About Me!

Hello everyone!

Welcome to my page, after reading this document hopefully you will be able to get a sense of who I am, my choice of Magellan and what makes it such an interesting project for me. To begin, my name is Nicole Walters and I attend Washington & Jefferson College, class of 2019. My major is psychology with a minor in Gender and Women studies, my interests follow along the route of counseling and therapy, working directly with patients from the community. I love helping people in any way that I can, so volunteer work has always been a large part of my life. I have done extensive volunteer work at a retirement home in Zelienople Pennsylvania and have learned the value of patience and a constant positive attitude. You quickly learned there were residents you could always count on to have a smile on their face and positive outlook on their life. While other residents, who were more of the grumpy and sullen types, needed more of your energy and focus during your time there. This experience, volunteering with elderly people, taught me that while in some cases the solution to the problem comes easy, a lot of the time, the person will fight you tooth and nail. There will be some people who do not want your help even though the help you are offering could be the best thing for that person. Even in some cases the family of the person in need of help, could be hindering the process and become another battle to overcome. All of these learning experiences have come to be a huge help when dealing with children, their behavioral health issues, and the family involved.

So far in my academic career I have completed several psychology classes three of which have come to be the most beneficial in everyday life and my time working on my Magellan. These classes are the base level psychology classes 101 and 102, and then Abnormal Psychology which introduced lots of disorders from the DSM-5 with their symptoms and the treatment plan available. Abnormal psychology has been incredibly beneficial to my Magellan project because the knowledge gained from this class has allowed me stay on point with the Doctors and therapist I have and will be working without through the durations of my project. This knowledge has allowed me to not just shadow the Children's employees I have been working with but to be involved and active in their work which has added to my time working on my Magellan.

I will now talk briefly about what my project is about, but to read a more in-depth description, please refer to my "Magellan Project" page on my blog's home page. The main focus of my project, looking at advances in outpatient care, was taping into the issue that the average person's response to a mental and behavioral issue is not the same as it would be for a physical disability. While most people would go to their family pediatric office if they notice a physical abnormality in their child, when the parents notice a mental or behavioral abnormality, they fail to know what to do or to react properly. Talk about mental health has improved by huge leaps from what it was only thirty years ago, yet, people are still not taking full advantage of the benefits gained from therapy. On top of this, family pediatricians are not fully trained to deal with the more severe or even moderate mental and behavioral disorders. Their average response to a patient who is struggling with a mental or behavioral disorder that could be solved in a few questions to a child psychiatrist, the doctor's response, is likely to be to send the patient to the emergency room whether or not if the patient is a danger to themselves or others. My project is focused on programs such as TiPS, which is run by the state to get family practices signed up so if they have a question they can be in contact with a child psychiatrist within a half an hour or signed up to have an appointment at the TiPs offices with in a two-week window. This program also holds seminars to update pediatricians to be more equipped to handle children who do come in with a mental or behavioral disorder. This program is just one of many in our country that is changing the way we view and treat mental disorders. Working with the women and men here at the Children's TiPs office in Wexford has been an honor so far and I cannot wait to see what work the people here will accomplish in the next month that I will be with them.