The service activities I have engaged in over my first few years at Agnes Scott College have been rewarding in terms of the relationships I have developed and enriching in terms of my own learning. Below I summarize the variety of ways in which I have been working on service as an assistant professor.

 

Service to the Students

 

Outside of the classroom, I have had the pleasure of advising and mentoring students in a number of different contexts. For the past two years, I have served as the faculty advisor for the Psychology and Neuroscience club. This involves meeting with the board members, helping with logistical and administrative tasks, and supporting these students by attending and participating in events such as “Fright Night” and the end of semester “Coffee and Donuts” each reading day. It is a joy to interact with students in a social environment and to engage in fun activities like decorating the halls late at night with cobwebs and helping the students setup their places to hide and scare patrons of the haunted psychology wing. I particularly enjoy engaging with both psychology and neuroscience majors as my own interests and scholarship span these fields. For example, I have served as a faculty judge for the “Scotties with Nerves” neuroscience symposium based on request from students in my social psychology course who are aware of my cross-disciplinary interests.

 

My mentorship of a diverse group of students also spans both formal and informal advising. My typical primary advisee load for psychology majors is around 20-25 students. I meet with these students one-on-one to discuss not only courses for the next semester, but their professional development, interests and plans after graduation, and overall experience and level of contentment at Agnes. I find this attention to student development beyond academic plans (i.e., their evolution as whole persons) as quite meaningful. I have written recommendation letter for students applying to internships, study abroad, Masters programs, PhD programs, and medical school. Beyond my official advisees, I meet with other undergraduate and graduate students to discuss career paths, employment opportunities, interview preparation, and to edit personal statements. For graduate students, these individual meetings further involve discussing outside readings, providing them with additional feedback, and creating an open space for self-reflection that supports their development as therapists in training.

 

Lastly, I encourage and enjoy mentorship of students in the development of their research skills and scholarly interests. For the past three years, this has involved mentoring research projects through the Psychology 400: Research Capstone and 440 Directed Research courses on topics such as emotional inhibition, emotion perception, empathy, the Strong Black Woman Schema, and the relationship of self-stability to attachment, emotion regulation, and self-identity. We have presented this research at the Spring Annual Research Conference (SpARC) each year as well as the Georgia Undergraduate Research in Psychology Conference (GURP) at Kennesaw State University. Currently, I am further mentoring eight students who are conducting research on the effects of trauma on self-development in my volunteer research lab (Ellie Carr, Kaelyn Dicks, Faith Lockhart, Meleah Oliver, MaryRose Schwier, J’Lynn Velon, Anise White, and Anna Woods). The aim of the volunteer lab is to develop larger research projects that will involve data collection over the course of a year and that will lead to publications in high-impact peer-reviewed journals.

 

Service to the Department

 

In addition to attending departmental meetings in the Psychology Department and the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program, I have enjoyed serving on search committees as a faculty member in both areas. This has included the Psychology Visiting Assistant Professor search (2022), Psychology Tenure-Track Professor search (2023), and the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Graduate faculty search (2022).

 

Further service work that I have enjoyed engaging in includes overseeing the learning assistants and coordinating research participation for the Psychology Department. The former activity involved selecting, hiring, establishing, and coordinating hours for our tutors during the 2021-22 academic year. I met with these tutors each semester to advise their work with students who are seeking support for Introductory Psychology, Research Methods and Design, Statistics, and APA style. I created a survey to assess barriers that students had to signing up for tutoring times and helped transition this work to the larger Resource Center for Math and Science (RCMS). Since this time, I have begun to coordinate student research participation for course credit in our Introductory Psychology courses (2023-present). This role involves surveying faculty in the department who are conducting studies each semester and coordinating faculty needs (e.g., number of participants needed, length of participation, timing of the study within the semester) with the announcement and crediting of student completion of these studies in the Introductory Psychology sections.

 

Service to the College

 

I appreciate being part of a vibrant college community whose values I share and which offers opportunities for student outreach and faculty governance. I have met with prospective students and families who are interested in Agnes and who are considering majoring in psychology. In addition, I have enjoyed presenting a mock social psychology class on helping/prosocial behaviors at Admitted Scottie Day in spring. The event allows me to connect with prospective students and to pique their interest in all the College has to offer in terms of coursework, research, and internships.

 

In terms of faculty governance, I have served as a curriculum committee member for the past two years. I have enjoyed the opportunity to learn about and participate in decision-making regarding approval of new courses, departmental changes, faculty hiring, general education requirements, and strategic aims of the College. This work has allowed me to develop an appreciation for the process by which we come to implement the principles and values that define our community.

 

I also appreciated meeting with the Board of Trustees last year to share what my involvement in teaching, scholarship, and service has looked like over my first few years here at Agnes. I was particularly excited to talk with them about my creation of a Journeys Puerto Rico course, which has allowed me to take inter-disciplinary interests in Latin American politics and environmental sustainability to design a course that contributes to the SUMMIT mission of experiential global learning and leadership. In particular, the course involves meeting with women leaders of sustainable agricultural movements in Puerto Rico and service learning activities that expose students to community-based revitalization campaigns on the island.

 

Service to the Profession

 

In addition to my work on campus, I am an active member of several professional organizations including the Southeastern Psychological Association (SEPA), American Psychological Association (APA), Society for Psychotherapy Research (SPR), and Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (STPP). I have also served as an ad hoc reviewer for several journals including Frontiers in Neuroscience, Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice, and Onyx Review. These experiences have given me a chance to explore various scholarly communities within which I wish to make further connections and contributions. For example, I seek to move into leadership roles in the teaching division of APA and in STPP, particularly around the promotion of inter-disciplinary teaching and scholarship in psychology and philosophy.

 

My work as a part-time clinician also provides me with opportunities for ongoing professional development that informs my teaching and scholarship. For example, I engage in training and educational workshops that keep me up to date on supporting the mental health of marginalized groups. Most recently this involved participation in a workshop for Ethical and Affirming Care for LGBTQIA+ Individuals. In addition to learning how to support individuals seeking gender affirming care through writing official letters that advocate for needed care, this training provided me with a wealth of information regarding safe mental health outpatient centers in the area for transgender and gender non-conforming persons. I have created a training presentation based on this workshop, which I bring into my counseling course as we confront the legal and political changes that are making it even more difficult for LGBTQIA+ individuals to receive the care they need.

 

In addition, I consider an important aspect of my development as a teacher and scholar to be the integration of decolonizing practices in my work. I have engaged this area of professional development through participation in an eight-week course on social justice pedagogies at Emory and through the decolonizing the curriculum workshop at Agnes. These experiences have informed the way that I think about pedagogy and design my course as well as the way that I pursue my research. I served as a faculty advisor for the Psychology and Neuroscience club as they organized a neurodiversity panel on diversity and inclusion in the sciences that brought faculty to speak on campus from Emory and Georgia State Universities. I am interested in presenting a workshop in the coming year on diversity and inclusion in research and the classroom based on these experiences at the upcoming Better Together Research Day—a collaboration between psychology departments across the Atlanta metro area.

 

Service to the Greater Community

 

My service towards the greater community involves public talks and an ongoing interest in working with Spanish speaking communities in increasing access to mental health and social services. Most recently, I have given invited presentations to a community philosophical discussion group in Atlanta: SPARK. These events have involved topics such as “What is Phenomenology?” and “The World of Jiddu Krishnamurti,” which are opportunities to speak to a wider audience about the scholarly work I am completing with students within the field of phenomenological cognitive science and its relation to emotional growth and human development. In the next two years, I plan to have the students who are completing Psychology 440 courses with me (Kaelyn Dicks, Meleah Oliver, MaryRose Schwier, and Anise White) present for this group. This will be a chance for the students to gain experience articulating their work for a public audience and to navigate the excitement and challenges involved in community engagement around scientific research.

 

Lastly, in the past year I spent one month in San Juan developing my Spanish languages skills and engaging in intercultural learning about the history, culture, and mental health needs of the Puerto Rican people. In addition to providing me with the opportunity to develop the Journeys course I am teaching this semester, this trip has allowed me to form connections with a community group on the island (i.e., Casa Pueblo: A Sustainable Self-Governing Community in Adjuntas) with which I hope to develop a partnership in the coming years. Their model of self-governance is one that shares features with community-based programs I have studied in Cuba, and I am interested in developing more involved collaboration with their group. This could potentially involve Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) that is integrated into a future course and/or research project I pursue at Agnes.