I Want To Be A Therapist

Graduate school is the next step in what can help me achieve my goal of becoming a therapist as there are no jobs for a mental health care professional who does not have a graduate degree. In order to make my dream a reality, I need more knowledge because being able to listen to someone and get them to open up and trust you is only one part of being a successful therapist. I will need to supplement my existing skill of getting people to open up to me with the knowledge of how to clinically treat them to help them overcome whatever challenges or trauma they have faced. Based on the work I did this summer, I am leaning towards wanting to work with teenagers because those were the students that I connected to the most. The psychology program

This entailed making a timeline leading up to the event, what they were feeling as it was happen- ing, different choices that they could have made, and then making amends with the people that they had hurt. This was a difficult conversation for many of the students to have and could sometimes last for multiple days, but they always managed to persevere through. One opportunity that I had to process with one of my students was after she had self-harmed one night. I had my reservations about dealing with a situation like this, as two of my friends in high school self- harmed and it caused a lot of drama that eventually ended our friendship, but I was amazed at how well I managed to handle it. Being able to have the experience of talking through events like this with that girl allowed me to gain a new perspective on an old event. This summer was an amazing experience for me, and helped me gauge whether or not this career was something that I could manage. I am especially interested in the Counseling Psychology program at University of Oregon because in addition to being a psychology major I have also been studying Spanish for the last four years that I have been at UC Davis, and your specialized program involving the Spanish language would mean that I could continue learning and using my second language.

Leve, Dr. Hawley McWhirter, and Dr. Stormshak all stood out to me. To start off I believe I would work well with Dr. Leve due to her involvement in investigating preventative intervention techniques in the foster care system and the juvenile justice system. Being able to understand how genetics and the environment interact and influence the behavior of adolescents is something that is imperative in order to help this community. Based on the work I have done this past summer and my general interest in working with youth I believe her and I would be a good fit together. Another professor whose research intrigues me is the work that Dr. Hawley McWhirter involving the Latino/a population and engagement in education. As I mentioned earlier I have been studying Spanish for the last four years and many of the classes I have taken have shed light on various aspects of Spanish, Mexican, and Latino/a culture. They are a population that has a strong presence within the country and that is not something that is going to change, so doing more research could only be a benefit. The third professor that I think I could work well with would be Dr. Stormshak because of her interest in different forms of intervention techniques while working with at-risk youth. This sounds similar to the work I did this past summer and that is what I would love to do in the future, so being