Peter Felsman

What is it you do as a graduate student?

I am a joint doctoral student in social work and social psychology. I get to ask questions I'm interested in and then work with bona fide scholars (i.e., my advisors, my colleagues) to try to answer them! I also get to teach mostly content I am passionate about (I've been a GSI for other lead instructors and also the instructor of record for my own course)! 

Why did you choose to major in Psychology and how has that affected your career thus far? 

Psychology was something I’d been interested in since middle school, when I had two realizations. First, my classmates had a variety of challenges (e.g., eating disorders, depression) which I wished I could better help them face. Second, my uncle and aunt, both psychotherapists who had studied with the great humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, seemed to leverage their wisdom to live extraordinarily vital lives. Whereas someone other than my uncle may have taken a multiple sclerosis diagnosis and ruminated mostly on its associated losses, my uncle, wheelchair bound, let this experience inform his work as a therapist, author, poet, painter, family man, friend. While I was in middle school, my uncle and aunt began teaching me various psychological skills: e.g., mindfulness and relaxation techniques, separating observations from moralistic judgments, reasoning strategies, etc., which I recognized as helpful to my own personal growth and useful in my role as friend to others. I majored in psychology at Michigan because of my continued interest in living through suffering, self-actualizing, and helping others.  My first semester, I took a psychology course as my freshman seminar: How to Succeed in College and Beyond. Before that course, I hadn’t envisioned psychological research as a part of my career – I knew no one doing psychological research and the thought of it honestly did not occur to me. But my professor, Oscar Ybarra, actively discussed his relationship with his own research during our class, and at the end of the term, invited me to join his lab as a research assistant. The most significant impact majoring in psychology at UM has had on my career is opening my eyes to research and improving my skills in scientific reasoning. Through classes like Chris Peterson’s Positive Psychology – its emphasis on “what goes right” a neat echo of Maslow’s work which was so formative for my uncle and aunt – and Denise Sekaquaptewa’s Stereotyping, Gender/Racial Diversity, I started to see how research could be a way of developing and disseminating insight on a larger scale than one-on-one therapy. As I worked on my honors thesis, I knew I would not be done scratching my itch to ask questions and pursue them scientifically by graduation. So, with the support of my mentors, I applied to graduate schools. 

What was your career path like? 

Career “path”, at this point, is not a great metaphor for me. While I have moved six times since my graduation in 2013, and am technically an alumnus, thus qualifying for this interview, I have remained a UM student living in Ann Arbor.  So, while the physical “path” hasn’t taken me very far, in graduate school I’ve been able to pursue my middle school dreams, many of my pre-existing interests, as well as develop new ones. I’ve gotten to design web-based, lab-based and community-based research, to work as a therapist (currently as an LLMSW, logging hours towards licensure), and to develop and teach my own course. And, since I didn’t move, I’ve been able to draw on the artistic community I connected with as an undergraduate to continue to create music (each of my band’s album releases marks an academic milestone). I’ve played my music all around the state, and even briefly toured the northeast and Canada last spring. I’ve also combined my experiences with improvised music as an undergraduate with skills and lessons taught through therapy, to pursue improvisational theater as a context for promoting psychological health.  For the program I am in, enrolling straight from undergrad seems increasingly unconventional. More and more incoming doctoral students have had some time off since undergraduate school, working or teaching, lab managing, going through a different graduate degree program, publishing papers with an undergraduate mentor, etc. While I’m sure I would have made good use of that time, I feel very fortunate to have been able to jump right in. 

What advice do you have for students getting a degree in the UM Psychology Department who are considering your profession? 

Get involved in research. Get to know your GSIs. Put yourself in situations that will give you a sense of whether you really want to pursue graduate school in psychology or not – go to talks, get involved in all stages of research, work with different people and in different labs. Also, find out about the many different forms “graduate school in psychology” can take – you’ll probably be surprised at the number of degrees and programs that represent overlapping content. I was. 

How do you use your psychology undergraduate experience in your work?

 One way, having been an undergraduate in psychology at Michigan not too long ago, is recognizing my own connection with my students and research assistants.

What is the best career advice that you have received?  

My senior year, when I was deciding what to do after graduation, my uncle sent me the following quote in an e-mail:  “If it's a hard decision then there's always lots to be said on both sides, so either choice is likely to be good in its own way. Hard choices are always unimportant.” -Albert Bregman, McGill University I’ve since found a good bit of relief and clarity through this idea.   

What memories do you have about the Psychology Department here at U of M? 

Seeing as this fall will mark the beginning of my 10th year making memories in the UM Psychology Department, I’ve got a lot of these. From my undergrad, in no particular order, here are a few standouts: I’ll remember the late great Chris Peterson’s Positive Psychology lectures; Denise Sekaquaptewa’s Stereotyping and Gender/Racial diversity course; Richard Mann’s Psychology & Spiritual Development course – the reading list, the meditations, the group experiences and conversations; how clueless I was as a first-time research assistant who spent most of his time on North Campus in a music school practice room; being a more confident and bored research assistant a few semesters later; being told I was unlikely to be able to do an honors thesis after the graduate student I had worked for announced her intention to leave the country; shortly thereafter, another graduate student, who’d been my GSI before, helping me get a proposal together so that I could do an honors thesis after all; meeting with faculty who valued my ideas; recruiting RAs of my own for the first time; picking up most of the timeslots because my RAs had less flexible schedules than I; productive meetings with Saroya; repeatedly learning that my writing needs work.