Personal Narrative

I guess the first thing that I have to say is that my biggest motivation to become a psychologist is my mom. You’re probably thinking that she has a psychological problem because of the way I worded the previous sentence. But the actual reason my mom is a motivation to become a psychologist is because she has a master’s in psychology.

Ever since I was little I always wondered how people worked. Growing up in Cuba there was a lot of poverty and sometimes violence in the streets; yet many people always strived to help each other as far as they could. I had a friend who I grew up with who lived on the same block as me and he was relatively poor, his parents had jobs but most of the time they could not make ends meet because the way the economic system is set up in the country. At the time I lived with my grandparents and my mom, my mom had a decent job but we were not rich and always helped my friends family because that’s how it was in Cuba, you always helped others if you could. By comparison people in Cuba are more “neighborly” than they are here. So it always brought up the question for me if people there helped each other when they were all poor, why wouldn’t people here with better economic standing help those in need. I remember seeing an article claiming that Sarasota, a city in Florida, about 20 miles from where I live, is the “meanest city in America”. This term was credited by newspaper after the city decided to criminalize the homeless population and even went as far as removing all public park benches so they wouldn’t sleep there. Keep in mind that Sarasota is one of the most economically developed cities in southwest Florida. And that’s just an example of how people from two different economically developed countries behave in the same situation.

In a psychological study led by Piliavin et al. called Subway Samaritans; the researchers wanted to learn if certain people, of different class, age and sex would or would not help someone in case of an emergency. The researchers set up people to fake an emergency by falling on the ground and pretending to be passed out inside a subway car in New York. The study concluded that a person of lower economic standing would help someone that had poor physical appearance (looked like a homeless person, as set up by the researchers), but that overall people would help regardless of appearance. So this answered my question; typically people always try to help those in need regardless of what they appear as expect when it depreciates their property value, like in Sarasota (yes that was an actual reason for why the city of Sarasota did not want any homeless people there).

I guess another thing that made me want to be a psychologist was the fact that my biological father left me and my mom when I was only 2 months old. Growing up he was never there, he had a job on the other side of the country so I saw him maybe once a month for a couple of hours. As I grew up I began to think it’s my fault. Maybe there was something wrong with me that made him want to leave. As I got older I began to think about it from a more mature standpoint. I still do not know why he left me, and every once in a while, he calls to know how I have been. I always answer with the same, “ok”, because what else would I say. As people we never really open up to others unless we trust them. I learned this from my mom during one of her classes. Mainly people do not want to open up to someone they don’t trust because they are afraid to get hurt. Its just part of the human psyche.

My senior year of high school I also had an AICE Psychology class. I took that class to see if I was any good at psychology and if I would want to get a degree in the field. I had straight A’s the whole year and I never got below a B in the tests. I even enjoyed everything we did in that class and all we learned from the different types of psychology to different studies that were performed on humans and even animals that helped breakthroughs in the understanding of people. To say the least that class really did a lot in my understanding and appreciation of the subject. As of now I would like to pursue a career in applied behavior analysis; focusing on children with Autism and Asperger’s.