Leader-in-the Field Inteview

For our Leader-in-the-Field Interview, I interviewed Dr. Victoria Christofi who is a psychologist at the University of Oklahoma's Health Science Center. I interviewed her because I am interested in becoming a psychologist of some sort and wanted to find out more about how she got to the position she was in. Dr. Christofi told me that she attended Ohio State where she received her Bachelors degree and then Rutgers University in New Jersey to obtain her Masters in counseling and apply for her Doctorates degree. I learned that when you apply for your PhD, you have to attend at least another 5 years of school and be working a job or an internship at a hospital, college, jail, etc. as a psychologist. She told me that her first job was doing college counseling for Plattsburgh State in upstate New York. Dr. Christofi told me about the details of an average day for her which consisted of seeing a few clients, supervising interns, consultations with parents or other clients and some sort of outreach to people that are not her clients, whether it be another type of counseling or teaching stress management. She told me that the way she balances her personal/professional life is by setting boundaries. She says one has to help to the degree that she is able to and then she must let go because she says "you can't be as effective if you are so involved." The biggest and scariest problems she encounters are when she is dealing with seriously depressed clients who are experiencing a crisis or are suicidal. When she is dealing with someone along those lines, she sometimes has to step over the line and violate the boundary that she has created for herself. When struggling with something work-related, Dr. Christofi says she goes to Kate Stanton for guidance. She says that Kate is always supportive and calm and helps her get thru situations. She also says she goes to other colleagues with clinically related matters because they most likely understand what she is dealing with and can help her and give their opinion. The greatest strengths, in Dr. Christofi's opinion, that are necessary to be successful in this field are empathy, good listening skills, and passion. She explained how it took a lot to get where she is and if you don't have passion behind you than you are not going to get far in this position. She said that her dissertation was one of the hardest obstacles she had to overcome, along with overcoming her own insecurities. The best advice she could give me was to be prepared and to know my own strengths and weaknesses and of course to have passion for what I'm doing. She also told me that this is the key to being a leader in anything you do, because if you don't have yourself figured out how are you supposed to help figure other people out.

Future at OU

Honestly, my future here at OU is completely undecided and unplanned. I would love to graduate in 4 years and am trying really hard to accomplish that goal with a high GPA. I have applied for different executive committees and teams of leadership and haven't gotten accepted yet, however, I know that I am still a freshman so maybe in years to come I will have the opportunity to be on a team that serves the greater community and public. The thing that interests me most is just helping and being there for others in their times of need. I don't know exactly what I am going to do with my passion yet, but I imagine something to do with service.

Attitude

Wow. First of all, I just wanted to say that today's attitude discussion really opened up my eyes and made me more aware of how I am acting at all times and how I view the problems that come at me everyday. Since I was a little girl, my mom has gotten onto me about three things: my eye rolling, my tone of voice, and my attitude. I never realized how important it was to have a good attitude until we discussed it out loud in class.

I really do believe that "our attitudes are our most important assets." With a bad attitude, everything else in your life could have a dark light to it. However, with a good attitude, you are more likely to view everything in a positive light and you are more likely to get things accomplished more quickly and stay happy! People around you respond better to someone with a good attitude. A good attitude makes others more likely to WANT to work for or with someone opposed to someone with a bad/negative attitude.

At my youth group, a lot of times people will get loud and talkative during praise & worship and this is really frustrating to those who are trying to focus on God. Sometimes I get so frustrated that I want to tell everyone to be quiet loudly or something rude because I get so angry, but my youth director, Ron Tremblay, will calmly ask us all between songs to please remember that some people are using this time to focus on God and that we are distracting them. The way he asks, so nicely and respectfully, makes everyone want to listen to him and it gets things done more quickly and efficiently.

Problem vs. Challenge

In the Problem vs. Challenge exercise our goal was to make it fully across this electric rug without getting shocked. We had a minute to come up with a game plan with our teammates, and after the minute was up we weren't allowed to speak at all. As if that wasn't hard enough, we were also told to act as if each minute was money being lost. We also lost money for accidently talking or improperly retracing our steps off of the maze. We all encountered problems in this activity, but we viewed it as a challenge and were excited about completing the task before the other team. Becky Barker was the lady who came to visit us and she is the director of Leadership and Volunteerism for OU. A problem that I have turned into a challenge is that I have been really struggling with the way I look and the way I appear to other people a lot lately. This is hard to explain kind of, but basically I want people to think that I am a good person and trust me and be able to come to me for things. This has been a problem because I am constantly caught up in this, however, I have recently turned this into a challenge for myself by working towards not caring about how people view me and work on building my relationships with those people and letting them feel how they want about me.