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.