“She was able to uncover so many things—not just about playing tennis, not just my identity and retiring, but also coping with my performance as a broadcaster, helping my relationships with my family, my partner, and friends,” Siripipat said. “She was able to open up my world and transform so many aspects of my life.”  

Nearly a decade after this therapist inspired her to focus on mental health, Siripipat—a one-time junior tennis star, former ESPN reporter, and current sports anchor—is a counseling psychology student at Fordham’s Graduate School of Education who wants to help athletes, coaches, and parents experiencing social and emotional struggles. 

“As mental health continued to [gain in]awareness and athletes became more outspoken about it, I saw a tremendous need for there to be somebody that could tap into different realms,” said Siripipat. “My goal is to blend my broadcasting experience, athletic experience, and my eventual counseling psychology training to be the Dr. Oz or Dr. Phil of sports.”

A Tennis Star from Missouri 

Siripipat began playing tennis at age 7. A decade later, she became one of the top 10 junior players in the United States. Her dream of becoming a professional tennis player was slowly becoming a reality, but in her junior year at Duke University, where she played on the women’s tennis team and amassed a 44-15 overall singles record and a 17-2 Atlantic Coast Conference singles record, her knees and right shoulder became worn from years of overuse. Three surgeries later, Siripipat realized her childhood dream was no longer possible. But she stayed close to the world of sports, which she had come to know and love.

“If I couldn’t be an athlete, at least I could continue to be around and cover athletes,” said Siripipat, who turned to sports journalism. “[Broadcasting] reminded me and felt so much like sports. There’s light and there’s just that live element and adrenaline rush and pressure.” 

From the Court to the Studio

For 17 years, Siripipat has worked as a sports anchor, reporter, and news producer at TV stations across the East Coast. She spent six years at ESPN, where she anchored televised shows like Sports Center and covered the Super Bowl, NBA playoffs, and Wimbledon; she also co-hosted “Spain and Prim,” with Sarah Spain; it was one of the first national sports radio shows to be hosted and produced by women. Siripipat also hosted “The Next Chapter” podcast at The Athletic, a subscription-based sports website, where she interviewed athletes about their retirement experience. 

In recent years, she has been nurturing another dream. Siripipat, who has a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Duke and a master’s degree in counseling psychology from the University of Missouri-Columbia, has always been passionate about psychology. It started with her personal struggles and expanded as she witnessed other athletes face mental health challenges. At ESPN, she helped launch a podcast called “Inside Out,” where athletes reflect on the psychological and social impact of sports. After receiving her master’s in 2018, she realized that if she wanted to reach the same level as her role model—Dr. William D. Parham, the first-ever director of mental health and wellness for the National Basketball Players Association—she needed to earn her doctorate. 

Encouraging Athletes to Speak Out and Seek Help

A year ago, she set her sights on Fordham’s doctoral program in counseling psychology at the Graduate School of Education. 

“The program and a few of the faculty members were in the space of what I was interested in—career transitioning, identity loss, retirement. The faculty themselves are very competent, but they also seem to have similar personalities to mine. And the diversity—just being embedded in Manhattan, I think is huge,” said Siripipat. “It was the perfect place.” 

On May 15, she shared the good news of her Fordham acceptance on her Twitter account that has nearly 30,000 followers: “Fordham was my No. 1 choice for a host of reasons … I’m excited for The Next Chapter & to share it with all of u!” 

This semester, Siripipat says she’s been learning about “group counseling, psychohistory, multiculturalism in Dr. Ponterotto’s class, racial issues, social justice issues, [and]hidden biases,” and she plans to bring those lessons to today’s sports landscape and athletes past, present, and future. She also works with Jennie Park-Taylor, Ph.D., associate professor and director of training for the counseling psychology doctoral program, as her graduate assistant. 

Decades from now, she hopes those efforts will pay off. 

“That would be my goal: to connect the dots and meld the two worlds of sports and psychology,” said Siripipat, who wants to be a good role model for her two-year-old son. “I [hope I]would’ve transformed or helped change the landscape where athletes can not only feel comfortable about coming out and talking about their issues without being judged, but also created a space where coaches and parents are more educated about how to raise not just a youth athlete, but a happy, healthy kid.” 

“The burden shouldn’t be placed on the child to always have to explain to the class how their family is related and why they belong together—they shouldn’t have to validate their family all the time. The school counselors and teachers should be there to create that open dialogue and sense of acceptance and community so nobody feels stigmatized, isolated or othered,” said Park-Taylor, who teaches counseling psychology and directs training for Fordham’s counseling psychology doctoral program. 

A transracial adoption is when a family adopts a child of a race other than their own. Park-Taylor and Wing’s article “Microfictions and Microaggressions: Counselors’ Work With Transracial Adoptees in Schools,” published online in the Professional School Counseling journal on June 15, identifies what microaggressions and microfictions—false narratives about an adoption—might look like for transracial adoptees and their families. The article also advises school counselors on how they can work with K-12 educators to help transracial adoptees and their families. 

School counselors are important because they can connect their clients with resources and families who are facing similar situations, Park-Taylor and Wing said. They can also speak directly with educators and administrators about how to make curricula more inclusive and sensitive, especially when adoption-related topics come up in class.

“When you are part of a biological family, there’s a little bit of a privilege or power associated with that because you don’t recognize what it’s like for somebody who’s not. It’s good to have school counselors and teachers become more aware of some assignments that might be triggering, hurtful, or emotionally difficult for transracial adoptees or adoptees [in general],” said Park-Taylor. 

Dealing With Microaggressions and Microfictions 

Park-Taylor and Wing’s article is divided into three sections: an overview of transracial adoptee population trends, a case illustration about a fictional transracial adoptee student whose experiences are informed by real-life narratives, and recommendations for school counselors working with transracial adoptees. 

The last section focuses on how common school assignments could hurt transracial adoptees, especially those who are adopted outside of the U.S. 

“At the elementary level, family trees, developmental timelines, and bringing in your baby photo are all very triggering assignments. In middle school and high school, genetics projects serve as reminders to adoptees that their biological history is often unknown, and for assignments where students are asked to learn about other countries, transracial adoptees may feel pressured to pick their birth country as the only option, which can further heighten their sense of racial difference and othering,” Wing said in a Fordham News interview. 

Students also face microaggressions from their peers, including the phrase “Go back to your country.” Their article can help school counselors identify microaggressions and intervene in situations at school, said Park-Taylor and Wing.

“It’s not just the sole responsibility of the adoptee to educate other people, especially if they don’t have the language at that time of their age or development, or the awareness themselves,” said Wing. 

Another microaggression is a “microfiction” in the family home—when adoption stories are intentionally altered or replaced with fictional ones that “sugarcoat everything to this beautiful, picture-perfect experience,” Park-Taylor said. 

“That can neglect the complexity and oversimplify the experiences adoptees might have. They may feel like there isn’t really space for them to talk about the more negative aspects in conjunction with the positive ones, so they feel more isolated,” Wing added. “If they can’t talk about that in their families, where can they talk about it?” 

A Personal Connection 

For Wing, a transracial adoptee from China, the topic hits close to home. 

When she was a child, people asked her intrusive questions. One of them was, “Who are your real parents?”

“Having to, as a child, validate your connection with people who you’re connected to and have raised you most of your life, if not all of it … It’s a lot of weight to put on a child’s shoulders,” Wing said.  

Today, she is a young adult. But those microaggressions haven’t stopped—especially when people learn that Wing is an adoptee. 

“Usually, the first response I get is, have you searched for your birth parents? Do you have connections with them? There’s an automatic assumption that A, I have a desire to. B—” 

“—that you’re supposed to, somehow,” Park-Taylor chimed in. 

“Yeah. Or even that I have access to that. For a lot of international adoptees, in particular, that isn’t a possibility,” Wing said. 

Her research on this article over the past year has helped her understand how useful these recommendations might have been when she was younger, she said. 

“School counselors weren’t really a force or presence in my life. The suggestions that we give are ones that I might’ve wished for myself or other people who are currently at younger stages of development, when it’s more difficult to process these feelings of confusion or stigmatization,” said Wing, a group facilitator for Families with Children from China and recently appointed Student Representative for the Adoption Research and Practice Special Interest Group in the American Psychological Association. But things are starting to change. 

“There’s been a larger push for multiculturalism and more socially just interventions and approaches in counseling psychology and larger fields of psychology, but somehow, I feel like transracial adoption is missed in that pool,” said Wing, who is now planning a project with Park-Taylor that focuses on supporting transracial adoptive parents, particularly amid the current pandemic and recent rise in xenophobia against Asian Americans. “I think this begins to open up the way in which we conceptualize giving that space.” 

Over the past year, Stewart, a doctoral candidate in counseling psychology at Fordham’s Graduate School of Education and an adjunct lecturer in Hunter College’s psychology department, interviewed 16 women who said they had experienced sexual assault during their college years. Stewart wanted to see how the current climate affects the way they’ve processed their own assaults and how they might feel about reporting them. 

“Jen’s work is very timely and poignant,” said her mentor, Fordham professor, and psychologist Joseph G. Ponterotto, Ph.D. “This is an intense, qualitative long-interview study, and the results are riveting.”

The 16 women are anonymous college students across the U.S. who spoke with Stewart through Skype, FaceTime, and, if possible, face-to-face. Their conversations, typically an hour long, are currently being transcribed and analyzed, but conclusions are starting to take shape, said Stewart. 

The work has formed the basis for her dissertation. Before conducting research for the project, she also completed a pilot study, for which she interviewed eight sexual assault survivors about their recovery process.

Last year, she was invited to present her pilot study at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention. In a recent interview, Fordham News spoke with Stewart about what she’s learned so far. 

How is your research different than what’s already out there? 

There’s a lot of research on how sexual assault can psychologically and physically affect victims, but there isn’t much research on what’s happening with sexual assault victims right now. We’re in a time period in American history that’s quite different. We’re talking about sexual assault in a nationwide conversation. It’s in the news, it’s on social media, it’s in the political world. So it’s everywhere you turn, and I was really curious to see how that’s affecting survivors.

Tell me about your research. 

I do qualitative research, which is interview-based. You interview people until you have what’s called a saturation, where the same themes are coming up over and over again. Like, this is coming up so much that we can assume it’s an experience a lot of people are having. When they start to come up in three-quarters of the interviews, you’ve hit saturation. 

You spoke with 16 different women. How did you find them? 

Facebook, actually. I recruited through Facebook college groups. I joined a lot of groups, posted, and people reached out to me. 

What did your interviews focus on? 

How #MeToo has affected how they understood [their assault]  and how their assault has affected how they view #MeToo in general. 

What were the biggest themes from those interviews? 

It seems like sexual assault survivors are in support of #MeToo and feel more comfortable talking to friends and on campus about their experience because there’s this open dialogue that’s been happening. 

But they are significantly less likely to report to authorities in the context of #MeToo after seeing all the people who stood up and reported, but nothing happened. Many of the women I spoke to were like, why would I talk? What’s the point? I’m going to go through all this legal hassle, I’m going to get put in the spotlight and questioned on whether or not what happened was real, and nothing’s going to come of it. So what’s the point of reporting anything, legally?

This April, you’ll be defending your dissertation. Outside of Fordham, what do you hope to do with it? 

Using this to inform policy would be great. I don’t know what that will look like yet. But there’s always an implications section in a dissertation. Now I have this research—cool. What does it mean? Let’s use this to help make a change somewhere.

What are some key takeaway points from your research? Something that could help a loved one dealing with sexual assault?  

Reporting [to authorities]  is really triggering for a lot of people. It can be helpful to recount stories for healing, but usually not immediately after. Imagine going through a car crash and barely surviving and then someone saying, “Can you tell me all about the details of the car crash?” 

Social support is really, really important in terms of how somebody will react after a trauma. A lot of research has shown that positive social support is better [than no social support or negative support]  in terms of reducing PTSD symptoms. [Many pilot-study participants] said the best reactions they had gotten were someone saying, I’m so sorry this happened. I’m here for you if you need me. If you want me to go with you to report, to get some health tests done—whatever you need, I’m here. I think that often times, we hear about sexual assault a lot, but don’t really know what to do when someone tells us it happens. You can’t change that it happened. You can’t fix it. But you can support people, whatever that looks like for every person. That’s something I’d love for more people to know. 

I think we need less victim-blaming and more listening to people when they speak out about things like this. The number of people who falsely report is so small, but those are always the cases that get publicity. Then people are like, oh, well, look at all of these women trying to ruin men’s lives. We need to be more open to hearing what survivors have to say and believing them.

Two years ago, you earned an M.S.Ed. from Fordham, and by 2021, you’ll also have your Ph.D. What’s one of the biggest things that the Graduate School of Education taught you? 

There’s a big focus on multiculturalism and social justice in my program, which I love—and that’s what I chose Fordham for. It’s taught me to be curious about other people’s experiences, to never make assumptions. Even though I’ve worked with a lot of sexual assault trauma, everyone’s experience is different. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

“I was really struck by what a difference it made for her to sit down and just be listened to,” said Pitcan. “That got me interested in the power of having somebody to witness what you’re going through—and how that can give people hope.”

Pitcan is a 27-year-old doctoral candidate in counseling psychology at the Graduate School of Education who will graduate this May. Over the past decade, she studied psychology as an undergrad at the University of Florida and completed a master’s degree in mental health counseling at GSE. She also volunteered as a 24-hour crisis/suicide hotline operator and counseled people of varying ages at several psychology internships.

Exploring Racial Microaggressions Against Black Men

More recently, she is the mastermind behind a project published by the American Counseling Association—one of the world’s largest organizations dedicated to professional counselors.

Last December, Pitcan published one of her GSE research projects in The Career Development Quarterly, a research journal put out by the American Counseling Association. Her project, “Black Men and Racial Microaggressions at Work,” focused on the comments and behaviors that subtly—and often unintentionally—express discrimination toward marginalized groups. She analyzed the experiences of 12 black men employed in companies where the majority of the employees were white. Over a span of two years, she spoke with them about the microaggressions they had faced in the workplace. Then she asked them about how they had reacted: what they felt, what they thought, and how they coped.

“It made them feel really alienated at work,” Pitcan recalled. “It left a bad taste in people’s mouths.” But because the nature of many reported microaggressions was “ambiguous,” a lot of people were uncertain about how to address them.  

The motivation behind Pitcan’s project was her own experiences as a Jamaican-American. She recalled attending majority-white schools where students made “weird” comments that were supposed to be compliments, but came across as insults. “You don’t talk like a black person” was one of them.

“It’s a symptom of a larger problem,” Pitcan said, referring to racial slights and wider discrimination across the U.S. “It’s like the fever you experience when you have an infection.”

Treating Trauma at a National Military Medical Center

Now Pitcan is a full-time clinical psychology doctoral intern at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center—one of the biggest military hospitals in the United States.

Since last September, she has cared for U.S. military service members, retired military, and their families. Many of these patients deal with trauma related to combat, exposure to violence and death, sexual abuse, or childhood issues, she said. Some come in for couples counseling. Others grapple with more corporeal diseases like cancer.

Pitcan’s longtime GSE professor and research mentor, Jennie Park-Taylor, Ph.D., said that in the five years she’s known Pitcan, Park-Taylor has seen her consistently present her work at regional conferences with a “calm, cool, and collected” composure. She’s watched her connect with curious strangers in a “real” way, and break down complex topics into conversational language. And she’s reviewed hours’ worth of transcripts from Pitcan’s interviews with black men who’ve faced discrimination.

“All of her participants shared really personal and, I would say, painful experiences … She was able to create a safe environment for them to share that. To not make them feel any shame or judgment,” Park-Taylor said. “She was able to, I think, really probe in a deep way. And that’s really difficult sometimes with complete strangers.”

Pitcan’s internship at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center also required her to commission in the U.S. Navy and become a lieutenant. Before she started working in clinical care, she underwent five weeks of boot camp in Newport, Rhode Island.

It wasn’t easy. But at the end of the day, she said, it was all worth it to help her patients rebuild their lives.

“Whatever your political beliefs are or however you feel about everything else, the individuals who serve in the military are sacrificing a lot for what they believe in,” said Pitcan, whose ultimate goal is to become a psychologist and establish a multidisciplinary group practice—a holistic group of doctors that includes experts in psychology, primary care physicians, mindfulness practitioners, and nutritionists.

“It’s really rewarding to get to work with folks who are willing to do that kind of work.”

But now, thanks to a Fordham professor and her students, they might.

Margo A. Jackson, Ph.D., a professor of counseling psychology in the Graduate School of Education, along with GSE students or alumni, recently wrote “Career Development Interventions for Social Justice: Addressing Needs Across the Lifespan in Educational, Community, and Employment Contexts,” a vocational guidance book with chapters tailored to underserved groups and individuals.

“Career development has to do with figuring out your interests, abilities, and values—in other words, what you like or dislike, what you’re good at, or what you could become good at, and what is important to you,” Jackson said. “That process of identity development starts when we’re born, and doesn’t end until we die.”

The book, published by Rowman & Littlefield last January, also speaks to Latinx refugee youth, adults who work in remote rural areas, ex-offenders, laid-off workers, teenage girls in juvenile detention centers, and internationally educated immigrants who are underemployed in New York City.

Jackson and her co-authors aimed to capture what career development looks like for each of these communities. The book not only confronts common barriers faced by these groups but also provides customized interventions to help people better understand who they could become—or who they want to become—and how they can contribute to society in a positive way. These strategies, supported by science and psychological theory, can be used by both readers and those in the helping fields: counselors, psychologists, social workers, community center leaders, and educators. And, by integrating competencies for social justice advocacy, career development services can be used to expand access to educational and occupational resources, Jackson said. 

Guiding Children, Ex-Offenders, and Baby Boomers

The career guide devotes each chapter to a particular group of individuals—starting with the youngest. The first chapter, titled “Antibias Career Development for Evolving Identities in Elementary School Children,” describes a program that could improve antibias education for young students in the classroom.

“Children start to recognize gender roles, race, and ethnicity at an early age through play,” said Victoria Broems, GSE ’21, a contributing author and aspiring public school psychologist. “This intervention is aimed at challenging stereotypes that are put in place by the social structures that we have not only in the United States but also in other countries.”

In this intervention/program, students are exposed to jobs they may have never dreamed of. The theoretical program includes a “career day” that features guests who challenge the status quo.

“Someone will come in and discuss a career that they’re in, but [the program]purposefully brings in people who will challenge stereotypes,” Broems said. “For example, instead of hosting a white female nurse, we might have a male nurse [of color].”

Another chapter focuses on ex-offenders. When released from prison, many people face an onslaught of obstacles: their criminal record, limited formal education, little-to-no work experience, housing issues, and physical and mental health.

The chapter’s authors, Allyson K. Regis and Gary L. Dillon Jr.—both doctors of counseling psychology—proposed a program to help them return to the workforce. It includes a resume workshop, mock job interviews to help them answer questions about their ex-offender status, assigning a post-release peer mentor, and discussions to help them recognize “old behavior patterns, triggers, and toxic attitudes” that might throw them back in prison.

The last chapter speaks to baby boomers—those who have reached the end of their careers, but not the end of their productivity.

Contributor Ashley E. Selkirk, Ph.D., sketches out a career workshop for baby boomers who live in retirement communities. The one-day program is designed to help them understand how ageism impacts the identities of older people, help them gain access to psychosocial resources, and create meaningful goals.

“In order to fight against ageism,” Selkirk wrote, “the public and baby boomers themselves need to develop a new language and new stories to redefine the role and value of older adults in society.”

Confronting Their Own Biases

But what makes the book particularly unique are its intimate testimonials from its authors. In personal reflections, each of the 15 authors probes his or her own biases to better understand themselves and those they serve.

The authors of the book come from diverse backgrounds: Jackson is a middle-aged white woman who raised two biracial daughters with her husband; Jill Huang, Ph.D, is a queer, cisgender licensed psychologist; and Gary L. Dillon Jr., Ph.D, is an African-American psychologist who counseled male black inmates at Rikers Island.

Another author is Kourtney Bennett, Ph.D., GSE ’16, a staff psychologist at Loyola University Maryland’s counseling center, who also served as a co-editor. Bennett, a black woman raised in a household where education and professional development were prioritized, said she realized her background was both a barrier and a bridge to supporting youth.

“I quickly learned, in working with youth of color in diverse settings, that while my skin color may have, in some cases, served as a point of connection, my education status and that of my parents sometimes marked a line of privilege and difference,” Bennett wrote in the third chapter. “I needed to learn how to welcome the direct challenges of students wondering how I, a doctoral student at the time, who grew up in a suburban town, could understand their experience.”

Reflecting on her biases was challenging, yet rewarding, she said in a phone interview. But the actual book itself, she said, is perhaps the most eye-opening of all.

“Each chapter works hard to make the theory translatable to lived experience and considers populations that may not be fully represented in research or theory,” Bennett said. “I think that’s why someone outside of this field could learn from it—just to consider career development from a social justice lens, or to think about populations or communities that may be unfamiliar, that you haven’t worked with before.”

In his new book, “A Psychobiography of John F. Kennedy, Jr.: Understanding His Inner Life, Achievements, Struggles, and Courage,” Fordham professor and clinician Joseph G. Ponterotto, Ph.D., uses psychology to unravel who Kennedy was—and who he could have become, had he not died 20 years ago in a fatal plane crash at age 38.

Unlike a biography, a psychobiography tries to explain a person’s psychological makeup, personality, and life, using psychological research and theories, explained Ponterotto, who teaches in the Graduate School of Education.

Ponterotto illustrated the difference between the two genres with a photo of an iceberg. A small block of ice bobs above the waves. The rest—a huge, monolithic hunk of ice—is hidden beneath the surface.  

“What’s above the water is usually what a biographer studies. That’s what people see—a person’s status and achievements,” he explained. “The psychobiographer is more interested in what led to that: the person’s inner drives, feelings, and experiences.”

At first, Ponterotto’s friends and family were puzzled by his decision to profile the junior Kennedy. “Some said, ‘You mean the president?’” he recalled. “I said, ‘No, no. There’s a lot written about the president, but we don’t know [as much]about his son.”

Ponterotto begins the book with the public’s perception of Kennedy Jr. He had surveyed 75 adults in the New York City area on what they knew about Kennedy Jr. and what they wondered about him.

“What were his private and public views on major issues of today: immigration, police brutality, globalization, discrimination, LGBTQ rights?” one survey participant asked. “Was he able to do what he most wanted in life?” inquired another.

The 212-page book also includes a comparison of Kennedy Jr.’s personality profile to U.S. presidents like Ronald Reagan; a psychological analysis related to the early loss of his father and relationship with his mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis; and a chapter that explores a question harbored by many: Would Kennedy Jr. have followed in his famous family’s footsteps and pursued a career in politics?

“Could he have run in 2016 against Donald Trump, rather than Hillary Clinton?” Ponterotto asked. “How would the country be different if he were alive?”

Ponterotto based his psychobiography on nearly 100 sources: letters, speeches, poems, and recorded radio and television interviews by Kennedy Jr.; memoirs, diaries, and autobiographies penned by people who had been close to him; in-person, phone, and email interviews with Kennedy Jr.’s colleagues and experts; and additional third-person documents.

An included excerpt from a book by Kennedy Jr.’s good friend Robbie Littell touched on what the young Kennedy was like while attending Brown. Despite attending functions on weekends with leading politicians and businessmen, Littell wrote, Kennedy Jr. never talked about them when he returned to campus, likely because he didn’t want to be seen as a public figure. “It was as though he deliberately split himself in two.”

What Ponterotto found most surprising about Kennedy Jr., he said, was his social and emotional intelligence. He had failed the New York bar exam on his first two tries. But he was a man who could read people well—a person who could put people at ease, despite his wealth and fame.

“He was able to bring people together—very different folks. He had his college buddies, rugby friends, pilot friends, [etc.]. He was able to bring them together to reach common goals in terms of working on [George] magazine, the foundations that he started, reaching up to help folks who work with disabled individuals, helping them with training and education,” Ponterotto said.

The psychobiography also delves into Kennedy’s thoughts during his final moments—his mental well-being and the fatal choices that would lead to not only his death, but also those of his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister Lauren Bessette in a 1999 plane crash. To get a better sense of what had happened, Ponterotto interviewed two experienced small aircraft pilots who had flown above the area where Kennedy crashed his single-engine plane. He also obtained the official accident report through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Ponterotto acknowledges that the book’s content could be emotionally sensitive to Kennedy Jr.’s family and friends. While he was writing it, he considered how the Kennedy family—his sister, cousins, and godchildren—might react. In the last chapter, he says that given how much has been written about JFK Jr., coupled with the family’s requests for privacy, he did not feel comfortable seeking their consent for the project. But he did obtain consent from all sources he interviewed, and he double-checked the accuracy of his reporting.

“Psychologists are going deeper than historians or journalists,” Ponterotto explained. “They’re dealing with a deeper level of emotionality, a higher bar of ethical protection.”

This is Ponterotto’s 14th published book and his second psychobiography. In 2012, he profiled Bobby Fischer, the youngest chess grandmaster in the world, in a psychobiography that brought his name to the big screen. Ponterotto was also the historical consultant for the 2014 major motion picture Pawn Sacrifice, a biographical drama about Fischer that starred Tobey Maguire and Peter Sarsgaard.

The psychobiography was published last November by Charles C. Thomas, Publisher LTD. But Ponterotto explained that the book’s copyright date is 2019, in honor of the 20th anniversary of JFK Jr.’s death.

If he could meet the man he studied for four years, said Ponterotto, he’d like to have a beer or soda with him, or perhaps play a game of touch football in Central Park. They could speak as members of the same generation. Their families both immigrated to the U.S. during the same period—the Kennedy family is from Ireland, the Ponterotto family is from Italy—and the two men share a two-year age difference.

“I’d want to get to know him as a friend,” Ponterotto said. “Not as a Kennedy.”

The GSE students were on hand to help their Lincoln Center campus peers interpret their results of Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) self-scorable personality assessments, which the law students had taken the week before.

The personality assessment is used to help people better understand which aspects of 16 distinctive personality types describes them best—knowledge which can improve any group interactions. The law students have organized themselves into six teams and each group works collaboratively throughout the semester on a project with an outside public interest legal organization on issues such as the school-to-prison pipeline, student debt, homeless youth, and refugees. The seminar, the capstone academic requirement of the Stein Scholars Program, is team-taught by Fordham Law Professor Bruce Green, the Louis Stein Chair, and Sherri Levine, associate director of the Law School’s Stein Center for Law and Ethics.

Levine said the public lawyering class requires more problem solving, project management, and collaboration than most law classes. So five years ago, Green and Levine asked Margo Jackson, Ph.D., professor of counseling psychology in the GSE’s Division of Psychological and Educational Services, if she’d be willing to visit their law class to help students develop their collaborative team-building skills.

“Learning how to read a court case and spotting the issues are very important, but all of these other [team-building] skills are important too,” Levine said. “The sooner that’s recognized and the more opportunities you have to operationalize them, the easier it will be to become a versatile and skilled practitioner upon graduation.”

As the law students shared one another’s results—such as ENTJ (extraversion, intuition, thinking, judgment), INFP (introversion, intuition, feeling, perception), or ISTJ (introversion, sensing, thinking, judgment) – the GSE students helped them consider how to better understand their own and their group colleagues’ personality preferences in ways to collaborate effectively with their particular community social justice projects.

In previous years, Jackson has recruited students from her Psychology of Career Development class to join her; this year two master’s students and two doctoral candidates are assisting from her Career Strength Research Team. The key to these sessions, she said, is focusing on strengths, not deficits, that the legal team members bring to the group. That’s because research shows that the more diverse perspectives you have when it comes to problem solving, the better the product.

“What always strikes me when we do this [with the law students]is that my own students also find out the limits and the strengths of their own approaches to assessment and helping with others,” she said. “If you take the perspective that you’re the all-knowing savior, you’re only focusing on others’ weaknesses, and not on their strengths.”

Liat Zabludovsky, a GSE doctoral candidate, found the session to be a “formative experience” that forced her to think more deeply about her path in counseling psychology. The field is facilitative, rather than solely diagnostic, an aspect it shares with the MBTI assessment, which posits that people exist on a spectrum of behavior depending on the setting they are in, be it work, home, or school.

“Explaining counseling psychology versus clinical psychology, and why I chose it, to a group of people who are competent in completely different areas, was much more interesting than I expected,” she said.

Marcella Jayne, a second year law school student who scored as ENTJ, said that her team’s project, designing workshops to help students avoid crippling student debt from for-profit schools, will require the contribution of all team members.

Jayne said that, prior to getting the assessment results, she would have never thought of giving her teammates positive feedback. “To me, that would almost feel condescending,” she said.

But when one group member said ‘I need positive feedback, or I’m going to disengage,’ she realized that each team member has different needs to feel motivated to contribute.

“In team environments, we each walk in with our own expectations. We don’t usually have these open-ended, touchy-feely conversations about what we’re each expecting and what our assumptions are,” Jayne said. “The openness to say something like that is good.”

For Levine, working with the GSE is an exercise in practicing what they preach about the value of collaboration and teamwork.

“We think [teamwork]definitely will serve you well in your future careers, and here we are trying to do just that. We’re working in a team with another part of the university, and collaborating with persons who do very different types of work,” she said.

An estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States wake up to this reality every day. To Eric Chun Lung Chen, Ph.D., they represent the voiceless whom he wants to give a voice to.

Chen, an associate professor of counseling psychology at the Graduate School of Education (GSE), has spent the past several years researching the quality of resilience, as manifested in the educational and career pursuits of undocumented immigrant students. He has focused most intently on “DREAMers,” roughly 700,000 undocumented individuals who were brought into the United States at a very young age. They were given a temporary relief from deportation in 2012 under former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The act had been considered, but not passed, by Congress in 2010.

The DREAMers’ experience deeply resonates with Chen, who was born in Taiwan and came to the states as an international student to attend graduate school. In addition to the common adjustment challenges associated with being an immigrant, he found the bureaucracy and uncertainty he encountered in obtaining his employment-based immigration visas and green card to be stressful, taking almost a decade to complete.

“When one’s own identity seems to be stigmatized as a result of being a marginalized member of society, how does that stigmatized identity impact one’s mental health? I’m particularly interested in the sense of self, and how it changes over time as it relates to one’s resilience and interpersonal relationships,” he said.

“If I were one of them, I might have given up hope a long time ago.”

DACA and the Sense of Self

Two years ago, Chen and GSE students conducted a research study, where they spent more than a year recruiting and interviewing a dozen undocumented Latinos who benefited from DACA. Their study focused on DREAMers’ experiences of self, their interpersonal relationships, and their future pursuits in the wake of DACA.

What Chen found was that although the DREAMers were relieved that they didn’t have to worry about being deported for the time being, that relief was tempered by an increased sense of responsibility for their parents as well as their siblings who remained undocumented.

“So it’s a mixed blessing. On one hand, they perceive their future to be brighter for them to pursue more educational and work opportunities. On the other hand, they now experience pressure from their undocumented family members to seek better-paying jobs,” Chen said.

Parents seemed to be the greatest source of support and motivation for DREAMers’ college pursuits, especially when they experienced feelings of hopelessness. With regard to gender roles, some participants felt conflicted in their need to take on household responsibilities and to pursue a higher education.

A Need That Is Greater Than Ever

Such studies are difficult to conduct, in part because of the time and effort it takes to recruit undocumented immigrants and earn their trust, said Chen. But the recent presidential election has made the work more important than ever, and Chen sees a greater need to translate an abstract concept like immigration into a narrative about flesh-and-blood individuals with dignity.

As someone who teaches future school counselors, mental health counselors, and psychologists, Chen said there’s a practical purpose as well—to encourage a dialogue that builds a connection through diversity.

“I want my students to be prepared when they work with DREAMers after they graduate, to have an empathic understanding of their struggles, to offer support, and to advocate for them rather than say, ‘Your family broke the law, and you should go back to your country.’ I don’t think that’s consistent with Fordham’s mission of social justice and respect [for]human dignity,” he said.

“Regardless of our personal views, I hope my research helps bridge the political divide by sharing DREAMers’ voices, fears, and their audacious hopes for the uncertain future. Hopefully and realistically, they’re going to continue to live among us, so let’s find a way to support them so they can fulfill their dreams and become productive members of our society.”

It does today, however, for Graduate School of Education psychologist Joseph G. Ponterotto, PhD.

A professor of counseling psychology, Ponterotto is the historical consultant on a new major motion picture, Pawn Sacrifice, a drama about enigmatic world chess champion Bobby Fischer and his struggles to walk the fine line between genius and madness.

The film, which stars Tobey Maguire, Peter Sarsgaard, and Liev Schreiber and is co-produced by Maguire and Gail Katz (The Perfect Storm and Air Force One), opens today in New York and Los Angeles, and then nationally on Sept. 25.

Ponterotto, whose 2012 book A Psychobiography of Bobby Fischer is the definitive psychological profile of the late chess prodigy, worked closely with Katz to review the script for historical accuracy and to write dialogue that captures Fischer’s personality. He also advised on Fischer’s behavior and interactions at chess matches—diehard chess fans will know when the film is being true to Bobby’s chess genius and when it is taking creative license, Ponterotto said.

Often, Ponterotto was on call during filming for any questions that arose.

“I would get a call or an email from Gail Katz, saying, ‘We’re in the middle of a scene, Joan is talking to Bobby’s attorney and reading some of Bobby’s letters. What would Joan say in this scenario?’” Ponterotto said. “It was exciting to apply my psychology skills outside of my teaching and psychotherapy roles.”

He also drafted psychological profiles of each of the main characters—Bobby Fischer, his mother Regina, and his sister Joan—to help the actors gain a better understanding of their characters.

Tobey Maguire was particularly attentive to the nuances of Fischer’s behavior, Ponterotto said.

“He did his due diligence. He did a lot of reading about Bobby and he talked to people who knew Bobby well, including Bobby’s brother-in-law Russell Targ and Bobby’s longtime biographer Frank Brady.”

Bobby Fischer was 15 years old when he became the youngest chess grandmaster in the world. His 1972 capture of the World Chess Championship from Boris Spassky is still considered to be the most widely watched chess match in history.

“We were riveted to this event,” said Ponterotto, who is also an avid chess player. “This was an American kid challenging a world-class Russian player during the Cold War era. The whole world stopped to watch the match.”

Fischer’s genius had a dark side, however. Over time, the lonely little boy who found solace in chess became an eccentric and paranoid recluse. His vitriolic anti-Semitism and his endorsement of the 9/11 attacks sank him into infamy.

His bizarre behavior, Ponterotto argues in his psychological autopsy of Fischer, is the result of an unfortunate combination of a traumatic childhood, mishandled genius, and inherited vulnerability to mental illness.

“Bobby had a genetic predisposition to paranoid tendencies from both his mom and his biological father, but he also lived with the stress of poverty and he had very little stability in his life,” Ponterotto said. “How do you develop a coherent ego, self-esteem, a sense of self, and an optimism toward life without any sense of security as a child? His early environment was too frenetic and unstable.”

Ultimately, Fischer died in exile in Iceland in 2008.

“The implications from Bobby’s story is genius gone awry—a child with special needs and gifts during a difficult historical period,” Ponterotto said.

“If we could’ve identified his struggles and implemented services both for him and his family, Bobby’s life story might’ve been written very differently.”

Watch a trailer of Pawn Sacrifice on the Bleecker Street Media website.