Graduate Students' Corner

Special Feature: Meet Monika Brandstaetter

Monika Brandstaetter

Monkia Brandstaetter recently completed her Master's degree in the Life-Span Development program at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. She came to the University of Victoria after completing her "Magistra" degree in Psychology at the University of Salzburg in Austria. According to Monika "the program structures in Canada and Austria are fairly different" "Austria has two degree levels: the Magistra, which takes a minimum of 5 years of study, followed by the Ph.D." However, due to the differences in degree structure between Canada and Austria, Monika first pursued a Master's degree at the University of Victoria. During her time in Canada, Monika also spent a year visiting at Carleton University working in the Social Ecology Laboratory conducting research on the relationships between gender and personal projects. While at Carleton, Monika not only did superb research, she also acquired many friends, colleagues and one future husband.

Monika's Magistra thesis at the University of Salzburg focused on the short-term stability of personal project appraisal, gender differences, and the relationship between personal projects and subjective well-being. She was able to combine this line of research with the research of her supervisor, Dr. Chris Lalonde, at the University of Victoria. Dr. Lalonde's research focuses on the strategies that children and adolescents employ to resolve the paradox of development that "their personal lives contained a multitude of changes yet that they still call themselves the same person over time." Monkia noted that "these strategies could be reliably categorized as either Essentialist (focusing on the essence that remains over time) or Narrative (focusing on the story that weaves together separate time slices of one's life). Monika extended this research by investigating "whether young adults who used one or the other of these strategies differed in (a) what personal projects they named, (b) how they evaluated them, and (c) how they used their personal projects to maintain or modify their sense of self." Monika's research has shown that "there is little difference with regard to the types of projects Essentialists and Narrativists name and how they are used to achieve self-functions such as self-preservation, enhancement, and expression." However; "the observed differences fit quite nicely with how Essentialists and Narrativists have been conceptualized and also seem to fit to provide explanations for earlier differential results."

Monika was particularly drawn to the integrative, holistic approach of the University of Victoria's life-span development program, which incorporates a developmental approach to the study of diverse psychological phenomena across all age ranges. One feature of the life-span program that Monika particularly valued was the quality and breadth of methodological training she received. In addition to courses in cutting edge developmental methodologies such as Hierarchical Linear Modeling, Monika was also able to obtain strong training in qualitative methodology from various perspectives including Sociology, Educational Psychology and Leadership studies. Monika felt that the interdisciplinary experiences available in her program were a major strength of her degree program. While her research was less interdisciplinary on a conceptual level, being allowed to learn and incorporate methodological approaches from a diverse set of disciplines was a real asset. Monika also noted "Several students and faculty in our department were part of an interdisciplinary research group engaged in a six multi-year health research projects. The group put on several events and seminars including faculty, students, and community members." This setting "allowed me to experience the interdisciplinary approach to life-span developmental research."

Monika is very enthusiastic about her experiences in the life-span development program and would recommend it to students interested in pursuing a career in both basic and applied life-span developmental science. She did say that "having a solid background in stats and research methods, a pronounced interest in the area that they are planning to do their research work in, a disciplined work ethic, and being generally open minded" would be of benefit to students entering the life-span program.

Having completed her Master's degree, Monika has returned to Europe and is working in a psychosomatic clinic in southern Germany. She is mostly working with "patients with eating disorders." While working in the clinic, she is completing advanced training in psychotherapy with a focus on cognitive behavioral therapy. Her advanced clinical training will continue for another three years. In addition, Monika is planning on completing her doctoral work in a clinical setting in conjunction with the University of Salzburg. "In my doctoral research I want to apply the developmental framework to clinical questions, either in the form of etiological questions or with regard to the course of illness and recovery.

In seven years Monika "expects to still see myself in terms of being the same self-continuous person I am now. Hopefully I will have completed both my psychotherapy education as well as my doctoral work." She also hopes "to have gained a good deal of experience working in a clinical setting with various types of populations." "At that point I could imagine starting up a small private practice which I could run part time, while spending the other part raising our 1.5 kids(we can't decide on one versus two).