Blog 9 - Advisory Prep 3

A common misconception is the topic of suicide is that speaking about it will cause suicidal thoughts or intent, however talking about it is the first step in preventing it from happening.

1. State whether or not you currently have a mentor, and what the status of your interview is with that person.

I currently my mentor  remains as Dr. Maureen Burney Ph.D., Director of Psychology at Chino Mental Health Associates.

My mentor and I have spoken of having our interview but have not had the chance to formally set a date, however if all goes well, I hope to have my interview done this weekend, as we have arranged a meeting for this Sunday to hopefully complete it.

2. Name the area or two you find most promising and explain your reasons.  

After several weeks of looking into different branches of psychology, I have been able to narrow down my topic to the area of suicide prevention, which is primarily due with my hopes of one day being able to save the lives of others through communication, listening and problem solving. Not only is suicide a concept that affects adolescents, but it is a topic that means different things to different social groups based upon ethnicity, nationality, race, religion, age, gender, sexuality and even social classes.

Suicide prevention seems most promising to me because not only is it a topic that I am interested in, but I have an emotional connection to this topic by helping my friends and relatives who have experienced suicidal thoughts, and it is for them that I am striving to understand why it occurs to begin with.  

3. What kinds of sources do you think will help you in the next month to gain more research depth?  Where will you go to get them?

The kinds of sources which I believe will help  me throughout the next month to gain more in depth research would have to be books from the CalPoly University Library and Articles from the University harddrive. journals from the journal of Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior which is a compilation of reports from around the world.

4. Write down a possible EQ.  

What would be the best approach in educating the public to be able to identify suicidal intent in peers, friends, relatives or others?

Blog 6 - Advisory Prep

The senior project has seemed like a breeze, however when it comes to typing out an interview, having god-like speeds would make it a lot simpler. 

1. What has worked well for you concerning senior project this year?  What has made it a positive experience for you?  

Throughout these few weeks of working on my senior project, so far what has been working well is my very lax and open ended schedule with my mentor, which is something I am very grateful for. As an individual, there are a lot of time restraints that I have and being able to work at a self determined schedule has been working wonders for me. Since my mentor works an open range of hours, coming in every week for 5-6 hours is a simple task I try to accomplish on Fridays when school lets out early.

Ultimately, what has made this project a positive experience is the relationship that I have been able to develop with my mentor. In complete honesty, I tend to be really awkward when I am really nervous and during my first several hours that I completed with my mentor I have been able to reach a variety of levels of comfort with my mentor. Since my mentor is really talkative, striking up a conversation is never that difficult and when I have something to discuss regarding my topic, my mentor is always eager to help and feed me information based upon either research or her personal experiences with patients.   

2. What are you finding difficult concerning senior project?  How can you adapt to make that portion work better for you?  How might the senior team help?

What I have personally have found most difficult concerning the senior project has been time management, which is something that I have to learn to balance on my own. There are times where I put a lot of time and effort into one small detail and forget about the big picture that my mentorship or research is suppose to be.

Separately, something I would recommend revising is the transcribing of the interview. I understand that the purpose of the transcription is to make sure that it is not plagiarized from the internet, however my interview was about an hour long and even with the use of dictation websites it was still excessively time consuming. Personally, if the transcription could have been simply a summary of the interviewee’s answers instead of the entire dialogue is the interview exceeds 20 minutes, it would have been a lot simpler, considering that we were also supposed to upload our interview onto our blog as an entry.