Meet Our Student Representative

By now, most of you should have received the Fall issue of Feminist Psychologist. For that issue, I collaborated with other students to share with you advice points on how to thrive in your first years of graduate study. This topic came following your requests when I emailed the student email list. In the next two issues of Feminist Psychologist, I will collaborate again with other students to present interviews with prominent feminist and womanist psychologists of color on their academic, career and personal journeys to success in our field. Lesbian and bisexual feminists’ and male feminists’ perspectives will also be shared to increase our understanding of how we as future leaders can negotiate our identity, culture and feminist ideals in the development of our careers in psychology.

I am so grateful to be in the position to serve you as the Student Representative of the Society for the Psychology of Women. I hope to represent you well and share with you information on women’s issues and social justice, as well as on the topics that matter most to our division. I am currently beginning a project entitled “Special Concerns and Success Strategies of Women, Students of Color, LGBT and Multi-Cultural Students in Psychology Graduate Programs” which will survey students from our Division as well as from Divisions 44 and 45 in order to better understand the challenges that we encounter and the coping and self-care strategies that we employ to find personal wellbeing and academic success. This project is currently being reviewed by my program’s Human Subjects Review Committee and by APA for a CODAPAR Interdivisional Grant. I am excited to work on this topic with the above-mentioned student populations, since it has been mostly absent from previous literature. Other projects I am now involved in include HIV/AIDS prevention among Latino and African American youth and among African American church members, resiliency and healing factors following sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and community violence, and recovery from bi-manual coordination deficits and neurological white-matter damage in children following traumatic brain injury.

I would be happy to correspond over email if you have questions and would love to learn about your current projects and interests! In addition, I would like to know more about what topics and issues you would like to see included in Division 35’s student programming at the APA Convention this year in Orlando. I truly appreciate everyone who has already emailed me with requests for programs on mentorship, collaborations with international psychologists and other APA divisions, on how to get involved in APA leadership, and on thriving advice for school and personal success. Please feel free to contact me with additional programming ideas or if you have any advice tips or information that you would like to share with our student membership. Here’s to a New Year of growth, achievement and well-being!