This is one of the capstone courses for students in psychology. All students have to complete a thesis if they're doing a fourth year a four year degree. So we work with community organizations to identify potential research projects. Those projects have been offered to the students as options. They pick the projects that they're interested in and they work together in groups on those research projects.
>> The partnership's important to me because as a research scientist up at South Lake, it's really important to have that sort of engagement between these clinicians, who see, they're the front lines. They see these things, but they don't have time and they frankly don't have all the research skills to analyze what they're seeing.
So I find having this community engagement, having these students come and, and be able to take, work with these clinicians, and take these front line observations and turn it into an actual research study. And we were going to turn this into pilot data, which we can then turn into writing for grants, which we can then turn into.
You know, all down the road this is actually going to be something that will significantly impact, I believe the community, not just around the Southwick area. But I think this is er, er, results that are generalizable, and it's that community engagement that, that's really important.
>> At Community Health Center Black Creek, we don't have resources to do research by ourselves.
And this is an opportunity for us to have students that are really involved in these issues helping us to, to get better, to improve the services, to improve the programs.
>> I have always been interested in social work and rehabilitation, and those kinds of fields, so I always wanted to know, like, how we could actually apply psychology to community resources.
>> It was an amazing experience, del, delving into research and also for me, an offshoot into graduate school.
>> Because the research that I did was so extensive that it would allow me an opportunity to publish my paper.
>> And I don't think I would otherwise had that experience.
>> Well, I really appreciated the fact that I got to apply the abstract concepts and theories that I learned in other psychology based classes and the statistical analyses that I've conducted in the past. To the practical application within community centers and with the partners in the community that we were able to work with.
>> It was a great experience to actually see ourselves implementing our education, whatever we have learned so far in three years, and implement it in a way that was helpful for a community agency as well.
>> We knew that this was all a large, interested, motivated group of keen undergrads.
But also we knew that the students would get a lot of it. We had a good idea, just from past experience that the students would get a good experience out of this.
>> Because it's meaningful for the students and because it's meaningful for the community organizations, it's meaningful for me.
And to feel like I'm contributing to something that matters for the students and for the community, is just a tremendous gift to me. I love this course. It's just really fun.