Psychology students build new skills as RBTs

By: Sara Banton
Creative Services Student Writer

Last spring, psychology professor Kevin Apple invited prospective employer Meghan Hoffman to his PSYC 200 class to talk about opportunities within her organization, Continuum Autism Spectrum Alliance. The presentation focused on post-graduation opportunities, but students Paige Casey and Kyle Cooper connected with Hoffman about summer jobs. They each applied for and accepted summer positions with Continuum.

“One goal of the course is to help students explore various options for their future,” Apple said. “Our great speaker for that day educated students about a field they may not have known about. It’s wonderful that students learned about an opportunity in my class that turned into a summer job.”

For the position, the students had to become Registered Behavior Technicians (RBTs). This required them to complete 40 hours of training, a competency assessment and the RBT examination. “In relation to most other summer jobs, there was a lot more prep before I could even start the job,” Casey said.

Both Casey and Cooper plan to pursue paths in behavioral psychology, so this opportunity served as a great introduction to the field.

“It gave me a better understanding of what the job is actually like. A lot of times when people think of psychologists, they don’t think about the fact that we’re not just sitting there listening to or watching people,” Casey said. “There’s a lot that’s going on behind the scenes. I just never realized how much work is done outside of session.”

Their clients were children all along the spectrum. They were given an individualized program based on that client’s behavior intervention plan, identifying behaviors that needed to be either increased or decreased.

“I have to mark down whenever they get something right or wrong so I can look at the progression throughout the programs from each session,” Casey said. “I had to graph a lot and do it in a covert way so that I wasn’t stopping session to mark things down. It had to be little plus or minus signs on paper while I was interacting with my client.”

“It required a lot of communication skills and time management,” Cooper said. “It required me to manage separate cases at the same time. Being able to keep track of each client and their needs and specifics about them and their case is an important part about being in the behavioral analyst workforce.”

Cooper said that the experience couldn’t have been replicated at any other summer job. “It changed my perspective on how I interact with others—how eye contact, the things I say, word choice and the things you don’t even think about matter to people. You have to think about how you interact with other people and the impact that has on what they think about you and what’s going on.”

Casey plans to graduate in May and return to Continuum this summer. Thanks to the psychology department for connecting her to this opportunity, Casey now has specialized work experience to add to her resume before applying for grad school. “I wanted to have a job before going to grad school that would give me experience with psychology,” Casey said. “Grad school is all about research, so the more experience I had, the better.”