Personal Statement

From as far back as I can remember, I have always been curious about why people to the things they do. Questioning, thinking, studying people’s behaviors was something that has been a skill of mine since I was old enough to talk. It came as no shock to anyone who knew me that my passion was set in the field of psychology. I started studying psychology my senior year of high school and fully dove into the subject without looking back. I knew in my head that my college career would be focused on studying the one topic that interested me the most. Psychology is the study of the brain and its functions, mainly pertaining to behavior. The field of psychology is one of those subjects that people are always a little more skeptical about. It is mulled

The way it is taught, perceived, and expressed in colleges all around the world is different, but also keep the fundamental parts of the subject virtually the same. Rich in recent history, psychology took the world by storm and flipped closed perspectives on the human mind upside down forever. 1879, the notorious year for the new found subject of psychology. Although it was just becoming known to the world in 1879, psychology set its roots as early as the 1600’s. Rene Descartes started off the journey of psychology with his idea of Dualism. Dualism is that idea that the mind and they body are separate, the mind can influence the body and the body can influence the mind. Descartes stated that the mind is the source of ideas and thoughts (located in the brain), and the body is a machine-like structure which can be studied and attempted to be understood. Descartes struggled with the ideas of nativism, knowledge is innate you are born with it, and rationalism, knowledge comes from experience, so he settled with a combination of both. The next step in the formation of psychology was the idea of Phrenology created by Franz

Joseph Jastrow eventually becomes the president of the APA in 1900. James McKeen Cattell, in 1888 became titled the first psychology professor in the United States at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. A significant fact about James McKeen Cattell is that he was a student of Wilhelm Wundt, the father of psychology. In 1892, the most paramount organization in the world of psychology was created. The American Psychological Association (APA) was founded by G. Stanley Hall and is the most prestigious psychological organization of researchers, educators, clinicians, and students in America. 1896 was a busy year with the inclusion of Functionalism, Structuralism, and Psychoanalysis into the psychology world. Functionalism is an early school of psychology, focuses on the acts and functions of the mind rather than its internal contents that was introduced by William James. Structuralism, introduced by Edward B. Titchener, is a school of psychology that says all mental experience can be understood as a combination of simple events or elements. Sigmund Freud introduced the idea of Psychoanalysis in a scholarly paper which