My Experience at the P20 Motivation and Learning Lab

During the second semester of my junior year I had the amazing opportunity to intern at the P20 Motivation and Learning Lab at UK. My main goals coming into this internship was to understand and experience the collegial environment and coursework within the department of educational psychology more specifically focusing on my personal interest of child development. Being apart of this lab allowed me to shadow students in their 400 level psychology courses at UK, work on graduate level research projects, and even present such research projects at graduate level conferences. The learning experience alone was outstanding. I was being taught topics varying from the cognitive development of a child to how to ethically develop experimental research. In addition to learning the basics of educational psychology, I gained much needed confidence in my learning aptitude. As you can imagine transitioning from high school into to a collegial level lab was  quite intimidating. Everything was different from the physical environment, to expectations in behavior, responsibilities, quality of work and etc. However after finding out how to succeed in my position at the lab I found that my college-going, and study skills self-efficacy increased greatly. I can comfortably say that I believe that I have the capability to pursue any level of education that I choose and all of my goals coming into the lab were achieved.