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Karen M. Gil Internship program has successful first semester

The Karen M. Gil Internship program in psychology successfully finished its first semester Monday with a showcase. 

Junior and senior psychology students who participated in the internship made academic posters to present the information they learned during their time as interns.

Dana Ripperton, internship program manager, said there are many draws to this program that makes it unique.

“This internship allows students to participate in a psychology program that ties both coursework and work experience together,” Ripperton said.

It was founded by an anonymous donor who named the program after Karen Gil, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Ten to 12 psychology majors are chosen each semester for the program and are placed into internships catered to their specific interests.   

There are six major subfields of psychology that students can go into: behavioral neuroscience, clinical, cognitive, developmental, quantitative, and social psychology.

Students are matched with an internship specific to their preferred subfield and participate in a 16-week program.

Ripperton said psychology students, especially undergraduates, typically do not have opportunities to get hands-on experience in their respective fields. This internship offers a stipend for students as well as course credit that supplements their academic careers.

Internship Director Steve Buzinski said in an email that he is not surprised by the success the program had during its first semester. 

“At the core of that success is our students,” he said. “We know that Carolina has some of the most talented, highly motivated students in the country and this program gives them the opportunity to apply their trade in professional work environments.”

Buzinski said interns participate in a variety of fieldwork and many are surprised by the number of opportunities that are offered in the field of psychology.

“This past semester we had Gil Interns researching ways to improve the performance of collegiate athletes, creating virtual brain models of addiction, coaching nicotine addicted patients in tobacco cessation techniques, piloting musical therapies for autistic persons, researching the influence of a prototype neurofeedback device on ADHD symptoms, conducting usability research on Lenovo computer projects, and much more,” he said.

Junior Dan Horschler was an intern this fall. He spent sixteen weeks working at Lenovo on usability research. 

“We were working on a text-analytics program that takes comments from internet sources and compiles them,” he said. “We then studied them to see what people like and don’t like about our products and how we could change their design to make them better.”

He said the internship allowed him to combine psychology with computer science.

“That’s not a typical academic field so it was neat to be able to learn how that was done in the real world,” he said.

Horschler was a cognitive intern and thought the program was a great experience.

“I think it’s definitely a unique program,” he said. “None of our peer institutions have anything like this yet and there are not usually a lot of internships for undergraduate psychology majors because you need so much training to go into the field of practice.”

university@dailytarheel.com

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