Gemma's internship

Hi, I am Gemma, a psychology student at the University of York, and I was a Summer Research Intern in the Psychology Department. I have an interest in mental health and am considering a career in clinical psychology or mental health research. I’ll be starting my second year at York in September 2023.

Following the University of York ending their partnership with the Laidlaw Scholarship, I was very lucky to be offered funding from the Department of Psychology to undertake a 5-week research internship with Dr Alex Pike (my supervisor) in July.

I was interested in the topic of catastrophising, and how that might relate to how well people integrate stressful life experiences into their overall life stories. I also wanted to investigate the relationships between these variables and socioeconomic status.

My research findings suggested that higher catastrophising correlates with reduced integration of stressful life experiences and lower perceived socioeconomic status, supporting my hypotheses and extending the current literature. These results showed no relationship between integration with stressful life experiences and perceived socioeconomic status. Next steps for future research would be assessing the impact of other factors on the relationship between catastrophizing and how people manage stressful life experiences, to allow for future therapeutic measures to account for the other linked mediating factors.

This was an amazing opportunity and allowed me to gain a real insight into the whole research process as a first year student. This started from the original brief, and was followed by learning how to complete an OSF pre-registration form (which can be accessed here), which encourages transparency in research. I also submitted an ethics application, and gained approval from the Ethics committee (Ethics Identification Number 20231). Subsequently, I created recruitment materials such as social media posts, in order to try to reach potential participants. The study was run online using Qualtrics, allowing us to recruit 170 responses within 2 weeks. In addition, during the recruitment period, I spent some time learning how to use R and Rstudio, which allowed me to complete my data analysis and report writing entirely in a reproducible R notebook. It was very exciting and satisfying to see the whole project come together in such a short space of time and the support I received from my supervisor was invaluable. I also had the opportunity to participate in a poster presentation at a small research conference at the University of York, this was wonderful and my first time presenting the research.I am very excited for the next step of this research project which is to publish the study in a research journal, which would be an amazing experience to learn about the publishing process and the overall academic world.

Overall, this internship has been an incredible experience and a marvellous opportunity to learn more firsthand about research, and I am definitely looking forward to doing more research-based things in the future.