It’s Friday at a Cumberland-based elementary school and Hayley Bonavita ’25 is shadowing a board-certified behavioral analyst and a doctor who are visiting an inclusion classroom. Carefully observing, she sees how they, alongside the room’s five teachers, handle behavioral issues and help the 15 to 20 kindergarten through fifth grade students navigate their coping skills.
“A lot of the kids get very overstimulated and need to take sensory breaks,” says the Bryant Psychology major, who’s there every Friday from the time kids get off the bus to when they’re heading home in the late afternoon.
When these types of situations occur, Bonavita or one of the teachers will prompt the overstimulated child to take a break or talk about what they can do to calm themselves down and return to the group.
“We're trying to get them to realize that they have the skills to bring themselves to a happy medium. They just can't figure out how to get there, so we help them with these steps,” Bonavita says.
Bonavita is one of 12 students in Psychology Lecturer Lindsay Amper Ph.D.’s “Senior Internship Seminar.” Over the course of fifteen weeks, undergrads identify an internship based on their interests within the psychology field and spend 120 hours with that organization. Having spent this past summer interning for the Department of Child Protective Services in Providence, Bonavita enjoyed working with the younger population and used her professional contacts there to find other avenues of interest — ultimately leading her to the Center for Psychology and Learning, an organization offering neuropsychological, psychological, and educational evaluations from preschool to college-aged students.
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“When I saw that I would have the opportunity to go through a lot of different areas of psychology within one internship, that stood out to me,” Bonavita says, noting that she wanted to use this placement to reaffirm her desire to pursue a Ph.D. in forensic psychology.
In addition to working with elementary schoolers on coping skills, Bonavita’s Tuesdays have been spent at the Center for Psychology and Learning’s Cranston-based office where she observes neuropsychological exams and conducts research on autism.
“We're trying to figure out how to push out the old diagnostic system for autism and bring in a new one, because, a lot of times, people will fly under the radar since they're not hitting the exact points of criteria to be diagnosed with autism at young ages,” Bonavita says.
The opportunity has put Bonavita in touch with The Autism Project where she spoke with individuals who were diagnosed later in life about missed signs throughout their lives.
“We're trying to make it a broader spectrum for people to get their diagnoses because we found that it's harder to move through your schooling without the diagnosis,” Bonavita says.
The research is in its early stages but, through her conversation with members of The Autism Project, she learned that many individuals struggled to maintain their grades in school and some mentioned that they were never able to find secure work and kept bouncing between jobs.
Meeting with Amper and fellow classmates at Bryant once a week, undergrads spend the hour and fifteen-minute period sharing updates on their internship experiences.
“Being able to hear my peers' stories of what they're doing and what they're learning has been really helpful in pinpointing the career I want to go into,” Bonavita says, noting that they’ll often talk through challenges and offer each other advice.
Reflecting on her placement this past semester, Bonavita says the experience has been rewarding.
“I really like learning how to administer coping skills and navigate them. Because of what I want to do in the future, I'm going to be working with a more intense population,” says Bonavita, who will share a final presentation with her class before the end of the semester. “Getting these skills now really stood out to me to be the most beneficial for my career down the line.”
