Speaker 1: I think another overall theme of the second quarter is that it finally felt like I was a graduate student. Welcome to Grad Life Grind. 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. My name is Arielle. I'm a first-year PhD student in clinical psychology and in this channel I talk about my life as a grad student and bring you information about the mental health field. In this video I just want to give a quick recap and reflection on my second quarter of year one in my graduate program. So my program is on a quarter system, which means that we switch to a new set of classes every 11 weeks or so. I don't know when you're watching this, but at the time of recording, it's April 2020. So we're in the midst of COVID-19 and my second quarter ended on a weird note because of the coronavirus. But I think that I've been really wrapped up in adjusting to that and I've forgotten to reflect on how far I've come and what I've overcome throughout the quarter that just passed. The point of my channel is to provide you guys with information about what it's like to be a graduate student at the PhD level and in the field of psychology. So this past quarter, I took five classes and those were psychopathology and psychodiagnosis, which is a class where we learn all about the different disorders, how to collect information about a client and provide a diagnosis, understanding the common symptoms that go with major diagnoses based on our diagnostic manual, which is the DSM-5. I also took research methods and statistics. I take a new level of statistics every quarter. So I was in my second quarter of statistics this past few months. I also took biological bases of behavior, which is exactly what it sounds like. It was basically the neural mechanisms behind behavior, different disorders, how the brain works and stuff like that. I also took affective psychology, which is basically psychology of emotion. And I also took clinical interviewing, which was basically an introduction to conducting clinical interviews, mostly focusing on an intake, which is the first session that you ever have when you decide to go to therapy. It's not exactly a therapy session, but it's designed to obtain as much information as possible about a new client so that we can decide how best to help them. So overall, I would say that this quarter went really, really well for me, mostly because in the first quarter, I was really just focusing on adjusting to graduate school, adjusting to living in a new place, and the amount of work that was required of me, adjusting to new people, and just a new environment overall. And in this quarter, I think I was already settled in and I could focus more on making the adjustments from quarter one to quarter two. Now that I knew the expectations, I knew the workload, I knew what worked best for me. I knew the new ways that I had to study. I was familiar with new methods of learning. I think that I was so much more prepared to tackle this second quarter. I also took a couple more classes the first quarter because my schedule was made for me by the university. For first-year students, it's always a lot of work. That's just the way that they design it, and I believe I was taking six to seven classes at a time during the first quarter, whereas I was taking five in the second quarter. So I felt way more prepared to manage the workload, but it was also just less work. I also came in with some expectations about the classes that I was taking. For research methods and statistics, too, I knew that I was going to have to learn how to code because we use this software called R, where we do all of our statistical tests. And you may have heard of R, or you may have heard of SPSS, which is another popular statistical tool. And in undergrad, I used SPSS. I also worked with Excel to do my statistical test, but I never worked with R, and I never coded before. So I came into the quarter being super nervous about that. So I sort of came in with the expectation that it was gonna be really, really hard for me, that I'm not good at math, that I don't know how to code, and I don't understand so much computer technology. But I actually was pleasantly surprised to find that it was not that bad. My professor was just really great in the way that he was able to break it down, and not just the coding component, but also writing up your statistical results, which was always a challenge for me. If you're a psych student, then you probably read a lot of scientific articles, but this class helped me to really understand every sentence in a result section, what it means, why it's important. So learning to write a result section was something that, in addition to coding, I also conquered. And it was just really cool to see that something that I was terrified about at the beginning of the quarter ended up being something that maybe I wasn't amazing at, but that I had a handle on by the end of the quarter. Obviously, there's still so much about statistics to learn, and there's so much about R to still learn, but I can remember throughout the quarter actually coding in class and being like, oh my gosh, I'm doing this. I'm running the stats tests. I'm getting results. I'm making graphs in R. I'm actually doing this, and I never thought that I was gonna be able to get it. So that was something that was really cool, and I think that in graduate school it's easy to get wrapped up in the amount of work that you have to do and not understand that there are so many small wins throughout the process because you're just learning so much and learning things that you never thought that you would be able to do. I think another overall theme of the second quarter is that it finally felt like I was a graduate student. So in the first quarter, I definitely felt like the work was new for me and more challenging than I was used to, but it still felt like I'm just a student and going to different classes and learning theory and learning foundational stuff. But now in my second quarter, primarily because I was taking clinical interviewing, I felt like I was really learning not just textbook stuff, but learning how to be a therapist. That's why I'm here. That's why I decided to pursue a PhD in clinical psychology. So taking clinical interviewing, even though it's just a taste of what clinical work is like, we started to learn how to ask different types of questions, how to reflect people's statements back to them, how to point out certain things, how to validate people's feelings, expressing and showing empathy, body language, and we also did video recordings. We would have to partner up and one of us would play the therapist and one of us would play the client and we had certain requirements that we had to meet to obtain all the information that is required in an intake. So we had to ask about family history, we had to ask about their presenting problem and all the symptoms that they were experiencing, getting information about their social support, how they cope, and also doing risk assessments. So asking them about suicidal thoughts or intentions, asking them about homicidal thoughts or plans, asking them about their substance use. So these are all things that were super new for me and super interesting and like I said, there's still so so so much for me to learn and I haven't even started seeing clients just yet, but getting the first exposure to both the clinical side of things and kind of delving more into research and stats, I started to feel like this is what I'm here to do. Like I really feel like a PhD student now. Another class that really challenged me was psychopathology and psychodiagnosis. I really loved the class because it was really walking us through the most common disorders and their symptoms and how to detect them and how certain disorders may present differently than what we think. For example, depression isn't always what we think it looks like or what we see in movies. It can look so many different ways, people can describe it in so many different ways and people's culture impacts the way that they present. So that class was great for me and obviously super informative, but what was challenging for me was clinical writing. It's very direct and to the point and you want to make sure that you're capturing what the client is saying and showing and not what you think. In this class, we had to basically write reports which are called vignettes and I'll probably do a video about vignettes because it's something that I'm sure all graduate students in psychology work with. But basically we had to write reports about mock clients that we were provided with. In those reports, they're super thorough and we have to talk about the diagnosis that we gave and why. We have to talk about the other diagnoses that we considered. We have to talk about what other questions we would want to ask to clarify certain things and that experience, that type of writing, is something that I've never done before. I found that some other students in my classes had written vignettes before, but it was new for me. And it was super difficult at times because they're pushing you to be as concise and thorough as possible at the same time. So even though this quarter revealed a lot of areas of growth for me and caused some discomfort at times, I ended up being really grateful for it because at the end of the day, that's why I'm here. I'm in graduate school because I want to grow and learn and do things that I've never been able to do before. And at certain times, I think it feels threatening to be criticized or critiqued or given certain comments on your work because if you are in a PhD program, you're probably a pretty high-performing student and you're used to getting all A's, especially in undergrad. You're used to being at the top of your class and the graduate experience is one that really highlights where you need to develop. I think in undergrad, students are trying to figure out what they're good at and then they pursue it. And in graduate school, you've already decided what you want to pursue. And so instead of highlighting your strengths, it's highlighting what you need to still work on. And that can feel really threatening to our identities as really intelligent people or really high-performing academics. Sometimes it can be kind of painful to not do as well as you thought you would, but graduate school is the place for that. It's the place to prioritize learning over grades and embrace the process instead of the outcome. And I think that that's really what I got out of this quarter. I'm hoping that the growth that came from it will carry me through the more challenging times that I'm gonna have throughout the year and the years to come. Overall, I feel like this quarter, this second quarter, had a really different vibe for me than the first one. I obviously was more prepared after having been through it once, but I also took advantage of the winter break that I had and really prioritized self-care and being with my family and kind of rejuvenating myself to really buckle down in the second quarter. And even though I went into the second quarter worrying about my ability to do certain things like coding, I also went into it excited because I was going to be doing things that I thought would be fun like clinical interviewing. And I think I came out of this second quarter so much more confident because I was able to make adjustments based on everything that I learned in the first quarter about navigating this whole experience. I think grad school has its moments where it feels super overwhelming, very stressful, a lot is coming at you all at once. So doing these recaps is actually really nice for me to reflect on how far I've come, what has worked for me, what hasn't, and what I look forward to. It also is really nice for me to just remember why I'm doing this and it just re-centers me on why I decided to pursue psychology, which I should really probably do a video about what led me into psychology or why I'm passionate about this field. I think my main takeaway is that graduate school is both grueling and gratifying. I think it's an experience that really tests you in a lot of ways and forces you out of the habits or beliefs about yourself that you had before and thrusts you into this new place that is scary, but also super rewarding. So if you're a graduate student right now, and you're struggling, I hope that this video reminds you that you're doing this for a reason and that it's worth it. And if you're someone who's aspiring to pursue graduate study in psychology, I hope that this video has motivated you in some way or given you some insight into what this experience is like. And no matter who you are, thank you so much for watching this video. My goal is to inform you, to inspire you, to spark an interest in you, and hopefully also entertain you. So I really hope you'll check back in next time. Hit the like button and subscribe to my channel and also share this video with someone you know.