The brief period I spent working as a case manager was fantastic, despite its difficulty, because for the first time I was able to bring together all my studies over the previous 4 years. Outside of classes, I spent a low estimate of 500 extracurricular hours watching University lecturers in psychology, and reading over a dozen works of famous clinicians. In order to synthesize this, I frequently wrote essays in class forums unprompted, eventually producing a 40 page manuscript in what I later learned is "psychotherapy integration," the effort to work outside of any singular theoretical approach to psychology. More specifically, I have set my sights on psychotherapy unification, the prohibitively difficult task of unifying the great pillars of clinical psychology within a single framework, which organizes their interrelations, explains their active ingredients, and distills a pragmatic ground truth model of the structure and dynamics of the psyche.
My long term goals are in clinical psychology, with the ultimate mission statement:
I conduct experiments wherever I am able to create the opportunity, and take great pleasure in trying to discern precice, practical truths in realms previously complicated.
I have studied over a dozen languages, having taught myself Russian in high school to fluency on my own. Upon entering University, I skipped right to the end of the provided curriculum, and was allowed the opportunity to continue my study under the auspices of an independent study, where I read a Russian book, and devised a revolutionary new model of Russian verbs, which I then taught as a Russian tutor, using diagrams I made myself, a short textbook on the model, and a web application I built from the ground up that runs complex linguistic analyses to produce automatic converstion to lemma forms, a product that is so far as I know the first of its kind for Russian.
In addition to Russian, I have variously studied the orthography, phonology, syntax, and morphology of Spanish (with 4 years in high school), Polish, German, Swedish, Adyghe, Belorussian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Classical Nahuatl.
My studies have extended well into metabolism, physiology, and evolutionary theory in different ways. The intersection is possibly referred to as "nutritional anthropology," though the evolutionary aspect of my studies applies just as strongly to my interest in psychology as it does to physiology. I have followed evolutionary biologists dissecting research papers for years (appr. 200 hrs), and run several of my own experiments respecting the topic, chiefly, my investigations into sunburn, and my study of the metabolic effects of low-carbohydrate diets (though their presence in the evolutionary picture is complex).
As part of an attempt to bolster my PhD applications, I extended my skillset into programming, then into web development, seeing in it the prospect of disseminating automated interventions on the psychological front, and other useful entreprenurial combinations amidst my other skills.
I spent 6 months for 70 hours a week in order to transfrom from having essentially no practical experience with programming at all to wielding a solid understanding of all relevant aspects of the complex and multiplicitous current state of web development, from full-stack frameworks like NextJS, various database formats, deployment platforms, microservice tools, and APIs, and multiple languages, like Rust, and libraries for data science, machine learning, responsive design, and end-to-end typesafety.
In one of the most difficult hiring periods for developers in recent memory, I got a position as a software engineer from scratch, in around 11 months.