Mentor Logs

Monday April 16th from 5:00 to 6:25
I met with my mentor again inside Adderhold Hall, this time to sit in on a graduate school class she's currently taking. The class had around ten or twelve people in it, and it was more casual than I was expecting. For International Creativity Week, the professor had decided to play a game in class. All of the grad students had come assuming the role of a famous psychologist and they went in turns asking the other psychologists questions about creativity and tried to guess what the answer would be. The students had to answer as if they were the famous psychologist, so it tested how much they knew about different psychologist's theories and ideas. I'd never heard of any of the psychologists except for Freud, but it was interesting to see how many different ways a concept such as creativity is looked at by psychologists and how many differing theories there are.

Friday April 13th from 10:50 to 12:40
This time I met with my mentor inside Adderhold Hall at the Torrance Center which is a small group of offices where research for creativity goes on. It's named after Dr. Ellis Paul Torrance who pioneered identifying and developing creative potential. He invented the Torrance test which is used in elementary schools to measure creativity. At first, my mentor showed me what she had been working on to celebrate International Creativity week. She is planning to put up posters around the department and pass out stickers for the psychology professors to wear to raise awareness on the importance of creativity in general.
After that she showed me the databases, called Galileo, that researchers at the University have access to and how to use them. If you're working on your dissertation to get a PhD. in psychology you would probably spend a lot of time using the databases to look up journal articles and either read them if the UGA has them online, or find them at one of the three UGA libraries. Most of the journals and books of psychology, my mentor said, are in the science library. Searching through the databases to find what you want can seem hard at first since there are thousands of articles that come up, but my mentor showed me how she narrows down the searches to make it easy to find the information she needs. We read through a lot of interesting articles about creativity. Reading through some of the articles showed me how interconnected everything is in psychology and how broad the field is, since a lot of the articles had advanced medical terminology.


Sunday April 8th from 3:00 to 4:45 p.m.

I met with my mentor at the Borders bookshop. To begin with she asked me a little about the project and I explained it, telling her how it was about a career in psychology. She told me a lot about her job as an educational psychology researcher at the UGA. I asked her how she became interested in psychology and she said that originally she had been a fifth grade teacher for 14 years. She was interested especially in creativity and gifted education. I found out that the education system and teaching in general is based on psychology. Educational psychologists are employed to study all the factors that affect learning like how information is presented and how people feel about their learning. Organizations such as schools, businesses, and the military all use this information to better teach and/or train their subjects.
I asked my mentor what she is currently working on and she told me she is currently researching the link between creativity and bipolar disorder and the neurotransmitters that are related to these creative abilities. The more in-depth research we have on this subject, the easier it will be for doctors to detect signs of bipolar disorder early in children who exhibit certain types of creativity that are linked to the disorder. She is also taking classes and working on her Ph.D. She said she would do less research eventually and become more of a professor of Psychology. I asked her what getting a Ph.D involved and she said you need to read extensively on the subject that you're interested in, meet others in the field at conferences to pick up new ideas, and do extensive research to eventually come up with a dissertation. She also told me about the new fMRI technology. With it, scientists are starting to map out the brain at a whole new level which could to lead to all kinds of breakthroughs in psychology and treatments for psychological diseases in the future. We arranged to have our next meeting at the Torrance Center at the UGA where she'll show me the databases she uses to research and analyze data.