My interest in clinical psychology in the counseling area has sparked my interest ever since I was in high school. Yet, in high school I was very indecisive of what I wanted to major in.
During my senior year, I took a psychology class and immediately fell in love. Although that may seem hard to believe because it is high school, and no one really falls in love with classes in high school. I can honestly say I cannot believe it myself either. However, I did fall in love with psychology class and it is possible to be in love with a class. I say it is possible because I never thought I could find a major that I felt so passionate about. I fell in love with the fact that I could learn about people, but most importantly I fell in love with the idea that I could help people facing adversaries within and outside of themselves.
When I began my undergraduate career at my community college, I took numerous classes relating to psychology as my electives such as social psychology, abnormal psychology, and many more. I enjoyed those classes tremendously. It truly made me have even more compassion for people and aware that we are all struggling with something within us. After three years at my community college, I graduated with my associates degree with a 3.3 GPA. I then moved on to pursue my bachelor’s degree at Northern Illinois University. At Northern, I took research methods and an industrial organizational lab.
At Northern, psychology majors must complete two labs to graduate. I am currently taking a personality lab this semester as well. Additionally, I decided to minor in family and child studies. I decided to minor in family and child studies because I love learning about family dynamics and about child development. For family and child studies, I had to take child development, a marriage, parent education, family financial planning, and parent-child interaction through birth to eight years old. For my industrial organizational lab, I had to do research on work life balance. The overall purpose of the study was to develop a new work life balance measure.
I had to implement a new measure which was to see if perceived organizational support and family role identity affected work life balance. The study was done using a self-report questionnaire. The participants who took the survey were friends and family members of the students in the same lab as me.
About 94 people took the survey ranging from ages 18 to 68 years old. Overall, the results indicated that perceived organizational support will positively affect work life balance. The results also indicated that if employees have a positive family role identity, it will lead to work life balance. Taking the industrial organizational lab was a lot of work and it was not easy. Even though it was a difficult class, I loved it. I love how challenging it was. Not only was it challenging, but it was fun to learn about work life balance because it was intriguing to learn about.
I also never heard of work life balance before and it was interesting to learn that there are better ways and things you can do to balance your life and work. It is still the beginning of the semester, so we have not any research yet in my personality lab. However, I am quite excited to do some research relating to personality.
I have done numerous research on graduate schools. However, I am highly intrigued by the magnificent reputation of Roosevelt University. I am requesting to be admitted to the Clinical Psychology-Counseling practice program because it will give me the opportunity to gain hands on experience since the program requires me to do field experience. I also want to gain more insight into clinical psychology and all the things that clinical psychologists do to help their clients. I hope you will give me the opportunity to continue my education at your outstanding institution. It would be a pleasure.
