Because I’ll be done with community college this summer; in the Fall I will instantly turn into a Junior at a University. Just to consider which University to apply to, I am visiting Psychology Department pages of various Universities and looking over research interests of faculty. I wanted to find out if anyone on this forum has participated in research focused on working with veterans and combat related PTSD.
Do you know what role undergraduate students might have had? So far, I’ve realized that the Department of Veteran Affairs sets forth requirements for internships on the (USAJobs.gov) website. Internships requiring a minimum of an associate’s degree (undergrads), for engaging in social work with veterans, encompasses doing clerical work and answering phones.
I hope someone can share with me their experiences as a graduate student who delegated their secretarial concerns to an undergraduate student. Also, I’m hoping for stories from those who worked in this area as an undergraduate student.
I didn’t work in this area as a grad or undergrad (although I was interested in it!) but undergrads usually don’t do a whole lot of clerical tasks - there are lab managers for that. Undergrads usually do junior tasks on psychological research teams. Those tasks might include running participants (so greeting them, giving them consent forms to sign, explaining the study and helping them get the survey or started on the experiment), cleaning data (which is preparing it for data analysis), and maybe some preliminary or junior data analysis like descriptive statistics. They might sit with a grad student while the grad student runs stats and explains it to them. Undergraduates also often run literature searches and collate and annotate literature for the literature review part of a paper. Some talented undergrads might do their own analyses for an independent study or a poster for a conference, and some may author small bits of a paper.
The idea is for you to get an actual glimpse of what it might be like to do higher-level research in this area. Doing secretarial tasks like filing and such won’t really give you that, although on occasion you may be asked to do something like that.
The VA requirements for interns has nothing to do with what professors assign or ask their undergraduates to do.
Unfortunately, I am a prospective graduate student and have never done research in the area that you are interested in. However, I do know that Georgia Tech does have experience in PTSD research. In fact, the DoD is a major client of the the Georgia Tech Research Institute.