My name is Caroline Ransom and I am originally from Greensboro, North Carolina but I now love to call Chapel Hill home. I am a junior Psychology major and Religious Studies minor. I have had the privilege of working in Sara Algoe’s Emotions and Social Interactions Lab for the past year where we have explored the relationship formation patterns of undergraduate students. From my experience in this lab as well as the wealth of knowledge I have gained in my classes, I plan on pursuing a Masters in Marriage and Family Therapy after graduation.
I also have the privilege this semester of working as a Gil Intern at my worksite, the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, the 53rd Division of the American Psychological Association. I work remotely under the guidance of my mentors Lynn Canty and former SCCAP president, Eric Youngstrom. Alongside my mentors and other coworkers, I am working to make empirical clinical research more readily available to adolescents and parents. SCCAP’s mission is to integrate both scientific and professional aspects of clinical child and adolescent psychology in order to encourage scientific inquiry, training, and practice to serve those children and parents.
It is through this lens that I am working on SCCAP’s Effective Child Therapy website to ensure that the most recent empirical research is available to the public. To do so, I am reading newly released or updated research on effective child therapies for a variety of symptoms and disorders which I then incorporate into the ECT website. We are working to convert the psychological jargon of papers and make it easy to read and informative for all who enter our website.
I also have the opportunity to work with a local UNC-based club, Helping Giving Away Psychological Science (HGAPS) here on campus. HGAPS was founded and is led by my mentor, Dr. Youngstrom. HGAPS works closely with SCCAP to provide psychological research. Since I am in a unique position to work with both, I am serving as a point of reference for these organizations to work together. I am grateful for such an opportunity to work with both SCCAP and HGAPS in my position as a Gil Intern. I am looking forward to all I will learn about serving the public and providing vital psychological information to those in need during this internship.
