A Culturally Informed Perspective on Wellness: Shujianing Li’s Internship at APARC
In the ever-evolving landscape of mental health, the importance of culturally informed practices remains as critical as ever. Shujianing Li, a third-year PhD student in psychology with a focus on counseling, embraced this challenge through an impactful internship where she spent over thirteen weeks designing workshops aimed at promoting mental well-being and financial wellness and addressing the unique experiences and challenges of the Asian American community.
What were your main job responsibilities?
I worked as a consultant with the Asian Pacific American Resource Center (APARC) over the summer to support two areas of programming: mental health and financial wellness. APARC noticed that many student mentors from the ASPIRE program–APARC's most popular peer-mentoring program–reported experiences of burnout/distress related to navigating multiple roles as students, mentors, and community leaders. To address this, I designed an interactive mental health workshop on self-compassion, boundary-setting, and burnout prevention that takes into consideration cultural and structural factors Asian Americans face.
Supporting APARC's financial wellness programming was challenging but fascinating. APARC noticed that many students came to APARC with finance-related questions and hoped to improve student engagement with their financial wellness programming. I drafted a financial wellness pre-session that approaches financial wellness from a social justice lens, aiming to destigmatize conversations about money and engage participants in reflecting on their financial values and identities. This work to refine this curriculum will continue into the academic year; APARC and I hope student engagement in this presession will help us design and provide financial wellness programming in more student-centered, culturally-informed ways.
I was surprised by how many of my clinical skills came in handy. Counseling skills such as empathic listening, reflection, reframing, modeling and even the use of silence became very helpful for extracting concrete issues from ambiguous situations (i.e., diagnostics). When designing the workshops, I also drew on counseling and human development theories to make the workshops collaborative, person-centered, and trauma-informed.
I also developed a new interest in program evaluation, so much so that it inspired me to take a course this fall in prevention science. Overall, I found it rewarding and motivating to be able to integrate many of my professional skills into one internship experience.
How did you find your internship? What tips would you give others seeking similar opportunities?
I got in contact with APARC in the winter of 2023 because I was interested in [their] work and wanted to stay connected with the Asian/Asian American community at the U. We would periodically check-in and the ongoing dialogue organically led to two mental health-focused collaborations during the spring semester.
Through this process, APARC's leadership and I developed familiarity and trust in each other, which made it pretty easy for me to bring up the possibility of doing a self-designed summer internship with them. Networking and outreach, in my case, definitely helped and I think my confidence in this internship being the right fit was high because I had already spent time just getting to know the like-minded people.
A couple of things I wish I knew: Start early in the search process, talk with people who worked at the exact organization/company you are hoping to join, and spend some time researching all the potential job titles that describe what you are interested in doing.
What were your main takeaways from your internship experience?
This internship experience helped me affirm my interest in consulting, workshop design, training, and program evaluation, and my passion in working closely with community-serving organizations and community members. Working with APARC was undoubtedly one of the highlights of my summer and made me feel so purposeful.
[Another] takeaway I have is about my home discipline of counseling psychology: we really don't talk enough about money or what it does to our wellbeing, when it is such a relatable issue for everyone. The field's silence about financial insecurity as a stressor could be reflecting the inaccessibility of psychological services to underresourced individuals, and prevent meaningful discussions on how mental health providers could help clients develop adaptive financial identities and values and navigate financial hardships.
In my future career, I hope to initiate more open conversations about money and its influence on mental health in Asian American communities.
This story was edited by Regina Ramos-Francia Ylizaliturri, an undergraduate student in CLA.