Janelle Vasquez

Janelle Vasquez spent her junior year running a real research study, not just reading about someone else's — recruiting participants, collecting data, and presenting findings at the spring research symposium in Andersen Library's atrium. "A lot of psych programs let you graduate having only ever been a research subject, never the person designing the study. I walked into my first case management job already knowing how to write an informed consent form and read an effect size, because I'd actually done both, not just defined them on an exam."

She now case-manages a caseload of about thirty clients in community behavioral health while working evenings toward her clinical licensure. "The applied-psychology framing Porter uses is exactly right for where I ended up. I'm not doing academic research anymore, but I use the methods training constantly — reading a treatment study critically, not just trusting the abstract, is a daily skill in this job."