This past semester I’ve had the absolute pleasure of participating in the College of Liberal Arts Psychology 200 Peer Mentor Internship. This internship undoubtedly benefited my future career in numerous ways. Firstly, meeting with each mentee taught me about the importance of collaboration, rapport, and trust amongst other things. In our meetings, I aimed to help them develop a growth mindset, provide them with support and validation, connect them with resources, and overall aid them in adjusting to our campus community. Additionally, I tried my best to create a safe environment for my mentees and to destigmatize asking for help. All of the above is applicable to my future desired career as a psychologist as I will need to do the aforementioned with future clients just as I did with my mentees. Furthermore, engaging in outreach and advocacy is what the field of psychology is about. This internship, especially the aspect of it where I met one-on-one with students, was truly great preparation for meeting one-on-one with future clients. It immensely improved my interpersonal skills, and I will forever utilize all that I have learned moving forward.
Seeing as I am a psychology major, my internship definitely tied into my area of study. More specifically, my internship allowed me to mentor for a class that beginning psychology students take. In doing so, I became familiar with psychology-specific resources, popular psychology topics (graduate school, research labs, etc), and met many faculty members from the Psychology Department. It’s been a great networking opportunity as well as an immeasurable learning experience that overall taught me more about psychology as a major and as a profession.
My internship didn’t explicitly state any educational requirements other than being in “good academic standing,” which I do believe is important in order to be successful in this internship. Additionally, it’s important to be organized, punctual, resourceful, understanding, and involved. As mentors, we are not only responsible for modeling the above positive behaviors but for helping our mentees who often struggle in those areas. That being said, it would be hypocritical and ineffective to encourage them to work on their time management skills and then be late to the meeting ourselves.
Although being a Peer Mentor isn’t a career, I am interested in a similar career of helping others through psychotherapy. Completing this internship and being able to be there for others in a professional, appropriate, and impactful way only further confirmed my desire to remain in a field where I get to interact with and help others. I’ve loved watching my mentees grow, become more involved, utilize the resources we talked about, and become overall happier more informed students. I’m honored to have known them and been a part of their journey! I genuinely can’t wait to see what they do!
To pursue a position in the psychology field, I will need to go to graduate school. I plan to earn my master’s or Ph.D. in order to be qualified to assess, talk with, and treat patients. To get into graduate school, I will need to gain much more relevant experience to make me a competitive applicant. I plan to take a gap year specifically to build up my CV, especially to gain research experience.
One piece of advice I have for any incoming interns is to be patient and treat your mentees with kindness! In the PSY 200 Internship, the students are mostly freshmen and sophomores and are just getting the hang of things. They may be more prone to missing meetings, not checking their email, not understanding the requirements, having a lot of questions, and needing a lot of help. However, they are doing their best and it’s crucial to be understanding while they are in this adjustment period. You may be the first impression they have of UNLV/UNLV staff, so you want to ensure that you are creating a welcoming environment that makes them want to pursue other help/resources :)
