Research

 

For this application, the policy proposal idea needed to be well researched. I needed to articulate what the need in society was and back it with statistics, how I wanted to approach it, and who were the power holders that I could direct my policy proposal to. This required a deep knowledge of policy and who held power, whether that be on the state level or the federal level. I also had to know what practices were being implemented and which weren’t. Doing research really helped me gain a better understanding of the world around me and how I can be a part of making a difference. I learned that many issues are very complex and bringing about change will always be an uphill battle.

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Idea Generation

 

 During this process, I met with an adviser and bounced ideas off of her to land on something that would be worthy of writing about and would connect with the Truman Scholar foundation. Throughout the process, I changed my idea of what my policy proposal would be about three times. For every different idea, I had to think about how plausible implementation would be or if I could really see myself working on this problem from that angle. Finally, after generating a multitude of ideas, I was able to come up with something that included elements of each idea prior to that, but also was true to my interests and passions.

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Systems Thinking

 

Systems thinking is a competency that I developed throughout this process because in order to construct a piece of policy, I had to think about what systems were connected or perhaps disconnected and how did that impact the issue I was wanting to resolve. For instance, I had to investigate who had a say in building prisons and what oversight did they have from mental health professionals. If there wasn’t any input from mental health professionals, who would be in charge of making that a requirement, being that so many incarcerated individuals suffer from mental illnesses, but don’t receive proper treatment?

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Receiving Feedback

 

 One essential element in meeting with my adviser was for her to give me consistent feedback on the progress that I was making from week to week. As someone that had coached several people during this process, I trusted that she would lead me in the right direction. Before beginning the application process, she warned me that this aspect of this process would likely be frustrating. There were times that I would leave a feedback meeting with her and feel like I was back at square one, despite thinking that I had made a lot of progress. In these moments, I had to motivate myself to keep going and keep revising until I made a product that I and my adviser were both satisfied with.

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Personal Values-

 

Reflecting on my personal values was the first step in embarking on this process. I was asked to pick a need in the world that I wanted to be a part of solving, and while there are so many things that need to be fixed, I had to do some deep soul searching on what it was that I wanted to spend my career studying and fixing. I’ve wanted to be a psychologist for a long time now, however, it was fairly recent that I decided I wanted to be a correctional psychologist and take my gift of listening and empathy to prisons and detention centers where I feel it is needed most. I value equity, restorative justice, compassion, and listening to others. I have taken these values and have decided that if these values were also the values of people serving incarcerated individuals, we would have a lot less recidivism and a more just and rehabilitative criminal justice system.

 

Vision

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Having a vision was paramount during this application process. In order to come up write up a piece of policy, I had to envision what I would want the criminal justice system to look like. Without having a model or example to look to, this can prove to be rather difficult. I struggled with not knowing what was reasonable and what would be unreasonable to expect or ask for. I was also challenged with the idea that I needed to think big and perhaps a little unreasonably to see the change that I wanted to see within our criminal justice system.

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Looking Ahead

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As I've stated before, the application process for the Truman Scholarship was the hardest application process that I’ve ever been a part of. It took a lot of energy out of me to communicate such huge, complex, and nuanced ideas and distill them into clear and concise ideas that would inspire change. However, I believe through that process, I was able to gain a deeper and more practical understanding of an issue that I was only emotionally passionate about before. By doing the research and analyzing data, I was able to better interrogate systems that need to be transformed to provide for a more equitable and just society for those that have mental illnesses and far too often end up incarcerated because of them. This process has helped me narrow in on what I want to focus on studying in graduate school and also what career trajectory I want to be on. I have begun to look at different schools that have good programs for this path that I am on. I am now more excited than ever before to begin taking actionable steps to pursue my dream of being a criminal justice reform advocate.

 

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