Category: Berger Institute News

Berger Alumni Panel Discuss Graduate School

By Lia Fox |

On October 18, 2024 The Berger Institute invited Alumni Dr. Frida Liu ‘04, Joceyln Chang ‘23, and Isabel Mendiola ‘18 to hold a graduate student panel. Each panelist gave personal insight into their experiences obtaining their graduate degrees in psychology, medicine, and law.

Dr. Liu, an assistant professor at the University of Washington, shared her experience getting a PhD in clinical psychology. Chang, spoke on her journey applying and attending Loma Linda University School of Medicine. Mendiola, currently in her third year at Stanford Law School, informed students on her nontraditional path to law school.

The panel began discussing the skills they carried over from their time at the Berger Institute. Dr. Liu emphasized adaptability, saying that her undergraduate research experience taught her to do “good work anywhere,” a mindset that helped her succeed in graduate school at the University of Arizona. Chang built off of Dr. Liu’s points and expressed the importance of flexibility and being able to digest a challenging load of new information. Finally, Mendiola concluded that her biggest lesson from her time at the Berger Institute was the value of collaborative problem solving.

The panelists moved on to discuss the decision to take a gap year before graduate school. Dr. Liu, who attended graduate school directly after college, still encouraged students to take a gap year as she acknowledged the landscape for applying to PhD programs has changed since her time there. For Chang, taking a gap year allowed her to have real field experience that she believed to be beneficial for both the application process and also one’s own understanding of their future. Mendiola described how working with Teach For America and a juvenile justice nonprofit helped her gain clarity and confidence before applying to law school.

Additionally, the panelists talked about their experiences financing graduate school. Dr. Liu explained that most competitive PhD programs in the STEM field are fully funded through a stipend. However, both Chang and Mendiola’s noted that medical and law schools almost always require federal loans and grants. The panelists emphasized the importance of seeing graduate school as an investment, and weighing the potential cost and return.

Finally, the panelists discussed strategies to cope with the stress of graduate school. Dr. Liu advised students to take time to adjust to the new demands of graduate school. Chang echoed this and also emphasized the importance of building good coping mechanisms before entering medical school. Mendiola spoke on the value of defining personal goals and distinguishing what is necessary versus fulfilling in the process.  

 

Cara Hagan: Where Ritual and Civic Practice Meet

By Kaitlin Ip |

The Berger Institute teamed up with the Gould Center for Humanistic Rights to invite Cara Hagan to the Athenaeum on January 29th, 2024. 

Cara Hagan, Associate Professor and Program Director for the MFA in Contemporary Theatre Performance at The New School, describes herself as “a mover, maker, writer, curator, champion of just communities, and a dreamer.” She believes deeply in the transformative power of art, challenging traditional notions of time and physics in the pursuit of liberation. Hagan’s work spans various mediums, including live performances, on-screen films, art installations, poetry, books, and numerous other forms. She emphasizes that the end result is just as significant as the journey of creating the work itself. 

Cara started her presentation with a poem, “Welcome to you and your body,” setting the tone for an exploration of the relationships, interactions, and experiences of humans in various spaces. She accompanied the poem with an evocative short film “Cygnus,” portraying a solitary figure dancing gracefully in a shallow lake, symbolizing the beauty and movement of the human body. 

Following the poem, Cara prompted the audience to utilize their bodies together, starting with clapping, stomping, and humming, to create a symphony of sounds that echoed throughout the Athenaeum. Afterward, she invited the audience to collectively synchronize seven deep breaths, raising their arms over their heads when inhaling, and lowering them while exhaling in unison. These simple yet profound actions engaged the audience in a shared artistic expression, illustrating Cara’s concept of civic engagement through collaborative artmaking.

She illustrated the power of her approach with another example of her work: a recent art installation called the Altar for Black Lives, which emerged in her North Carolina community following the tragic murder of George Floyd and others due to racism. Through the act of memorializing the victims, the installation provided a platform for her community to collaborate, express, and envision a more peaceful and equitable future. 

Cara delivered a unique and interactive Athenaeum presentation never seen before. The Berger Institute and all members of the community who attended her presentation deeply appreciate Cara’s use of art and movement to engage others in reimagining the world we live in. 

Racism takes years off our lives, ritualism attempts to take some of that time back.

 –  Cara Hagan

Project STRIVE and Resilience

By Kaitlin Ip |

In a remarkable journey shaped by personal resilience, Director of the Berger Institute Stacey Doan has become a leading researcher on resilience, particularly among youth. Recently awarded prestigious grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global, Doan is spearheading resilience-based interventions for youth facing adversity. Her transformative research, specifically Project STRIVE, aims to evaluate the effectiveness of resilience programs, identify key factors impacting outcomes, and extend the benefits to historically underrepresented adolescents in underserved communities. This initiative, blending positive psychology and contemplative practices, has the potential to prevent mental health issues among historically underrepresented youth and illuminate risks in other minority groups.

Click here to read more about Dr. Doan’s research journey at CMC.

Talking about Open Science with Roman Briker

By Kaitlin Ip |

On February 8, 2022, amid the lingering COVID-19 pandemic, the Berger Institute invited Dr. Roman Briker to give an Open Science Zoom talk to members of the Claremont community. Dr. Briker is an Assistant Professor in Organizational Behavior & Human Resource Management at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Roman’s research interests are interactions between humans and AI and social and organizational hierarchies. 

In this talk, Dr. Briker discussed the reasons for the emergence and processes of the replication crisis of the early 2010s. He also stressed the importance of understanding open science and how it can be implemented in the scientific community and society.

 The replication crisis occurs when researchers cannot replicate or obtain similar results to the original, peer-reviewed study when repeating that study using the same methods and population. In the early 2010s, prominent researchers admitted to faking their data, and large-scale research projects revealed that most findings in psychological studies could not be replicated. At the peak of replication, Diederik Stapel falsified data on Microsoft Excel in his garage and published 59 journals and papers: they were all based on fabricated data. Given that the relevance and utility of science critically hinges on the trustworthiness of its findings, these developments constitute a huge burden for scientists and stakeholders wanting to apply scientific knowledge. 

To combat this problem, Dr. Briker introduces Open Science, which refers to an array of practices that promote openness, integrity, and reproducibility in research. The key elements of Open Science include public preregistration of the study before collecting data, replication of trials, uploading data to the public, and more. Because it is a more transparent and honest approach to publishing research, open science becomes a solution to reduce the problems of the replication crisis and simultaneously increases the quality and success of the findings. 

Attendees asked provoking questions in the Q&A afterwards and expressed gratitude for the opportunity to hear aboutDr. Briker’s expertise. 

“Science shouldn’t be a good story. Science should be about the truth.” – Dr. Roman Briker.

 Follow @bergerinstitute on Facebook and Instagram for future updates on events!

Life After Psychology

On October 29th, 2021, the Berger Institute for Individual and Social Development, hosted three panelists who pursued non-traditional career paths after earning degrees in Psychology: Faye Sahai, Haley Umans, and Matt Wallaert. Ms. Sahai is now a partner at Mirai Global, Managing Director at Vinaj Ventures, and an Advisory Board member for the Berger Institute.  Ms. Umans is a PhD candidate at Claremont Graduate University and the Director of Evaluations at LA’s BEST. Finally, Mr. Wallaert is the Head of Behavioral Science at frog, a consultancy firm specializing in designing and building experiences, products and businesses. 

Each speaker had valuable advice for students, and they elaborated on how psychology is an important part of their professional roles even though they are not directly working in academic or clinical psychology fields. Each speaker took a unique journey to arrive where they are now in their careers. Ms. Umans described how she chose the field of program evaluations because she felt that it opened a lot of doors for her, and that she could pursue many different directions with the experience. After realizing that she enjoyed research and working with children, she found that doing evaluations of programs designed for children gave her the perfect balance between research and community engagement.

Mr. Wallaert continued on a more traditional academic path by continuing to study psychology in graduate school, but he left that path to become one of the pioneers of the field of behavioral science. Working in the field of technology, his training in psychology and human behavior has been especially helpful in the field of technology. Mr. Wallaert described how the focus of his work differs from that of academics. For example, rather than wondering if a p-value is significant, he says, his work is concerned with understanding how technology design may impact the risk to return ratio.

Ms. Sahai explored many different careers and companies before finding her passion in venture capital where she is now. She explored traditional consulting and non-profit work, and utilized every skill she learned in each position as she continued through her career path. Ms. Sahai also highlighted the importance of understanding behavioral science in her work, explaining how it shapes many of her decisions on the job.

Attendees gained useful insights from the panelists, and expressed gratitude for the opportunity to hear their stories. 

 Follow @bergerinstitute on Facebook and Instagram for future updates on events!