Speaker 1: Welcome to Almost Dr. Armas. If you're new to this channel, thank you for checking it out and if you're already a subscriber, thanks for being back again. In this channel, I talk about my life as a grad student and bring you information about the mental health field. So it's been a while since I last recorded a video for you guys because I had the flu for about two weeks and I had no voice so I wasn't able to record unfortunately, but just wanted to give a quick recap of how my second quarter is going. For those of you that are new to the channel, I'm in a doctoral program for clinical psychology. I'm in my first year and I'm about halfway through the second quarter. So I'll just give you guys a quick update about how it's been going and in the coming weeks, I'll do some videos about how clinicians are trained and some of the cool things that I've been learning over the past few weeks. So first off, just an overview of what the quarter is looking like for me. So I'm taking five classes and those are psychopathology and psychodiagnosis, research methods and statistics, clinical interviewing, biological psychology, and psychology of emotion. So that first course, psychodiagnosis, is basically going through the diagnostic manual for mental disorders and we're learning about the major disorders and what the criteria are, how to diagnose them, what they look like, and things like that. So that's super cool. Research methods and statistics is intense. That's a five-hour class and I basically learn about different statistical methods and we're also learning how to run those in R, which is a coding platform. I didn't know anything about coding before grad school or before a few weeks ago, so that's been an experience, but so far it's going well. That course was something that I was really intimidated about coming into this quarter, but it's actually not that bad, especially if you have a good instructor and you're kind of on top of everything. So for those of you who have never coded before and you may be doing that soon, it's going to be okay. The other course I'm taking is called clinical interviewing. It's actually one of my favorite ones for this quarter. It's basically techniques for asking questions about a client's presenting problem and trying to get information about their history, what kind of symptoms they're having, or what their family history of mental illness may be, how they're coping, or how to respond to the information that we hear from clients in a therapeutic way. So that's been really, really cool. The other two courses are psychology of emotion and biological psychology. Those are a lot more science-y for me, so they're not my favorite, but they are kind of interesting. Psychology of an emotion is cool. As psychologists, we deal with people's emotions 24-7, so it's interesting to learn in the classroom about how we process information and emotion, how people interpret things that happen to them, and biological psych is basically all about the brain, which is intense. There's a lot more detail than I ever expected, so that's challenging me this quarter, but I'm getting through. So this quarter definitely looks different for me than the first quarter, not just because of the content, but also because of my schedule. All my courses are clumped into three days in a row, so that means two of the three days I have two classes back-to-back and I'm in school for basically seven to nine hours in a given day with a few breaks in between. So even though the content is different in a good way, the schedule is a lot more physically and mentally taxing than I was expecting. So it's nice to have classes three days in a row because that means you have four days in a row off, but it's turning out to be a little bit harder than I expected because even though you have four days off, you have to spend that time doing work. It's not like a four-day weekend vacation every time, but overall I would say that I'm enjoying this quarter more than the first one because of course I know what to expect, I know where things are on campus, I know people now, so it's less of a culture shock and adjustment period and more of just like staying focused and figuring out what works for me as I adapt to the course load for each class. And I definitely feel that compared to the first quarter, this quarter feels a lot more like grad school. I'm learning more to prepare for clinical training in the summer, I'm starting to really feel like I'm learning how to be a therapist, whereas the first quarter was sort of orienting me to grad school and to classes and it felt like I sat in the classroom a lot, whereas now even though I am sitting in the classroom, the types of learning methods are different. I feel like what I'm learning now is a lot more applied, which is great for me. I want to know how the things I learn are going to apply to the field and it's really exciting because I also get to share that stuff with you guys. I believe we're already in week five of the quarter, which is about the halfway point, so things are starting to pick up and midterms are coming this week, so it's going to get a little bit crazy, but I'm still excited, I'm still surviving, and I look forward to sharing with you guys what else happens. Again, I'm almost Dr. Armas. My goal is to inform you, to inspire you, to spark an interest in you, and hopefully also entertain you. Thanks for watching this video and I hope you'll check back in next time.