Opportunity to Work With People

¶ … opportunity to work with people who just lost everything they owned, you would know just how grateful you feel for having chosen a career in the field of psychology. Helping people in their hour of need comes with an amazing feeling of having succeeded as a human being. That's exactly how I felt when I was sent to work with victims of Hurricane Katrina at a Disaster Relief Camp. That experience only strengthened my belief that being in the field of psychology was the best thing that could ever happen to me. And what gives me even greater pleasure is the fact that I come from a minority group that is severely underrepresented in this field which accounts for lack of cultural diversity among psychology practitioner.

My interest in the field of psychology can be traced back to the times when I was still in high school and we heard about the unfortunate incident at Chernobyl. I was so deeply moved by the disaster and its impact on innocent victims that I began working on a project that aimed at providing humanitarian aid to families affected by the nuclear disaster. My efforts did not go unnoticed as I was ultimately chosen to go to Belarus to distribute medical supplies and other items. I was served as peer counselor during high school- a valuable experience that gave me an opportunity to reach out to people. During this time, I also worked as the President of the student association council and was considered worthy of a variety of awards and scholarships.

Even though I initially wanted to be in the medical profession and was not precisely interested in psychology alone, it was along the way that I developed greater interest in community service and psychology became the obvious career path. My community service experience includes participation in Alpha Psi Omega (community oriented service organization), and serving as the vice-president of the organization. Additionally, I was President of the Charles Drew Science Club for minorities. For these and other academic and community contributions, I received the President's Undergraduate Leadership Award for Community Service in my junior year, and the President's Undergraduate Leadership Award for Leadership in my senior year. In my junior year, I received the Katherine Vario Scholarship for pre-health studies.

These experiences strengthened my decision to pursue a career in health-related profession that mainly focused on serving the underserved community.

However it was not until I moved to California seven years ago that I realized that lack of cultural diversity in the field of psychology was actually hurting the victims from other ethnic backgrounds. For the past three years, I have been working with a minority group that helped me better understand the need for cultural diversity in this field. I have come to realize that there are strong traditional and cultural barriers that prevent patients of African-American background to open up and voice their feelings. They usually express their emotions believing that family issues and problems must remain within the family alone. A person from a different ethnic background may not be able to fully comprehend these psychological and cultural barriers and hence the need arises to have more people from minority groups in this field. The victims of other cultures suffer when the practitioner fails to understand their concerns, their inability to express themselves and their traditional beliefs.

In this capacity, I have worked with minority population using group therapy, and individual therapy and have utilized various modalities of Cognitive Behavior Therapy / Rational Emotive Therapy (RET). To meet the cultural-specific needs of African-American women I developed a Creative Art Therapy which helps women cope with stress. Through art, music and written expression the women gave voice to their pains, sorrows, and joys. They learned how to process their thoughts and feelings in a way that was non-threatening and liberating.