Community Psychology Graduate Student: ‘I’m Gaining Skills that Will Make Me More Marketable’

The word “community” and its deep importance to the study of community psychology means a lot to Hunter Clark ’24 M.A.

When she was an undergraduate majoring in criminal justice at Georgetown College in Kentucky, Clark interned with the police department.

“I remember going out on a call for someone having a mental health crisis,” she says. “I saw the way the officers handled the situation, that they were kind and polite and patient. The police chief valued people, and he and the officers cared about their community. It confirmed for me this was a world I could work in, and this was a way the criminal justice system could work.”

But what interested her more than patrol work was forensic psychology, and she wanted a graduate program where that was part of a community psychology program.

“I toured the whole Northeast looking at schools,” Clark says. As soon as she arrived at the University of New Haven and she spoke with admissions staff and with people in the program, “I knew this was it,” she says. Clark was taken by the welcoming vibe and “knew I would be a person, not a number.”

‘A big field’

The focus of the master’s degree in community psychology – now 50 years old – has “long advocated for social justice by empowering marginalized communities and seeking to strengthen health and well-being through community partnership and prevention programs.” That was what Clark was looking for.

“I like having the chance to explore all the different factors that go into a criminal decision and legal decisions, and being able to explore on a broad scale,” she says. “This is such a big field, and so many parts of it I find I might want to research, such as eyewitness testimony. I get to look at a lot of different populations and I’m gaining skills that will make me more marketable.”

She’s so drawn to the material in her texts and class discussions that her phone is literally brimming with notes – about possible research topics to explore or cases or fields of study she wants to learn more about. “When I’m reading, I am always stopping to add notes, asking so many questions, or making notes such as ‘hey, this might be interesting to research.’”

‘I absolutely love forensic psychology’

Her graduate assistantship is with the Tow Youth Justice Institute, a university, state, and private collaboration working on juvenile justice reform by engaging policy makers, practitioners, service providers, students, communities, youth, and their families. She is part of the Juvenile Justice Policy Oversight Committee and loves how her work at the Institute amplifies and extends what she is learning in her courses.

“At Tow, there’s a Community Expertise Working Group that goes out and interviews in the community to see ‘what youths and their families who have been impacted by the criminal justice system would like to see changed and what would benefit them.’ Rather than saying ‘textbook research says this will help,’ you’re adapting what research says to a community. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. It’s caring about the people and not just the statistics.

“I’m able to compare what I’m doing in my graduate assistantship to what I’m learning in class,” she continued. “Both encompass how important it is to include the community and their voices when trying to establish policies and programs that are going to benefit them.”

That’s just one of the practical, hands-on learning experiences she’s taking part in. One of her professors, Rosemarie Lillie Macias, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology and the director of Research and Evaluation Center of Esperanza United, a “national culturally specific, gender-based violence resource center,” is leading a team of graduate and undergraduate students including Clark who will be part of a spring symposium on gender-based violence.

Clark says she is talking with her graduate advisers about “what I want to do for the rest of my life.” She is considering taking an even deeper dive into research in a Ph.D. program. Or, she may choose to work in the area of competency exams and evaluations for trial after completing her master’s degree in 2024.

“I absolutely love forensic psychology,” she says.