Road to Academia: Enterprising & Conducting Applied Psychology Research

Learn about Dr. Laurie Kramer, a professor at the Applied Psychology department of Northeastern University, and former director of the University Honors Program. She will be speaking about her road to academia, her enterprising endeavors, and advice for undergrads pursuing research.

Jennifer: Welcome back to ViTAL Chats, the podcast for ViTAL, Northeastern’s Healthcare Innovation Core. I’m one of your hosts, Jennifer. Today, in our January episode of the Spring 2024 semester, we are speaking with Dr. Laurie Kramer, Professor of the Graduate Department of Applied Psychology and the former director of the University Honors Program. Dr. Kramer has a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Illinois in 1989, and she is also a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in the state of Illinois. Throughout her career, her research explores the positive mechanisms by which siblings interact, and her work is widely recognized nationally and globally, cited by major outlets like the New York Times and USA TODAY. Dr. Kramer is also a founder of the Fun with Sisters and Brothers program, which is a preventative program that parents can use to teach their children a certain set of basic social and emotional skills.

Jennifer: So, Dr. Kramer, thank you so much for being here and accepting our invitation. I thought maybe we could start by talking a little bit about how you first jump started your career in academia and research?

Dr. Kramer: Well, thank you. First of all, thank you Jennifer, for inviting me to speak to the ViTAL audience. It’s really a pleasure to be part of this podcast. So, my history is a little, little interesting because I started out thinking that I wanted to help people through a totally different field, physical therapy. So when I started college way back when I was a physical therapy major, actually somewhere in Boston, and I quickly learned that that was not for me. And a lot of that happened as a result of being in some science courses where I had to do anatomy and dissections and they gave me a cat. And that blew my mind.

I love cats. This was just not for me and when they told me that next semester I’d have a human, I was like, no, I have to find another way to help people and actually pursue the field of psychology, which at the time, clinical psychology and it still is a pretty difficult field to enter, a little competitive. And so I really decided I just needed to really focus on that, put my energies into it, started at a different university and really thrived learning about psychology. I went until I got my Masters in Experimental Psychology and worked for actually a year as a staff psychologist in a residential treatment program for individuals who had some form of intellectual or developmental delays or disabilities.

I’ll just mention that as a psychologist, a staff psychologist, at that time, I had only a master’s degree. I didn’t really know a whole lot, and they assigned me 200 people that I was responsible for their assessment and designing treatments and all of that. And I realized this is crazy. I need to go back to school. I need to learn more and ended up going for my PhD in Clinical Psychology and was very fortunate to have some great mentors and got involved in some different research projects. But probably the most pivotal was working with Doctor John Gottman who was my graduate advisor. He’s very well-known now as the founder of the Gottman Institute and as a major researcher and clinician for couple, for couple relationships. He has a nickname called Doctor Love, a love doctor. Yeah, he has a love lab. But I learned so much about relationships from him, as well as from the graduate program I was in.

And he really helped me hone my interests in children’s interpersonal relationships and how friendships among children can really help them learn so much about themselves, about relationships, and also help them develop some social and emotional competencies that can serve them well. It was also the person that turned me on to the whole notion of children’s sibling relationships and how formative they can be for children’s development. And so I jumped on it and did my dissertation looking at the formation of children’s sibling relationships, focusing on preschool age children, age three to five, who are just becoming a sibling, the first, for the very first time. I’ve been following those families over time, sporadically and now some of those first-born children, who were three to five when I started knowing their families and observing them in their homes, are now in their 30s. Isn’t that crazy? So, I’m hoping to go back soon and learn more about how those relationships have developed over time.

Jennifer: How do you think, so far… after these like 30 something years, 20 something years? Have they evolved in a more specific way?

Dr. Kramer: Yeah. Well, so much has happened over time, and one of the major results that I had from this longitudinal research was that the quality of relationships that these first-born children had before they even had a sibling because we observed them. We had them play with their best friends at the time. It was so cute. We had the two kids together alone in a room in the house and I just left a tape recorder going. You know, we only entered if we heard something, you know, that was potentially problematic.

Jennifer: Turbulence.

Dr. Kramer: Turbulence. Yes.

Like, there’s one time where we heard one little child yell out, “Mom, I didn’t even cut her hair!” and you should have seen all of us run into the room. But that was an exception. Usually, the kids played and had a great time, did some really interesting things. We were really interested in the quality of their play and whether they got involved in fantasy play and pretend. So that was also an interest of mine at the time, but it was the quality of their relationships with their best friends, before they even became siblings. There was actually the strongest predictor of how well they were going to get along with this new baby, once it arrived. And that was true every time I went back to observe these families. So even when the last time I visited these families, the first-born children were leaving home for college or work and their younger siblings were entering high school, and that was still true. The quality of those friendships, before they became siblings, still predicted how well they got along.

So, you know, it led us to really understand that there’s some interpersonal skills and competencies that kids get and exercise with their friends that can translate to other relationships, like their sibling relationships.

Jennifer: That’s really cool. I read that article about you, from the NGM magazine at Northeastern. I’ll link that under our podcast for those that are interested. But I read that quote by you that was about how the quality of their friendships became the significant predictor of future sibling relationships. I was wondering if, you know, the reverse could be true: that, like your relationship that you fostered growing up with a sibling could change the way you interact with other people.

Dr. Kramer: Yeah. I think so. We did not see those direct linkages when the children were young, but we’re going to be looking next time we examine them to see if that seems to be true.

So we’ll be asking both the older children and younger children in the family if we’re lucky enough to… to get to interview them, what their relationships are like with others. Because some of these first and second born kids now are in partnered relationships, some are married, some are not, some have kids. So that’s going to be really interesting and we do want to see if having good sibling relationships growing up maybe is correlated with the quality of other relationships that they have in their lives now. We’re also going to try to look, if they do have kids, to see what the quality of their children, sibling relationships are like, so that we can look some more at some intergenerational patterns too.

Jennifer: That’s really interesting. I remember my roommates and I back at home a few weeks ago, we were talking about, “oh, she must be an elder sister because of the way she’s acting or that person must be an only child.” So yeah, I find that to be really interesting. I think a lot of our listeners also grow up with siblings and they feel the same way about looking at people who grew up as an only child and they’re just so different, so.

Dr. Kramer: Yeah, they’re different but I wouldn’t say in necessarily in negative ways. So we do know that people who grow up without a sibling do tend to learn a lot of these interpersonal skills.

Jennifer: By themselves?

Dr. Kramer: Either by themselves, or maybe with friends, maybe with cousins, other children. But if they only interacted with adults, yeah, I think they would look pretty, pretty different.

Jennifer: The next question that I had was whether there were any difficult aspects in your research, specifically around siblings?

Dr. Kramer: By what kind of difficulties might you mean?

Jennifer: Let’s say for a research project on looking at the neural anatomy of things, there will be a different set of challenges, but since sibling relationships are more social in that way.

Dr. Kramer: Yeah. I mean, I think you’re right. I think that any kind of interpersonal relationship or social relationships are really difficult to study because you’re trying to understand deeply how people relate, but you don’t always have all the information that you need, right? So, a lot of my research involves observing people as they communicate or play together or just do things together. It’s really great when you can couple that with interviews with people where they can tell you what was going on for them, because sometimes we tend to make assumptions about what particular, you know, interactions mean, what they signify, but you really want all of that.

So how do you put that information all together because sometimes what people tell you in an interview isn’t exactly corresponding with what you see when you observe them interacting with other people. So, how do we understand that is a challenge and knowing that sometimes people just aren’t fully aware what they’re trying to do in relationships or what they mean to them.

Sometimes it’s really hard for people to articulate that. But we can still learn a lot just by observing them and looking at communication patterns and what happens when one person does one thing, how does the other person respond, what happens next? And we have some statistical techniques to help us try to look at the probability of certain things happening. So, when people have a conflict, what’s likely to happen next? Are they going to continue to conflict, is one person going to kind of try to smooth things over, someone else going to intervene and try to mediate? So, it’s those sorts of things that are just so interesting. But yeah, they’re challenging because they’re real and people are not always very aware of, you know, what’s going on for them and they may not be very consistent over time either.

Jennifer: Yeah, speaking of the information that you gather from these interviews, I’m assuming that for social research, a lot of it would be qualitative. For research newbies like myself and the others, could you elaborate on the kind of statistical approaches that you would use?

Dr. Kramer: Yeah. So, I tend to use more quantitative methods rather than qualitative but we are doing some work on qualitative too, which is kind of opening up new doors as well. But it’s possible even when you’re observing, like let’s say we have some recordings of people talking to each other or interacting with one another. There’s ways to code their behaviors, develop coding systems, look at inter-rate of reliability and agreement, and try to get to what, what’s going on in these interactions. So, you know, it’s just like any other science really, in that you can form some educated hypothesis about what you expect to see based on the research literature or other kinds of maybe you know, pilot groups, focus groups or pilot interviews, those sorts of things to get some ideas about what might be happening, formulating some good research questions. You can find ways to translate the seemingly totally qualitative information into something quantitative that you can do some statistics with. There’s a lot of new techniques coming up that I think are really interesting. I am not an expert on those sorts of things.

But you know, what’s been really interesting in the sibling literature is that for years people only studied families that have two children and we know that families have more than two children, right? They went so far as to say to parents or just tell us about two of them, you know, tell them about the oldest two or the two that are the same gender, right? And the parents were like, what? This makes no sense and the reason for that was that basically the statistics that we had available to us didn’t really help us look at larger family systems. So that was a huge limitation, but there’s been some gains in looking at using multi linear modeling, hierarchical modeling approaches where they nest different relationships with them.

So, it really helps to understand families as systems, which is really, really great. There’s also some sequential analysis approaches that are really interesting so that you can look at the probabilities of something happening based on something happening before that and that can be really, very informative as well. So, there’s new techniques coming all the time. You know, when I started this research, Jennifer, it was challenging. I, we didn’t have like phones to record, you know, video recording. So, I would go to people’s homes carrying video equipment that was basically four different pieces.

Jennifer: Must have been heavy!

Dr. Kramer: It was heavy. It was clunky and they would just laugh. You know, they’d open the door and say, “oh my god,” like the recording step was so crazy and so, it would take us a few minutes to set it up. I had a tripod, the whole thing.

And now, you know, it’s so changed that I can even ask families to make recordings themselves and submit them. So that’s been a huge technological advance that’s going to really help us.

Jennifer: That’s really cool. It sounds like everything is constantly evolving all the time. I know a couple of meetings ago, club meetings ago, we had a bunch of people from the Institute of AI — I know it’s a buzzword — but it seems like it’s got applications in every single field. Do you feel that the field of psychology or research in psychology would evolve in any way based on the use of AI?

Dr. Kramer: Probably, and I’m not exactly sure exactly how that might work, but I’ll tell you a fantasy of mine and that is, you know, I’m a clinician too, as well as researcher. One of the things that I really want to do is help people, help families where kids are having difficulties getting along or developing early prevention tools that families can use. Yet, the primary way that we’ve been doing that is working family by family, right, or having families come into a clinic or having a program that’s kind of designed for everybody and their mother. You’re not really specific to the needs of a particular family, but I think with technology you can have an iPad or something that’s mounted that could be in the family home where you as the counselor or the researcher or observer can actually be there. How parents kind of be that coach, as parents get exasperated, because their children are fighting, and they don’t know how to handle it or they’re just feeling overwhelmed by all of that.

You can actually be there in the moment as families need that help and help to coach them through those experiences.

Jennifer: That’s really cool. So moving everything virtual!

Dr. Kramer: And inserting yourself into that as a helper upon the family’s need, which I think could be really, really helpful.

Jennifer: Speaking of iPad.

Dr. Kramer: Yeah.

Jennifer: I had this thought in my mind, the phenomenon of iPad kids. I don’t know if you’re familiar, but right now, it’s this trend that we see: on the subway, in the airport, there’s kids clutching onto their iPads. Technology is really shaping the way that they grow up and interact with others. Do you think, I’m sure like in the older days, those children and siblings didn’t grow up with that technology, so I’m wondering if you could predict any differences in those dynamics?

Dr. Kramer: Yeah, I just think that people are very consumed by screens these days. I’m going to count myself as one of those people too. It’s just, I don’t want to say that, you know, it’s just those kids. But yeah, I think that it removes you from real interactions with other people and it could really limit the depth and intimacy of the relationships that you’re able to develop with other people. How do we help people avoid being so attracted to them all the time in a way that’s going to reduce the benefits that come from real interaction? I think the pandemic just did a number on all of us right now. In some ways, it was really good. I mean, you got to stay connected to people that you cared about that you can’t physically see, but it kind of changed everything in a lot of different ways, too.

Jennifer: I’m sure the pandemic also allowed for a lot of time to spend with siblings. I know myself when I was stuck at home, I only had my play buddies that were my blood related siblings. It could get annoying, but yeah, it was really fun.

Dr. Kramer: And that was actually a huge concern for a lot of families during that time, how to help their kids get along, since those relationships were so important because they were the primary social relationships for most kids.

Jennifer: Yeah. So I’m hoping to move on to your work with the program, the Sisters and Brothers Program. One thing that I’ve heard about from research professionals in general is that they often worry about bridging the gap between their research and directly applying that research to its research users. I’m really intrigued to hear about that.

Dr. Kramer: Yeah. So when I started that first study where we were looking at those three to five year olds who were first becoming siblings, part of my motivation was to be able to use that study and and others that we did afterwards to try to come up with some practical implications for families. Maybe that could lead to some prevention or intervention programs or other forms of treatment and that’s basically what happened. As a result of that study, we were able to say ok having a good friend predicts good sibling relationships. What are kids doing with their friends that’s helpful? We were able to really focus in on some social and emotional competencies that kids with good sibling relationships were more likely to demonstrate with their friends than kids with poorer sibling relationships. So, we turned that around and took those competencies and then found ways to teach kids those skills.

So we structured, I mean there were a lot of other studies in the interim because we had a lot of questions about how to do this: To what extent are parents really important in this process? What should we be trying to do? Should we be trying to decrease sibling conflict, or should we be trying to increase more positive forms of engagement among siblings and worrying less about sibling conflict per se? We had a lot of questions that we did some studies to try to come to answers with, and also along the way, how to figure out how to measure some of these things scientifically. It involves some instrument development as well. But the end of the story basically is that it gave us some ways to actually turn the results around, develop a program, the more Fun with Sisters and Brothers program was one of those programs, and it started as an in-person program for families who had two children between the ages of four and eight.

And we’d have about kids from maybe 2–3 families come in to our space and we had a really great space where we could do it. It looked like a little house.

It was wonderful and the house was equipped with eight video cameras and audio — microphones hidden all over the place. It was really, very cool. Then there was a viewing area where the parents could sit and watch on a video screen what was going on with the kids. It was a four-session program in the space where we taught kids together, so siblings together, were taught these social and emotional competencies and then they practiced it together. I would usually sit with parents and explain to them what we were doing and help them figure out ways to keep the learning going at home. We did things like developed some bedtime stories that focused on these competencies. We’ve created an activity book and a board game. We even had a rap song.

Jennifer: Oh!

Dr. Kramer: Yes, it’s really great. I have to find that for you, but we used that in the child session, so it was really great and it worked. We had really good data. It really helped increase positive engagement in siblings and it helped to decrease negative conflict. It also helped kids develop skills in their ability to manage difficult emotions. We were really surprised but it also helped parents improve their emotion regulations too. So even though we weren’t trying, it had a very positive effect with that. The challenge of the program was that we could only work with a limited number of families at one time and it required a lot of us to do this. I did this on Saturdays for years and it gets a little exhausting to do that.

We had some organizations who picked the program up, and were doing it, but it was still really hard to have enough staff people to do this. So, we figured out pretty quickly that we needed to come up with an online version and what that is so that’s really what we’re doing now. We [VP1] have an online version. This is for parents, so it’s putting parents in the role of coach or teacher for their own kids. It’s available for families who are comfortable learning in English and have at least two kids in the four to eight age range. We have a number of families involved in the study and we were surprised, but 30% of our sample is outside of the US. It’s really cool that people who speak English or comfortable listening and reading in English were interested in being a part of all of this.

Jennifer: Wow, that’s very cool.

Dr. Kramer: The data again, very positive, and kids are, you know, parents are able to teach these skills, kids are improving and we’re seeing games, more games for parents’ emotion regulation than child regulation with these data, but that’s still a really good thing.

Jennifer: Haha, happy kids, happy parents.

Dr. Kramer: Exactly!

Jennifer: That’s what my parents like to say. So, I stalked the website of the program a little bit. I understand there’s four lessons, right? I have written down somewhere: there’s playing with siblings, taking perspective, emotional regulation, and conflict management. I was wondering how you came to categorize them that way, and how you decided to break those up?

Dr. Kramer: Right. The first thing I did when we took the results from that first longitudinal study was to present that to a group of graduate students, so I taught a seminar, graduate seminar. I said, “hey, I want to develop a program, help me” and probably had about 20 students in there. It was really large.

We looked at these data, we’ve read from the literature, we worked together and split up into small groups to try to tackle this. Our first draft of this program involved like 12 sessions, which I had to say no parents can go, we can’t do this. We got it down to four but basically, it parallel the major results of the research that we found, plus the addition of one major competency that came from other people’s research, colleagues’ research. The major findings were that kids who have better sibling relationships and better friendships tended to engage in more sustained play with their friends, so they kept the play going. They got really deep. They got involved in fantasy play, which actually requires a lot of social.

Jennifer: Like imaginery?

Dr. Kramer: Yeah! Pretending to be something because the way that kids pretend, it’s wonderful. This is hard for adults to do but what they do is they sort of give each other information within the context of their play about what’s going to happen, right? They don’t have a meeting beforehand and say “ok, you do this, you do that. Then this is going to happen, that’s going to happen.” They may start by assigning roles, but they’re basically weaving cues to one another within the play itself to make things happen and make the play fun and exciting. That’s hard for adults to do. It’s like improv theater.

Jennifer: We’ve lost our creativity.

Dr. Kramer: Yeah, kids are freer with all of that, but the ability to do that and really get into some deep play is a very good emotional and social competency. It requires being very attentive [VP2] of and following the lead of someone else. It connects with that idea of perspective taking.

So being able to look at a situation not only in terms of what you want to have happen or what your needs and goals are, but to take into consideration your siblings as well, that’s really important. Siblings are frustrating. We know that, right?

Jennifer: Tried and tested.

Dr. Kramer: We realized that kids don’t always know how to deal with their frustration. Some of that is because they lack a vocabulary. They don’t know how to talk about what it is that they’re experiencing. They have a very limited range, often, of how to describe what they’re feeling. So when they’re really frustrated or exasperated, they may say things to their sibling like “I hate you.” But they don’t hate their siblings. They’re frustrated. They’re wanting to tear their hair out. There’s a lot of things going on for them, but it’s not hate.

So if we can help kids develop a more accurate vocabulary, so that they’ve got more words to use that match how they’re feeling and can communicate those, that’s going to be really helpful. The other piece is learning how to manage those intense emotions. What can they do to regulate those feelings? We have about 10 different strategies that we teach kids and give them the control for how they want to, we call it chilling out, how to chill, how they want to chill right now. That helps them so they’re able to tell one another how they’re feeling, what’s going on. Learning self-control is a really important skill too, that we teach, so, how to realize when things are getting a little bit crazy, out of control, how to stop the action, take a deep breath, think about what your goals are at the moment. So those are some of the competencies.

If you can put all those things together like that, emotion understanding, perspective taking, emotion regulation, it’s going to give you a lot of foundations for managing conflicts. We think about managing conflicts in terms of problem solving. Conflicts are basically problems. How can we use some pretty standard techniques to understand what the problem is, to communicate what the problem is, to tell their sides of what’s going on for them and what they want to have happen? Then to work together to generate some possible solutions to this problem that they’re going to both feel ok about. How to pick one, try it out, see if it works, and go through just a pretty standard problem-solving paradigm. Often they need parents to help lead them and coach them through that, but all of those skills parallel the results of that longitudinal study.

Jennifer: That’s really cool. I remember last semester I was taking clinical psychology with one of my professors, and he was talking about how, in adulthood, a lot of anger management issues stem from the way you’re raised. He began to talk about how sometimes, in this modern age, people, parents tend to think about treating their children like adults and talking to them in that way, teaching them that vocabulary. So yeah, just made that connection there. It’s really cool. It also sounds like there’s a lot of responsibility on the parents’ side. First of all, they have to recognize that their children, the siblings, are having problems and then come to these programs to help. How do you think, on a more macro sense, for those parents that don’t reach out and don’t recognize the problem and don’t know where to go, what do you think are the solutions for that?

Dr. Kramer: Great question. I think that we live in a society where for years people just assume that siblings are going to fight.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Dr. Kramer: That this is just what they do and maybe they even have this belief to go with that that is sort of like there’s nothing we can really do. A lot of times parents feel like I really like my kids to get along, but they’re not and maybe I can’t expect it. Maybe there’s nothing that I can really do to change that. We did an interesting study as we were developing an instrument to measure parents’ perceptions of children’s sibling relationship quality and basically asked parents to rate their what they thought were the characteristics of a really good sibling relationship between kids who are the same genders and ages of their own kids.

So, you know, they would rate like how much conflict they thought would happen even in a good relationship or how much sharing or telling each other secrets, those sorts of things. Then we had them do that for their own kids’ relationship. Then we looked at the differences and what we had expected to find was that that parents would feel that their kids were engaging in too much conflict. We thought that was going to be what they were going to tell us, but what we found was actually the opposite. The biggest differences between what parents wanted to see in their kid’s relationship and what they did see was actually in the area of warmth and engagement. So wasn’t like they were feeling like there was way too much conflict. They expected to see some, but what they wanted to see was greater warmth and positivity. Those are things we can help parents help their kids do or we can help kids directly to do that.

So I think that we’re facing some cultural, societal assumptions that these things are just normative. That can be really problematic because it can lead parents to not intervene or get help when kids are abusive or aggressive to one another and that does happen. Not all the time, but it happens. In fact, sibling aggression and violence is actually the most frequent form of family violence. Are you surprised by that?

Jennifer: I didn’t expect that! I thought it would be between the parents or something.

Dr. Kramer: Yes, yes, but no. We also know that parents are not even aware of the extent to which these things happen between siblings, kind of hidden from our parents. I always ask my college students when I’m teaching on sibling relationships to write me anonymously about something that happened between them and their sibling, if they had a sibling, that their parents never knew about. Oh my god, it is astounding what people have told me. Yeah, it’s terrifying.

We live in a society where we’re not taking these kinds of the significance of intractable sibling conflict, aggression, even abuse seriously between siblings because it’s kind of dismissed as that’s just something that kids do. It really is a public health challenge. There’s a lot of people that are really concerned about that. I do think that we have to find ways to let parents know that there are benefits to good sibling relationships that will last kids throughout their lives and that there’s things that we can actually do to help them achieve that. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that they be able to do that. These are relationships that can change. There’s hope.

Jennifer: Yeah, I was thinking about the fighting and the conflicts between siblings. Some of my friends who have siblings that are closer in age tend to fight more, but my siblings and I, personally have larger age gaps. I know you’re doing research on siblings with really large age gaps. I was wondering if you could touch on that a little bit?

Dr. Kramer: Yeah, it’s so interesting because when parents are concerned or when people are concerned about sibling relationships, they’re always looking at they’re three years apart, they’re two years apart or they’re both girls or they’re a boy and a girl or whatever. They kind of attribute those things to those social demographic factors of sibling relationships.

When we’re talking about sibling relationships where the age gaps are like pretty normative for US families, which is usually between like a year and a half and four or five years, there’s really not a big difference. I mean, I found in my research that kids who are 4 as opposed to three when their siblings were born for a little bit more mature and better a little, you know, more able to welcome this new baby for the most part. It’s those social relationships that were much more predictive of good selling relationships over time. Now, Jennifer, you’re involved in this study, looking at what it’s been like for families of Chinese descent who were affected by the one child family and the one child policy and the lifting of that policy. It was very surprising to learn from some graduate students that I’ve been working with who come from China and grew up there that as that policy was lifted, more people had second or even third children.

I had naively assumed that those would be families where the first-born child was like 3, 4, 5 years old, like they would be in the United States when they have their first sibling, but I was really interested to learn that for some families and there’s a good number of these families, the older children were like in high school, sometimes in college when their younger siblings were born. That’s a really large age gap and it’s a totally different phenomenon given the age gap, but also given the culture.

Jennifer: Yeah, like you said, the social relationships play a really big role. I assume for those Chinese families, they were socialized to play with children that didn’t have siblings either. Their approach to having a newer sibling would be drastically different. It’s really crazy. I mean, I’m shocked every day listening to those interviews that we do.

Dr. Kramer: Which shocks you?

Jennifer: Just the comparison in terms of the cultural component, obviously, but also the way they think about things, the way they approach their sibling relationships, the warmth and intimacy part of it, I feel like… it’s definitely not lacking… but just that it’s very different in that environment.

Dr. Kramer: Yeah.

Jennifer: Yeah. A lot of our members in the club and the podcast listeners, we all have siblings, some of us do and this is a really great opportunity for us to kind of do a personal reflection on our sibling relationships too. I feel like I’ve done a lot of that in the past few days preparing for this podcast.

I was wondering, just to end the podcast, if you had any advice for those of us who are thinking about going into the Graduate School space, or thinking about pursuing a career in academia?

Dr. Kramer: Sure. First, let me just say that I’m delighted to hear that this could lead more people, including you, to reflect on their sibling relationships or even what it’s like not to have siblings, because that’s really important too. These are lifelong relationships. They could be the longest relationship that you have with anybody in your life and we’re learning more and more about how good sibling relationships can really support people’s mental health, even that maybe their physical health as well. They have lifelong benefits. [I] Just want to encourage people call your sibling or text them.

For your other question about preparing for your careers, which I think is great. I think where I started, as I said, was really trying to fine tune where my interests were. That’s the hard part. I think once you know what gets you really excited, what motivates you to want to learn more but fascinates you, that’s going to be really, really helpful. Finding the right programs for yourself or graduate education or practicum or internships or co-ops or whatever. Spend the time to find out as much as you can about the backgrounds of the people who are faculty or clinicians or whoever. I think that what turns out to be most important is that match finding programs where you could envision working with two or more people, I think is really, really important.

That’s going to ensure that you’re going to have the ability to really pursue deeply what you are interested in. Be aware that your interests are going to change and that is great. That’s fine. You’re not going to have to be married to whatever Plan A was.

Jennifer: Oh. Thank God.

Dr. Kramer: We all grow and develop and that’s fine. I think the trickiest part is finding the right environment in which you’re going to thrive and then throwing yourself into it even though that means sacrifices. Yeah, that’s what grad school is. It’s really a wonderful time in your life. Even though it’s really hard and challenging, it’s really the one time in your life where your job is to learn. I mean, that’s so cool. Later on, you’re going to be doing things for other people. You’re developing you and enjoy that the relationships you make with other people in your programs, Oh my god, they’re going to last you throughout your career. I think being with a supportive cohort of people makes the ride a lot more fun.

Jennifer: I really like the part about enjoying the present. I feel like my parents are telling me all the time. Like, “Ugh I wish I could go back to school. You should really enjoy it.” So yeah, that’s really great advice.

Well, thank you so much for coming in and speaking with us. We’ll definitely benefit a lot from it

Dr. Kramer: Great. Thank you, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Thank you! Ending the recording now.

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