Emily Meadows credits her Bachelor of Arts with Research Distinction in Psychology from The Ohio State University and her access to faculty and research opportunities on the Marion campus for having a profoundly positive impact on gaining access to a graduate program and obtaining a competitive position in the area of research after graduation.
Meadows attended The Ohio State University at Marion for all four years of her major, from 2009 to 2013. After graduating from Ohio State, she worked as a clinical research coordinator in the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Center for Biobehavioral Health for three years prior to starting a doctoral program in clinical psychology at the University of Toledo in 2016. Currently a fifth-year graduate student at the University of Toledo, she is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology and doctoral intern at the Youth Opportunity Center in Muncie, Indiana. The internship, explained Meadows, is the final portion of her graduate training program.
“Overall, my training and experience in applied psychology and social and behavioral research have been essential for designing and conducting empirical psychological research studies, mentoring undergraduate and incoming graduate students, as well as working with at-risk youth and their families.”
Meadows shared, her work is pretty evenly divided between clinical therapy and research.
“In my clinical work,” said Meadows, “I have developed specialization in treating concerns related to disruptive behavior and conduct disorder among at-risk and trauma-exposed youth and their families.”
“Using a developmental, trauma-informed perspective, I work in outpatient, inpatient, and residential treatment settings to help families create safer environments for their children, reduce risk of family violence and child abuse, and learn healthy ways of relating to one another,” she said.
Her research is an extension of her clinical work and largely focuses on the ways in which adverse childhood experiences influence both proximal and extended outcomes across a person’s lifetime. For example, she explained, internalizing and externalizing problems during childhood and adolescence, school achievement, emotion regulation, and parenting practices in adulthood.
“Completing my undergraduate degree in psychology at Ohio State Marion,” said Meadows, “was a wonderful experience and has prepared me very well across phases of my professional development since.”
“Over the course of my undergraduate career at Ohio State Marion,” Meadows explained, “I was able to take advantage of the university’s exceptional quality of education in a smaller, more approachable setting; this, in turn offered more opportunities to build a network of faculty mentors, tailor my research experiences to fit my needs and interests, and gain direct experience in research design and implementation than what is often available to students working in research labs on larger university campuses.”
According to Meadows her Ohio State psychology degree directly contributed to her marketability.
“Aside from the weight that a degree from The Ohio State University carries with it, my experiences at Ohio State Marion allowed me to gain a greater breadth of exposure in both academic and research domains,” she said.
In addition to her degree from Ohio State, are a variety of awards and recognitions, research studies, and professional presentations that she participated in during her tenure as an undergraduate.
“The opportunities I was able to take advantage of at Ohio State Marion to begin my professional development directly increased my marketability and have earned recognition across the interviews I have attended for post-bac research programs, graduate school, and doctoral internships,” said Meadows.
The guidance Meadows got from the psychology faculty during her first year at Ohio State Marion were countless, she shared.
“I began to develop a sense of what I wanted from a career in psychology,” said Meadows. “With the help of faculty mentors, I gained a clearer sense of where to focus my efforts to achieve my goals. I worked closely with and sought advice from all of my professors.”
Based on her area of interest, she worked on several research projects in the developmental psychology research lab of Associate Professor of Psychology, Dr. Chris Daddis.
“During my time in his lab,” Meadows said, “I was able to learn exponentially more about research design, methodology, and statistics than one can pick up in a single academic course on each subject.”
“Under his supervision and mentorship, I was also able to develop a senior honors thesis project that extended into the community and allowed me to work with a local middle school to collect data,” she added.
From this project, Meadows was encouraged to present her research findings at the Ohio State Denman Undergraduate Research Forum in Columbus, where she earned second place in psychology and was later awarded the Undergraduate Honors Thesis Recognition Award.
“These experiences directly contributed to my preparedness and marketability for obtaining a competitive position in research after undergrad,” she said, “as well as gaining acceptance into my graduate program.”
“I later learned firsthand that many of the opportunities I had at Ohio State Marion are just not as readily available on large university campuses where courses are taught and guided by teaching assistants with class sizes of 100 or more students,” said Meadows.
“This often makes it very difficult to seek out assistance directly from faculty members and receive the kind of one-on-one instruction and mentorship that is readily available to Ohio State Marion students should they choose to take advantage of those benefits,” Meadows added
Meadows shared that almost 10 years after starting her degree at Ohio State Marion, she continues to benefit from the mentorship of faculty on campus through seeking their career advice and collaborating on research projects and manuscripts.”
“These experiences have directly contributed to my own professional identity and role as a mentor to undergraduate students in the many labs I have worked in and led since my time at Ohio State Marion,” she said.
Meadows shared that she is confident that studying at Ohio State Marion offered invaluable opportunities with regard to its ability to maintain the ‘Ohio State’ educational experience and Buckeye morale, while also offering even more in the way of return on investment, direct access to faculty, academic assistance, and research opportunities.