University is a place where students have the opportunity to discover what they are passionate about and study it in depth. Here is an interview with Serena Romanelli, a second-year honours psychology student at McGill who shares a passion for both psychology and linguistics.
Isabella Focsaneanu for Her Campus Mcgill (HC McGill): Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your studies?
Serena Romanelli (SR): I’m currently completing my second year of a Bachelor’s degree in Honours Psychology and a minor in Linguistics. Since I was little, I’ve always had this passion for justice and public speaking in me—for the longest time I wanted to be a lawyer. I would walk around my house at 3 years old with a pen and a notepad—and Mr. Potato Head glasses squishing onto my face—and I’d interview people and pretend to write down their answers. My dream was this mix of social justice, law enforcement, and world leadership. In the end, though, it always had some element of caring about people and understanding what they go through. In high school, I started watching the crime show Criminal Minds, and it sparked my fascination with behavioural profiling. I wanted to understand people’s behaviour and predict it—I wanted to be a people reader. I got my DEC in Criminology from Champlain College and decided that the field was a little too wide-scale for me—I much preferred the psychological aspect to criminal behaviour, and a lot of other facets of psychology, too. I have an obsession with absorbing information, so I began buying dozens of books on criminality, body language, and psychological assessment—I think I actually have read more non-fiction than fiction, at this point, simply for leisure. Aside from the psychology stuff, I love linguistics. I love taking courses where I learn how to distinguish different sounds of a language’s different dialects and how those sounds correlate with a person’s background and culture. I really like knowing word origins—so much that my mom bought me an etymology dictionary in secondary 4, which I used to read during my free time in class (that’s a little sad, isn’t it?). It fascinates me so much to know the connections between languages and where English words came from, or the root of words in other languages. In high school I liked (forcibly) quizzing my friends on whether a word had Latin or Greek as its root—because you can hear it in the way the word is written and pronounced which language it stems from. I promise it’s more interesting than it sounds. I also do this (weird) thing where I listen to people speaking in a different language and I try to guess what nationality they are based on the sounds I hear. Like, Russian has a very distinct velar (i.e. at the back of the throat) quality to it that distinguishes it from French, which is a language spoken at the front of the mouth. So for a long time I’ve been playing this game where I “guess the language”, it thrills me.
HC McGill: What is your research about?
SR: For my honours thesis I joined a psychology lab that studies child and adolescent psychopathology, which is a great accomplishment because I love working with children to help them become happier and avoid hardship. The topic of my own research project is a secret, but what I can say is that it looks at interpersonal relationships among emerging adults (people our age). Since I can’t give you any scoops on my project, I can tell you that I’m assisting in another study that looks at mental well-being in children, and another that addresses friendship in emerging adults. I don’t think I can say more than that, though; but, in essence, I’m really a social psychology kind of girl, so I like bringing some of those concepts into anything I do.
HC McGill: What interests you most about your research?
SR: What interests me most about my research is seeing what people really do and comparing it to what they say they’d do. As humans, we really like to believe that our behaviour will turn out a certain way, but what tends to happen is that we often can’t accurately predict how we’re actually going to act in a given situation. Apart from that social psychology stuff, I love working with the kids because it just makes my day to hear them laugh. I like when they know there’s somebody who really enjoys hearing about their lives because it makes them happy. It’s so important for me that kids are just happy. That’s all I want.
HC McGill: What motivated you to join this lab and study this particular subject?
SR: I joined this lab in particular because I have a soft spot for kids. I have a baby sister who is two years old, and every time I see her my heart soars. The way she’s always smiling and the sound of her laughs and giggles make me so happy. When I think about her, and if I imagine away the smiling and laughing and replace it with sadness and crying, it’s unbearable. I could never stand to hear her suffer or even cry—and a large part of me hates to imagine other kids going through that, too. To me, kids are innocent… They get put into bad situations sometimes with no way out; and if there’s something I can do to lessen their pain, I need to do it. Kids shouldn’t have mental illnesses, and that arguably huge prescription I believe in is what motivates me to love the work I do in the lab.
HC McGill: What are your plans for the future?
SR: In an ideal world where everything is perfect and there are limited setbacks, I would be an international speaker on mental health. I love public speaking, I love justice, and I love helping people—so the former career path seems perfect. I don’t know what specific area of interest I’d like to really focus on, yet, in psychology, but I know it has something to do with social forces. My immediate plans for the future are to apply to graduate school and obtain my Ph.D. in clinical psychology so that I could counsel and do research (hopefully affiliated with a university). By that time, I also hope I have some sort of husband who would travel around with me and do his own amazing things—we’d be a team, both focusing on our careers. My primary goal is to make a difference with what I’ll be doing – to help people on both a smaller and larger scale so that they can lead happy lives to their fullest potential.
All images provided by the interviewee.