For most students, summer is a time to relax or travel, letting their minds stray from classwork and exams. Other students, like senior psychology major Ashley Gochinski, decided to further her education at a unique internship close to campus.
Gochinski recently completed her internship at the Framingham Heart Study, where she worked in their brain aging program as one of their surgery project interns.
“I went through the medical charts of the study participants and documented every medicine, lifetime illness, and invasive surgery they had into our database. The lab I worked for was specifically about neuropsychology,” Gochinski said.
Gochinski learned what research goes into the day-to-day life of a professional working in her field of study, and that gave her insight as to what it would be like if she pursued research as a career.
While at the Framingham Heart Study, Gochinski was not expecting some crossover work to occur in another similar field. “I was also surprised that I was doing more medical work compared to neuropsychology work. But in order to see results and correlations we had to go through medical charts,” Gochinski said.
Gochinski credits the work she did at Framingham Heart Study as a stepping stone to her future career. “I knew that I wanted to pursue a PhD after Lasell and possibly do neuropsychology research in my career. This internship would get my foot in the door with these goals,” she said. Gochinski specifically wants to work on diagnostics for children.
She chose to major in psychology at Lasell because of her lifelong interest in the subject.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the topic since I was a kid. I took a class in high school and it really convinced me that it’s something that I really did want to do as my career and in college,” Gochinski said.
From the Lasell psychology program as a whole, Gochsinski has learned about different aspects of psychology and ways to integrate it into other areas of the workforce.
“There are many different areas of psychology and ways to use my degree in very different fields, such as counseling, research, business management and all that type of stuff,” Gochinski said. “The program gives you a lot of options and it covers all areas of psychology.”
Gochinski recommends her internship at the Framingham Heart Study to other Lasell students who are interested in pursuing research especially in psychology or health science.
“It gave me an insight of what a career in research would be like and it had good opportunities to learn about other potential careers, like neuropathology, neuropsychology and neurology,” Gochinski said. “Doing a nine to five office job gave me a sense of professionalism, and dealing with confidential records also gave me a sense of accountability.”
Comments