Student Interns at Cognition and Development Lab at Yale University

Sandesh Bhandari ’14, a psychology major at Saint Peter’s University, spent the summer interning in the Cognition and Development Laboratory at Yale University. One of only nine undergraduate students from around the country chosen for this highly competitive summer internship, Bhandari participated in a number of research studies concerning the social understanding of adults and children.

“I’ve always wanted to pursue a career in psychology, especially in research,” he said. “The internship at Yale gave me the research experience that helped me decide if the career was actually for me.”

The summer internship program provides the opportunity for a group of highly-motivated undergraduates from institutions other than Yale to participate in the lab’s research over the summer. This annual, nine-week internship offers a hands-on, intensive research experience and training in the fields of cognitive and developmental psychology. In addition to Bhandari representing Saint Peter’s at this prestigious program, other selected students arrived from institutions such as the University of Notre Dame, Trinity College and University of Melbourne. They were given the opportunity to work and live at Yale, and explore their field of study on a professional level.

According to the Yale University Cognition and Development Laboratory website, work in the lab explores a variety of questions on how children and adults construct causal interpretations of the world around them and how those interpretations compare to other ways of tracking information. Research often leads to questions on how adults and children cognitively reduce the enormous causal complexity of the world to more manageable forms and what distortions of that information occur as it is necessarily simplified. Work at the lab centers on a developmental perspective that explores how young children cognitively grasp the many levels and types of causal structure inherent in the world.

Once at Yale, Bhandari was assigned to a mentor, who he worked with on research studies for two months. He said, “My graduate mentor was Matt Fisher, and he was really helpful with basically everything. He introduced me to a field of psychology that closely resembles my interests, and also introduced me to some very helpful research techniques. He was very supportive of my inputs and gave me helpful suggestions.”

Bhandari collaborated with his mentor at the lab, which was instrumental in teaching him the basics of psychology research studies.

“My major duties were working with my mentor to design the experiments to answer questions we were interested in, conducting these experiments and performing statistical analysis on the data,” Bhandari said.

As part of the research, Bhandari worked with children – ages three to seven – on an experiment that tested their ability to perceive different modes of arguments and distinguish between them.

“Conducting experiments with children was a completely different experience than what I was used to,” he said. “One needs to be very subtle and careful about how one treats them. I think I learned a lot about how to design experiments for children and how to conduct those experiments efficiently.”

In addition to hands-on research and experimentation, the internship at Yale also included workshops on finding the right graduate school based on interest, as well as introduced some of the latest techniques and software being used in the field of psychology research.

“I didn’t have much research experience prior to this internship, so I wasn’t sure if it was what I wanted to pursue as a career,” Bhandari said. “Actually being involved in a grad school-like experience has helped me decide if I want that experience when I graduate from Saint Peter’s.”

The internship and workshops had a profound impact on Bhandari. This experience allowed him to figure out the next step in realizing his career goals after graduating from Saint Peter’s.

“I would like to join a graduate school and pursue a doctorate degree there,” he said. “Right now, my interests lie in understanding how people react to various kinds of events. I would like to pursue a career in cognitive psychology and keep on looking for the answers to these questions.”

Bhandari said the education he has received at Saint Peter’s thus far helped him a great deal with his internship at the Cognition and Development Laboratory.

“Some of the classes I took at Saint Peter’s were really helpful as they introduced me to the topics that I worked on during the summer,” he said. “Working with [Maryellen Hamilton, Ph.D., professor of psychology] was especially helpful as it was my first research experience of any kind. I learned a lot of scientific techniques from her that were very useful during my time at Yale.”

And he’s bringing what he learned at the internship to Saint Peter’s, as well. “Sandesh is a talented student who I believe has the capability to contribute significantly to the field of psychology,” said Dr. Hamilton. “He returned from his summer internship with a renewed excitement for research and has been actively working on his research interests both in class and in my laboratory.”

She added, “Having an opportunity to work in the laboratory of a major research university like Yale is something I think many students believe they are giving up when they attend a small, private liberal arts college. However, we have had many psychology majors attend summer programs at research universities. I believe because we are a small department, we not only get to know our students talents, but we actively involve our students in research collaborations. Such collaborations open the door to not only these types of prestigious summer programs, but to competitive graduate programs.”

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