My experiences in Gonzaga’s Psychology department not only prepared me for a career in Psychology, it also taught me how to get excited about learning and conducting research on questions I thought were important. This first began when I was a research assistant and lab manager for Dr. Monica Bartlett, where I quickly fell in love with the field of social psychology and the important real-world questions we can attempt to answer with Psychology. After completing the department’s advanced research methods and statistics courses, I felt ready and prepared to pursue grad school.
I was accepted to Villanova University for their 2-year Master’s in Psychology program during my senior year at GU, and was lucky enough to receive one of the department’s graduate assistantships to fund my education and provide a living stipend as I pursued my degree. I went on to conduct research on a wide range of topics ranging from intimate relationships and auditory perception to my master’s thesis on the relationship between nationalism and race perception. My research and education has led to fellowships that have funded my summer work and travel, service awards, a position as a student editor of an academic journal, a semi-finalist position for a Fulbright grant to Germany, and the receipt of the UC system’s Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship to fund my doctoral degree.
I’m now in my first year of my PhD in Social Psychology at UCLA, where I study the way politics and prejudice influence the information we obtain from our visual perception of other people. With this work I hope to lay the foundation for novel interventions that reduce prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination towards racial and sexual minorities in the years to come.