Ahuti Goyal spent the summer of 2018 putting her research skills to use
During the summer of 2018, Psychology major Ahuti Goyal (‘20) interned with an NGO called Udayan Care. This NGO focuses on providing homes for abandoned or orphaned children between the ages of 6 to 18. She was assigned to the advocacy team that focuses on the child’s psychological well-being, their rights and wellness, as well as aftercare. The aftercare program gives these young adults a home, a college education, and psychological counseling. Udayan Care used snowball and convenient sampling to find out whether previous aftercare programs had helped young adults gain independence. She writes “The psychology 51-53 sequence gave me an understanding on how to read and write research papers in psychology. By taking these classes I learned how to search for specific literature and how to interpret data.” Applying her skills she gained in the 51-53 sequence, Ahuti conducted a literature search on approaches used in aftercare programs across many different countries. Future research will examine whether these approaches are effective in an Indian cultural setting as well or whether other approaches are more effective.
Ahuti is working as a research assistant in the Culture Impacts Emotion Lab (CIEL) with Dr. Koopmann-Holm. Ahuti writes that this experience helped her “think about how I may implement certain ideas better suited for different cultures. India is a growing and developing country, therefore certain ideas that may have been well suited for a European culture would be difficult to implement in an Indian setting.”