Gina Scarsella, alumna (class of ’11), Auburn, WA
After the long and anxiety-inducing graduate school application process last school year, filled with GREs, personal statements, recommendations, interviews, and all that fun stuff, I will be living in Seattle next year to attend Seattle Pacific’s Clinical Psychology (PhD) program! It will start in late September, so I am in the middle of enjoying quite a long summer in which I hope to do everything and anything before the next five or more years (which I’m pretty sure will not be filled with relaxing breaks here and there…there are a few puny ones, at least). I’m anxious and excited to live in Queen Anne, meet more new people, and spend even more of my time ruminating about psychology-related things! I am set up to have two mentors when I get there, Dr. Marcia Webb and Dr. Thane Erickson. Dr. Webb studies trauma, especially in women, and the stigmatization of many disorders from a spiritual lense; she has also created a scale to measure whether religion helps/hurts a person to cope through sufferings. She has a lot of experience being a Christian clinical psychologist, so I look forward to learning from her. As for Dr. Erickson, what attracted me to his studies was his focus on anxiety, as well as positive psychology. I wrote my thesis on these two topics and am excited to see how the ideas from positive psychology can be applied towards people with anxiety, particularly social anxiety. He just emailed me today in fact, to meet sometime at the end of the summer to talk over things for the fall! This makes me feel a bit better, and I have heard that they are all very supportive in SPU’s program; they want us to do well. I don’t know why that is a surprise, probably because I am so intimidated to do this program. But I got in for a reason! So I should focus on that a move forward boldly!
As for the rest of my life, I am hoping to go on a road trip in a few weeks, to the Grand Canyon and through the midwest, then up to Wisconsin and back this way through Yellowstone and stuff, should be chaos, but fun! I’m also trying to get to Peru with my best friend in late August…now that would be amazing!
Anyways, that’s where I’m at now! Hope you all are well! 🙂
Gina