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After completing a summer job as a third-grade teaching assistant, Whitney Laird ’07 (Westfield, N.J.) discovered a passion for early childhood education.
“I fell in love with teaching,” she says. “I feel that teaching is such a great job. It provides you with so many opportunities to make a difference in a child’s life.”
This semester, the psychology major is serving an internship at Lehigh Valley Child Care on College Hill. She is gaining experience and knowledge in the field through her work in the center’s pre-kindergarten room.
“I thought that this opportunity would be interesting because it would allow me to see how early education is structured around the developmental needs of children at their particular age,” she says. “I thought it would be interesting to see how pre-kindergarten education may prepare children for when they enter elementary school.”
During two four-hour sessions each week, Laird assists her supervisor with organizational duties, leads projects for the four-year-old clients, and plays with the children to get to know them better.
“I have developed many goals for this experience, one of which is to develop a research topic to write a term paper on for the end of the semester,” she says.
Laird meets four times per month with her adviser Susan Basow, Dana Professor of Psychology, and other students in Advanced Applied Psychology, a class that allows junior and senior psychology majors to earn credit while working in an organized out-of-classroom experience with on-site and faculty supervisors. Basow covers topics such as ethics in the workplace, getting the most out of the experience, confidentiality, and termination issues.
“At the meetings that we have had so far, we have been able to discuss our placements and compare and contrast our experiences,” Laird says.
“Lafayette provides many different ways to extend your educational experience outside the classroom,” she continues. “There are many things that you cannot learn in a classroom that are vital to fully understanding what you are studying. As much as you can talk about child development in class, you will never fully understand it until you have first-hand experience at observing it.”
Laird adds that her interest in psychology is valuable to her career goals.
“It is a field that has always interested me, and after observing in a couple different educational settings, I am beginning to see how a psychology background would be beneficial for someone in these positions,” she says. “I have enjoyed every single psychology class I have taken here at Lafayette. I think that the staff members are all extremely intelligent, and I really admire the enjoyment of the field that each of them expresses in the classroom. They are willing to help you and are always there for support. Their enthusiasm helps students become enthusiastic in what they are learning as well.”
Laird served an externship last spring in Lafayette’s human resources office under the guidance of alumna Leslie F. Muhlfelder ’81, vice president for human resources and general counsel, to gain an inside look at the field. She is a psychology laboratory assistant and director of fundraising for Delta Gamma sorority. She also participates in the sorority’s Adopt-a-Grandma program.