APA's Minority Fellowship Program has a five to seven percent selection rate
The American Psychological Association (APA) is paying for the rest of Darrick Scott’s tuition at UMass Boston. Scott, a Chicago native who just finished his second year in UMass Boston’s Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program, has been accepted into the APA’s Minority Fellowship Program (MFP). The program’s selection rate in recent years has ranged from five to seven percent.
Scott is a graduate student in the Black Mental Health Advocacy in Research Lab, where he supports his advisor, Assistant Professor of Psychology Tahirah Abdullah. He came to UMass Boston because he wanted a program that integrated diversity and social justice within its mission.
“Dr. Abdullah invited me for an interview and I really was blown away by the faculty and the environment,” Scott said.
Scott came to UMass Boston directly from Chicago, where he was doing research around how families cope with violence in the urban community. It was there that he developed an interest in exploring stigma in communities of color. At UMass Boston he's studying stigma within Black American mental health on a broader level and how Black Americans navigate therapy.
"Yes, you're dealing with life like everybody else, but we also have to keep in context that you're also dealing with these contextual barriers, like you're dealing with racism on top of not being picked for that soccer team," Scott said. "You're dealing with these systematic barriers, [like] poverty—you have to go beyond what the norm is in terms of what society says people experience and add those pieces in.”
Scott has been active both on and off campus his first two years here. Next month he’ll be presenting at the annual APA convention in Chicago. For Abudullah’s lab, Scott created flyers about the on-campus Black American Resilience Coping and Stress Study. He went to classrooms to get people to participate and he put the survey into the computer program. He’s also the cochair of the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program’s Diversity Committee.
“We’ll talk about personal and professional experiences and instances where marginalization or diversity was an issue. We’ll process it all together to think about how it impacts our work – how it impacts the broader community,” Scott said. “Collectively the group [of UMass Boston students and faculty] votes on topics that we would like to discuss and explore. Once we vote on [a] topic, the cochairs research the topic and represent the literature that we found for the group and then we create a processing activity.”
The goal of the MFP is to increase the number of ethnic minority professionals in the field and help promising graduate students, postdoctoral trainees, and early career professionals achieve lasting success in areas related to ethnic minority psychology. In addition to the tuition support, Scott can get help with his dissertation, and, through a summer institute, implementing research ideas. He’ll also have access to mentors.
After he earns his PhD, Scott would like to be working at a university, doing research and working with younger scholars, and providing treatment within a community setting. Whatever he does, through this fellowship, and UMass Boston’s program, he’ll be well prepared.
“I’m being trained right now to root myself in a multicultural approach, and I think that’s been my doorway into thinking about how to adapt treatment or be culturally-responsive in terms of navigating very sensitive topics with clients,” Scott said.