Media mention: Delgado-Romero quoted in APA magazine

When it comes to mentorships and opportunities to work with faculty in the psychology field, underrepresented students may be missing out.

This stems from a number of reasons—for example, requests for mentorship are ignored by faculty, few faculty in a department share a student’s culture and understand his or her life experiences, or faculty from diverse communities are already stretched thin working with other students. But for these reasons and more, universities and professional associations are working to identify the challenges faced by underrepresented students in the field of psychology and help overcome them.

An article in this month’s Monitor on Psychology magazine from the American Psychological Association addressed the challenges students and early career psychologists from underrepresented backgrounds face and included perspectives from Edward Delgado-Romero, associate dean for faculty and staff services and professor in the Department of Counseling and Human Development Services. He noted that along with looking for career advice, underrepresented students often look for mentors who understand the cultural component of their work.

“Young people find it refreshing to talk to someone who they don’t have to convince that their experiences are real,” he said, and advised students who couldn’t find a mentor in their home department to branch out to adjacent departments, a nearby hospital, a state association, or an ethnic-minority psychological association.