Meet Current CSPP Students
CSPP has a lively and diverse student body. Below are profiles of a few current students in the San Francisco Clinical Psychology PhD and PsyD programs. We hope these profiles help you get to know the programs from an insider's perspective. These students welcome any questions you have. Their email addresses are embedded behind each of their names - just click on a name to send a message. Amy Backos is a fourth year doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology PhD program at Alliant’s San Francisco campus. Amy came to CSPP with 10 years of experience as an art therapist, having also kept a studio and worked for a sweater designer in Ohio. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Kent State and her Master’s from Ursuline College, and has already attended and presented at many professional events including an international research conference in Argentina. “I came back to school because I have bigger and better ideas for art therapy. There are not a lot of art therapist that could empirically validate art as a therapeutic technique.” Since beginning the program, Amy has benefited greatly. “After ten years of practice, I’m getting much more focused. My practicum experiences have helped me focus. I’m a fan of the personal psychotherapy recommendation. I feel like all the aspects of the program have really honed me. I feel a lot more polished.” read more
This third year clinical psychology PhD student and mother of two took a rather circuitous route to CSPP. As an undergraduate at Princeton University, Lisa Greenberg studied soviet affairs and politics, and worked in China and Korea before going on to receive a Master’s degree in Russian Studies from Georgetown University. (She’s also fluent in English, Russian and Spanish.) Then, in 1999, her son was diagnosed with autism. “That was the impetus for coming to CSPP. I had just learned about a whole new world in terms of special needs for children and parenting differently.” Lisa recently completed her first research project on the effect of testing environments and testing children with executive function disorders like ADHD, Autism and Asbergers. “When my son was getting tested, the results were so disparate. It made me want to look at tests of attention in kids who do have attention disorders and those that don’t, in both quiet and distractive settings.” read more
Jason Jones is a second year Clinical Psychology PhD student at Alliant’s San Francisco campus. Even though Jason was interested in psychology as an undergraduate, he was skeptical of it as a career. He described himself then as a “non-believer in a normalizing science.” It was through his work in education, as a teacher, that he gained a new perspective on psychology and reignited his interest. He taught English and History to middle school students and taught one year of GED courses. “While working with at risk populations in education I became more interested in the barriers those people faced. I thought: what if those are internal barriers, how can one address those? I became increasingly intrigued by those questions and saw that a lot of those people had therapists, and saw that it had an impact on them. Through that I was able to see the real impact psychology was having on people’s lives.” read more
Ramon Martinez is a true Bay Area native, born and raised in Oakland. He is a third year Clinical Psychology PsyD student at Alliant’s San Francisco campus. He came to the program with little clinical experience and only two psychology courses under his belt, but his personal experience and a passion for service proved qualification enough. “I really do feel like everything in my past has been a stepping stone that led me to this point in my life. Although prior to coming here I couldn’t say I had much real clinical experience, I did work in the helping profession, in many different roles. The theme in my life has been serving others.” read more Gina Poelke is a third year doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology PhD Program at Alliant’s San Francisco campus. Before coming to CSPP, Gina worked as a statistical analysis software programmer. She also worked for WestEd, a non-profit education agency, and studied student success at community colleges at Columbia University. Gina’s family inspired her to pursue psychology. “My mother’s side of the family is Indonesian. My family would congregate once a week at a family member’s house for rice table. Everyone cooks. I loved it growing up because everyone would sit around the table. Sometimes everyone talked or no one talked. But when I left, I always felt more centered. I enjoyed hearing everyone’s stories and knowing I was going to hear their story again, every month.” read more
Marcella Raimondo is a third year student on a “moderated” schedule, having completed her Master’s in Public Health at the University of Michigan prior to entering CSPP’s Clinical Psychology PhD program. The moderated schedule allows Marcella to remain, part time, at her job with Kaiser Permanente where she works as regional coordinator for baseline (meeting consistency standards for insurance groups) and for domestic violence. It was through Kaiser that Marcella came to CSPP. When Marcella was considering a PhD, she spoke with her colleagues at Kaiser Permanente who put her in touch with some CSPP alumni who also worked at Kaiser. “They all had great things to say,” says Marcella. “Its focus on research, developing competencies in various areas, I like that combination. CSPP also values multiculturalism, and that’s something I value too.” read more
Danielle Schlosser is a fourth year doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology PhD program at Alliant’s San Francisco campus. Although she was undecided about her focus when she entered the program, in her third year she found her niche through her dissertation research on prodrome schizophrenia. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I first got here. I wrote a list of all my ideas. It was a really long list, but my faculty advisor helped me narrow it down. I finally picked a topic and got it done. What was surprising is that I found my niche in my dissertation research. I just came into it. I had no idea I could actually find my own opportunity and have the flexibility to be able to seek out research programs in the community. That’s exciting to me. A lot of people change their focus and that's okay." read more
Carmen Velazquez is a fourth year doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology PhD program at Alliant’s San Francisco campus. She is currently working on her dissertation, “Reading level and acculturation on performance of executive functioning,” with a focus on Mexican Americans, and hoping to collect data this semester. This is a change from her first research project, a study of adolescents and academic success tied to the home. She has already presented her research at the APA Convention in New Orleans in 2006 and at the APA Convention in San Francisco in 2007. Carmen has had diverse practicum experiences. She has learned about play therapy and worked at an elementary school early intervention program. For her practicum last year she worked at the Ananda Institute, a non-profit family health center. She dealt with child protective services and children who were in foster care or wards of the state, but her focus was mainly in neuropsychology and domestic violence, supervising evaluations for learning disability assessments. She also worked with anger and impulse control and trauma, and has continued to work at Ananda this year. read more
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