bee–lined to the little table that had a sign reading “Psychology.” Once there, I had the wonderful opportunity to speak to John Erikson and Susan Lutz. They both are practicing psychologists and had a lot of wonderful advice and information to offer. The most important thing I realized after talking to them is that you don’t need to have only one job once you start working. Mr. Erikson has his own private practice but he also works at The Meadows, a psychiatric center, as a counseling psychologist. So if you have two dream jobs, it is possible that you will find a way to do both.


Overall, the networking event was a great learning experience. Even though initially I was apprehensive, nervous and not at all dressed for the event, I came away happy, confident and a lot more knowledgeable. I now know how to present myself at such events and how to keep conversation flowing. I also gained a lot of interesting insight into the world of a practicing psychologist and know a little more about what to expect once I start working.


I hope to see more of these events in the future and hope to see more liberal arts students attending them!

My Internship with NeuroBehavioral Associates

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Diana Langburd This past summer, I had the opportunity to intern for Dr. Culotta at NeuroBehavioral Associates. My time at NeuroBehavioral Associates was one of the most enriching educational experiences I have taken part in. NeuroBehavioral Associates is a neuropsychology office in Columbia, Maryland, that works with children, adolescents, and adults who deal with neurobehavioral and other cognitive disorders.

Three days a week over the course of a month, I commuted from Frederick to Columbia to work as an undergraduate intern at the office. My daily tasks included observing clinical assessments with Dr. Culotta and other colleagues, and the administration of neuropsychological testing. Additionally, I attended IEP (Individualized Education Program) meetings in which I observed Dr. Culotta, various therapists, and other school board administrators interact with families to acquire funding for special education programs.
    
Aside from learning about neuropsychology through observing the clinical environment and meetings with patients, I also had the chance to learn about the field by reading through many of Dr. Culotta’s books and PowerPoint presentations. By reading through these presentations, I learned a wide variety of things–from how the dyslexic brain works to neurological changes in the brain during adolescence.

While at NeuroBehavioral Associates, I also had the opportunity to work on a research project to prepare a paper for submission to the Eastern Psychological Association’s annual conference in New York this March. Dr. Griffith and I examined the literature regarding symptom magnification, malingering, and adolescence. This is an important issue given the rates of juvenile crime and emerging research regarding the teen brain.
 
My internship with Dr. Culotta and NeuroBehavioral Associates taught me a lot about the psychological field and helped me further map out my future career plans. By observing and working with families, children, and colleagues, I have gained knowledge, communication skills, and advice that will help me later in my educational and professional career.

Further Examining Leadership and Innovation

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I recently posted an entry referring to my experience in Dr. Sam Hunter’s Leadership and Innovation Lab. This lab is categorized under a larger field known as Industrial/Organizational Psychology. I/O psychology is the study of human behavior in the workplace. In addition to an experiment relating to leader errors, I also participated in a research project in which all of the lab members worked to code books for leader errors. We searched through over one hundred biographies on political leaders for errors. Some of the leaders included Theodore Roosevelt, Lenin, and Mussolini. While it is no surprise to most people that political leaders make mistakes, it was interesting to discover how leaders make an error and ultimately react to that error. Viewing leader errors through two different channels has shown me the value of studying this occurrence.

In addition to the projects that we work on in the lab, the graduate students have also been especially encouraging in preparing us for graduate school and teaching us about the world of research. The graduate students read and revise personal statements and CVs of lab members several times each semester. For me personally, I was unsure of how to write a personal statement before entering the lab but with the help of a few graduate students, I now have a more professional personal statement. Furthermore, graduate lab coordinator, Lily Cushenbery, hosts a graduate school night every year for all psychology undergraduates to help prepare for the transition to graduate school. A PowerPoint of the presentation can be downloaded here. Also, two of the graduate students have been assisting me in starting my honors thesis project on identifying ways to make teams more creative.

Although I have only been in the lab for one semester, I feel that I have learned an extraordinary amount about I/O psychology and the importance of the field in a short period of time. My experience in the lab has fostered my interest even more and I look forward to working on more projects and an exciting future in I/O psychology beyond the lab. Although leadership and innovation still excite me as a much as the next person, I doubt that I will ever be able to view them in the same manner again. While all of us can enjoy the luxuries of a great leader or a groundbreaking innovation, there is much more to be discovered than meets the eye. Working in the Leadership and Innovation Lab has given me a fresh perspective on two prevalent concepts and has shown me the value of digging a little deeper for knowledge.

Taking a Closer Look at Leadership and Innovation

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Psychology has been of great interest to me for about five years. While psychology is an interesting subject, it is also very broad and one can specialize in a number of different subfields. I discovered Industrial/Organizational Psychology in an introductory course in spring semester of my sophomore year. Loosely defined, Industrial/Organizational Psychology is the study of human behavior in the workplace. While I am interested in most aspects of psychology, I/O psychology particularly appealed to me due to its importance and practicality. This enthusiasm for the field ultimately brought me to working in Dr. Sam Hunter’s Leadership and Innovation Lab.

Leadership and innovation are words that we seem to encounter on a daily basis through a variety of means. They are, in a sense, catchwords in the collective conscience that play on people’s creative senses. This is best evidenced by company slogans such as Toshiba’s, “Leading Innovation,” or simply, 3M’s, “Innovation.” Using these catchwords can get people excited about a company or a certain product. Leadership is also at the forefront of our minds at all times. It would be equally surprising to see one of those clich�d motivational posters featuring the word “LEADERSHIP” accompanied by an inspiring photo and encouraging quote in an elementary school as in a CEO’s corner office. While the common image of innovation may be a product that will revolutionize the world and leadership may be portrayed as a great president leading a nation to supremacy, it is also important to look at these ideas within the daily operations of organizations. How does a leader react to an error he or she has made? Can conflict be beneficial for a team pursuing a creative outcome? Are there certain types of people that are more vulnerable to a destructive leader? These are some of the research questions that we tackle in Dr. Hunter’s Leadership and Innovation Lab.

One of the projects I worked on last semester was an honors thesis project supervised by Andrea Hetrick. The project pertained to leaders reacting to their own errors. In this project, each participant was told that he or she is the manager of a local department store and has made an error that his or her followers are upset about. The “manager” then discussed the error with a subordinate (played by a confederate) in his or her “office”. As a psychology major and participant in a handful of studies, I can say that this experiment is as real and as interactive as they come. For nearly all of the studies, the “manager” took the role seriously and gave a genuine answer that one would expect if the situation were to actually take place. I enjoyed seeing the different strategies that students used to react to the errors.

Working in an I/O psychology lab has given me a better perspective of what I/O psychologists do and why it is important. It has provided me with an opportunity to conduct and learn more about research. While one can learn about a subject from a lecture or a textbook, it is more inspiring to actually participate in the research itself. Next week, I will post an entry pertaining to another lab project and more about the lab in general.

What a Difference a Year Makes

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I am intrigued by our new electronic sign and thought I would contribute to its content by welcoming our new Liberal Arts students who joined us this summer and updating the Liberal Arts family on the Moore building project.

What a difference a year makes! At least that’s true of our Moore building project, the expansion and renovation of the home of the Department of Psychology. During the past year, workers have demolished all but the steel frame of the north wing of the original Moore building, and constructed an addition on the north side that stretches the entire length of the original building, seamlessly connecting the structure of the original smaller wing to the extensions on both the west and east of that wing.

When completed, the addition will provide 50,000 square feet of new laboratories for psychology faculty and students, offices for faculty and graduate students, new undergraduate advising facilities, spaces for students to study or relax, clinical facilities for the psychological clinic, and a home for the Child Study Center. The building is scheduled to be fully enclosed within the next week or so and the project is still on target for completion at the end of 2011. We anticipate that part of the department will move into these new quarters in time for the spring semester 2012, while other faculty will exodus from the original building and renovation will begin there. It will be 2014 until all psychology faculty and students will be reunited in their long awaited new home.

You can view the slideshow below to see the progression of the Moore Building construction project:

From DUS to Research Psychologist

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At the conclusion of my Sophomore year, I declared my major in Psychology. After having explored what felt like dozens of majors, I had finally found one that I was excited about. Moreover, I knew that it was time to begin thinking about how I would fulfill my honors college requirement of a senior thesis. In the fall of my Junior year, I met with a number of professors doing research in psychology. After much consideration, I chose to complete my thesis in Professor Keith Nelson’s lab. His lab is devoted to research in the cognitive developmental area. Studies done in Prof. Nelson’s lab usually investigate language and cognitive developmental interventions for typically developing children as well as those with autism, all of which interested me.

My first semester of research in the lab was spent doing transcribing and coding for a few of the graduate students’ projects. This gave me the basic experience necessary to understand how research at a major university works. I also worked with Professor Nelson to conceptualize a research study for my senior thesis. For my research study, I would use a computer program developed to teach young, typically and atypically developing children their native language or one of several second languages. In the program, a student creates a sentence from a list of words, after which an animation of the sentence is displayed. However, instead of using this program on its intended audience, I would use this program to teach simple Swedish words and phrases to English speaking college students. Moreover, I would speed up or slow down the rates of presentation within the program to see how participants learn a new language at varying presentation speeds. Furthermore, working memory scores would be compiled for each participant to see the relationship between working memory, rate of presentation, and second language acquisition.

The conceptualization of a research study is far from the most difficult aspect. Putting my study together took a number of steps. First, I had to get approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB), an organization whose job is to ensure that research is ethical and safe for those involved. Then I had to select and gain access to the proper materials with which to test my variables. Most importantly, I had to apply for funding before I could purchase any materials or have money for compensating subjects. Next, I had to post flyers around campus to recruit participants. Finally, I had to train other lab members in the proper procedures for running subjects. Without guidance from the graduate students working in the lab, I would have been clueless as to how to complete any of these steps.

At last it was time to begin running subjects in my study. I chose to run 24 participants through 8 sessions of the study. While the hours spent running subjects through the study were tedious, it was great to work one-on-one, teaching intrinsically motivated students a new language. This was my favorite part of the entire experience. On several occasions I passed a former participant somewhere around campus only to hear them yell out a “pojken!” or another Swedish word they learned in the study.

While I have just finished collecting data for my senior thesis, the hardest part is about to begin: the writing. Along with the written thesis comes the presentation of my data at the Undergraduate Exhibition in April. To think that a few semesters ago I didn’t have a major is shocking. My undergraduate research experience has taken me from being a clueless new Psych student to feeling like a full-fledged research psychologist. While I am not sure where I will end up after graduation, I know for sure that my research experience is going to be invaluable.

Crossroads of Religion and Science

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Agora
Originally uploaded by LAUSatPSU

In the December issue of Agora, Penn State’s first and only liberal arts journal, one piece has drawn considerable attention from the publication’s devout readers. In “Religion: A Cerebral Mix Up?” Jenny Lorenzo (Senior, Biology and Psychology) discusses the possibility that neural activity plays a large role in constructing one’s sense of a “higher being.”

Lorenzo was kind enough to sit down with me in the HUB one afternoon to discuss her research in more detail. As mentioned in the first half of “Religion: A Cerebral Mix Up?,” modern neuroscience shows that the temporal lobes of the human brain play a big role in determining our “sense of self.” Mild trauma is known to create a disruption between the left and right sides of the brain, and renders each side incapable of recognizing the fired neurons of the other. Lorenzo explains that these disruptions cause the left side of the brain to perceive the right side as a separate entity, another being, and vice versa.

Lorenzo was interested to find that Micahel Persinger, a researcher in the field of neurotheology, which explores the relationship between the brain and religion, has successfully created a way to simulate a spiritual experience. Persinger, along with other scientists, constructed a device known as “the God helmet,” which stimulates a person’s temporal lobes with electrodes in order to elicit a response. Most importantly for Lorenzo, Persinger’s experiments with the “God helmet” showed that both self proclaimed atheists and religious participants experienced a presence of another being when placed in a solitary, dark room while wearing the helmet, proving that stimulation to the temporal lobes created spiritual experiences.

After reading the article and discussing it with Ms. Lorezno, I was left with a few questions. Are these findings enough to discredit the notion that there is an omniscient, supernatural authority? Have we falsely been led to believe in God(s) by our own minds? Lorenzo doesn’t think so. When I asked her whether or not she believed that God is real or just a “cerebral mix up,” she replied “There’s a gray area. Both sides are arguable, but I don’t think religion can solely be explained by science.” Neither do I. What do you think?

You can read past issues of Agora by visiting our website. 

Moore Progress: A Skeleton Appears

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Moore Building on August 21
Originally uploaded by LAUSatPSU

Visible progress on the Moore project has been substantial during the past month as the “bones” of the north wing have emerged.  All brick, mortar, and cement blocks have been removed from the facade of the north wing, exposing the steel structure underneath.  This structure will serve as the central core of the new addition.  Adhering to the timetable set for the construction, workers have also excavated the foundation for the part of the new building to the west of the north wing and have begun work on the excavation to the east.  Soon we’ll be able to see the entire outline of the addition.

After a summer laying utilities and dealing with sinkholes, workers restored the alley between Nittany Parking Deck and the Moore building in time for the return of students and the beginning of classes, easing access around the building.  However, the parking lot to the north of the building has now been closed.

See the slide-show below for photos of the Moore construction project:

Meet the Summer 2010 Liberal Arts Student Marshal

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The College of the Liberal Arts has chosen Allison Baker as the College Student Marshal for the summer 2010 commencement ceremony and she will receive her diploma on stage on behalf of all the students in the college. Allison chose Jose Soto, Assistant Professor of Psychology, to accompany her as her Faculty Marshal.

Allison is from Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and is the daughter of Tracey Allgier-Baker and Paul Baker. A Schreyer scholar, she will graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology and a minor in International Studies. Allison was the recipient of the President’s Freshman and Sparks awards and an Academic Excellence Scholarship. She presented her thesis research at this year’s Undergraduate Research Exhibition and won Honorable Mention for Information Literacy. Allison studied abroad in Belgium, was a research assistant for several faculty members, and completed an internship with the Center for Mental Health at Quittie Glen in Annville, Pennsylvania.

The summer undergraduate commencement ceremony is scheduled for Saturday, August 14, 2010 at 10:00 a.m. in the Bryce Jordan Center.

Moore Project Construction Begins

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Moore Construction June 18
Originally uploaded by LAUSatPSU
We all celebrated the formal ground breaking for the Moore building project earlier this month. After years of planning, work is beginning on a wonderful new facility for our students and faculty in psychology. More than 15 percent of the College’s majors are in psychology along with several hundred more who minor in the field and thousands who take one or more psychology courses. Several hundred undergraduates work each year with psych faculty in their labs and more than 100 graduate students have offices and lab spaces in the building. So creating this new facility will benefit many hundreds of students across the college and university.

Even before the formal ceremony, work began across the street, setting up the construction staging area in front of the Ford building (the first photo). Unfortunately, the residents of that building will be looking at a disturbed “front yard” for months and years. After the public attention of the ground breaking, the real work began. The north wing of the current Moore building will be stripped to its structural frame and the new building built around it. The attached photos illustrate work beginning on June 7, the Monday after the ceremony, as trees were cleared for the work. The photos also show the boarding of between window spaces, in preparation for the demolition, and then preparation for new infrastructure to be laid on the west side of the building.

For those who enjoy wrecking balls, the next stage will involve some demolition.

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