1.Tell us about yourself…

My name is Lauren Love, I’m 26 year’s old. I live in Lansdale Pennsylvania, about 45 min outside of Philadelphia. I’ve been working at least full time since graduating High School in 2006, normally having at least 1 side job as well. I tend to have a main job, a side job, and maybe also babysit and dog sit and go to school on top of that. I love being around people, my friends my family, and my animals. Although I haven’t done much of it, I plan to travel more. I feel like I’ve been in school forever, and can’t believe I’m actually approaching graduation this spring. I’ve always seemed to take somewhat of a different route to accomplishing things.

2.How long have you been part of the Penn State World Campus community?

I’ve been part of the World Campus community since the summer of 2013, and I love it.

3.How do you feel about your learning experience?

It’s been wonderful. I believe Penn State must treat faculty and staff well, because everyone who I’ve dealt with has been fantastic. It took me awhile to find the right transfer school from community college, and Penn State was it. I feel more involved in Penn State’s distance learning program than I did being on campus at my community college. I was actually able to study abroad with a local campus as a world campus student as well, and went to Italy last spring to study cross-cultural Psychology. I definitely feel like I’m not missing just because I’m a distance learner.

4.Why did you choose Psychology as a major?

That’s a good question. I was always interested in Psychology, but never actually wanted to be a Psychology major. I thought that if I wasn’t going to get a Ph. D., there was no use in studying it and would not get a job. I took Psychology as an elective in high school during my senior year, and really enjoyed it. When starting college, my brother suggested I should just take at least one course I was interested in right after high school to keep the momentum going, and keep myself in school. That courses ended up being an intro to Psychology course. I switched majors a lot at community college. I was elementary education, nursing, communications, and ended up with a liberal arts degree for my associates. When it came time to transfer, I decided on a Psychology major because I had a good amount of credits in it from electives I had taken, and with my experience in a relevant field, I thought it wouldn’t be a bad choice.

5.Tell us about your job….

In 2007, I began working with individuals with developmental disabilities. I worked as direct care for 5 years, and a program manager for 2 of those 5 years. As a direct care staff, I would support individuals in their family homes and in the community, working on life and social skills. As a Program Manager, I coordinated staffing for homes with multiple staff working there. I supported individuals with Autism, Intellectual Disabilities, Down syndrome and other special needs. After 5 years, I moved to an administrative role as a secretary in a department, which provided Lifesharing services. Lifesharing is kind of like adult foster care, where an individual with a developmental disability lives with a family as a complete family unity. I often helped with the clients still, and provided relief to our provider families. After a little over a year there, I made the jump to Human Resources where I currently am. All of these positions have been at the same agency. However, I definitely want to get back to dealing more directly with providing services to people in some day.

6.What are the requirements to execute your job? Have you learned any skills, from your academic involvement, which directly improves your performance at work?

It has been interesting how my on the job skills have paralleled my academic learning. Studying psychology helped me have a stronger base for understanding paperwork and behavior plans, which were essential to what i was doing in direct care. It also helped me understand some of the theory behind the methods we were using to teach and reinforce social skills. In my current job my knowledge of the agency is very helpful. Also, I took my “Intro to I/O psychology” course right before transferring to HR, which was helpful. I think that course would be interesting and helpful to anyone in any workplace though.

7.Do you plan on applying to graduate school? If so, tell us how would you make graduate school a reality.

I actually never saw myself going to grad school until recently. I always thought it was going to be difficult enough to complete my Bachelor’s while working, however now I’m seeing grad school as a real possibility. I have no clue how I would make grad school a reality, but I do know I will be taking a GRE refresher course sometime after I graduate, and taking them soon after that. Growing up I always told everyone I wanted to be in school forever, and I guess I have kind of kept that promise.

8.How do you see yourself in five years?

Five years seems far away. I could very well be in a grad program by them, or possibly completed one, but you never know what kind of detours life will throw your way. If I haven’t completed a grad program, I would at least like to be training people in some facet.

9.What would you do if you win $500 million dollars from the lottery today?

Easy. I would pay off all my school loans, and lucky for me, I don’t have $500 million dollars worth of school loans. I would save half of the rest, share some, and travel. If money were no obstacle, I would travel as much as possible.