Commitment to Diversity

The Counseling Psychology Program has a strong commitment to promoting the personal and academic growth for our students in an atmosphere conducive for learning, good decision making, development of leadership skills, and skills emphasizing the significance of diversity. As part of the program’s value of diversity we are working to enhance the diversity among our students, faculty, and staff. To this end we have developed a diversity recruitment plan that will help the program reflect the diversity of the US population. Our plan includes taking specific steps in (1) recruiting faculty and students from diverse backgrounds to enrich our department, (2) creating an academic, social and emotional environment that embraces diversity and (3) creating materials that communicate the importance of diversity in the program to assist in recruiting and retaining students and faculty from diverse backgrounds.

The faculty members in the program believe that diversity spans all aspects of counseling psychology. As a result our faculty members take every opportunity to infuse issues relating to diversity in course work, counseling practica, supervision, and when addressing student personal development. Further, our faculty make concerted efforts to become involved in research and professional endeavors that embrace diversity. For example, some faculty hold membership in diversity related American Psychological Association (APA) divisions such as: Divisions 36 (Psychology of Religion), 45 (Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues), and 52 (International Psychology). Faculty members also engage in a wide variety of diversity related research. Recent research topics include African American racial identity, ethnic forgiveness, training culturally competent psychological consultants, homonegativism, spirituality and clinical supervision, post-disaster religious beliefs and God images, ethical dilemmas among counselors in training in Hong Kong, internationalizing counseling psychology, and gender and ethnicity in suicide.

We are proud to highlight that our commitment to diversity was highlighted by two faculty members receipt of an APA Commission on Ethnic Minority Membership Recruitment, Retention and Training in Psychology  grant to increase research and graduate school applications among undergraduate students of color.