Become a role model.
Andrew Keenan ’10
For my internship, I served as a child mentor at Valley Youth House in Allentown, Pa. I would spend time with individual children with a variety of mental health problems or issues and I would serve as a positive role model for them.
Through this internship, I learned to apply many psychological principles that I learned in my Psychology courses at Arcadia. Some of the principles I applied were successful, and some were not. Whenever I applied a principle and it did not work, the failure taught me to look more at the children as individuals and try to figure out why something like a reward failed to work with them. Then I would think about what else I learned at Arcadia, and try to apply that principle in order to get the behavioral response that I wanted. Essentially, I learned to think critically outside the classroom environment. Also this experience expanded upon my knowledge of psychological disorders, which I have learned about at Arcadia.
