Hi, my name is Yinuo Liu, and I am a senior student at UNC Chapel Hill. I’m an international student and come from Hangzhou, China. I am double-majoring in Psychology and Computer Science, and my knowledge in both fields cultivates my passion for integrating new technologies into traditional interventions to improve their efficacy. I’m particularly interested in the child/adolescent psychotherapies and hope to further explore how internet services can be incorporated to enhance therapies’ accessibility and diversity their application.
In my junior year, I volunteered for the Brain and Early Experience Study as an undergraduate research assistant and interacted with families to gather data about child development. Under the supervision of Dr. Rebecca Stephens, I became familiar with the collection and processing of various data types like behavior assessment, actigraphy, and fMRI. I also accumulated experience working with children and their parents, and realized how important family dynamics are to the development of a child. I then joined the Famil-e FIRST Lab led by Dr. Deborah Jones and contributed to the Technology-Enhanced Helping the Non-compliant Child Program. The program incorporates a mobile application called Tantrum Tamer into the traditional HNC sessions and confirms that participants can benefit from this app and better maintain the parenting skills gained from the therapy itself. In the lab, I helped with the encoding of the child-directed play videos in HNC sessions. The technology-enhanced HNC project demonstrated to me the amazing interplay of technology and psychology and gave me insight into the particular area that I want to work on.
Outside of the lab and curriculum, I serve as a volunteering counselor at the Crisis Text Line, having conversations with texters in crisis and helping them calm down and come up with productive next steps. I gained professional crisis intervention training after being admitted to the position and practiced skills of empathy and validation in each chat. After over one hundred conversations with various texters, I further realized the limitation of these short chats and wanted to establish long-term therapeutic relationships to help clients struggling with all kinds of problems. I set up my goal of becoming a therapist, and my internship in the UNC Community Clinic offers me a closer look at the training and work of therapists.
The UNC Psychology and Neuroscience Community Clinic is dedicated to providing high quality and affordable psychological services to the community and campus while providing training for graduate students in the UNC Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program. Dr. Jennifer Youngstrom, my internship mentor, is the co-director of the clinic and oversees the internal operations of the clinic. As an intern of the clinic, I am responsible for a variety of tasks, including providing childcare for therapy sessions, checking voicemails and documenting contact information of potential clients, and tracking dates and length of attended appointments. I sincerely feel that as part of the team, my involvement in the clinic’s daily operations makes it possible to provide services for both the therapists and clients.
The most important part of my job is to organize and update psychological resources for therapists to use. I cataloged and summarized over 150 therapy video clips uploaded by clinic therapists for trainees to check. I reviewed and updated 300 pages of clinic disorder recommendations, replacing expired website links and adding new sections of educational videos and tracking apps. I also reviewed the referral resource sheet by updating emails and contact information of therapists and organizations outside of the clinic. By visiting and organizing these resources, I develop a good knowledge of skills and techniques used in therapy sessions while having a better sense of the responsibilities taken by a professional therapist, which fulfilled my expectations of my internship worksite.
Overall, I have had a wonderful internship experience at the UNC Community Clinic. I am extremely thankful for the guidance and support provided by my mentor, Dr. Youngstrom, and clinic teaching fellows, Yoyo and Chanti. I also feel grateful for the organizers of the Gil Internship Program – Dr. Buzinski and Emily. I will continue to utilize and expand the clinical skills and knowledge I gained from this experience throughout my academic and professional career.
