Rebekah (RJ): My name is Rebekah Jackson and I am a 3^rd year student here at GIPP. I’m talking today with Dr. Peter Weiss, the newest addition to our faculty. He became an assistant professor here at GIPP in Fall 2007. So, Dr. Weiss, tell me a bit about your background.  Where did you receive your education and clinical training?

Dr. Weiss (PW): I started off as an undergraduate at William and Mary in Virginia and I was a psychology major there. I got involved in doing clinical and personality research there. As a result, I knew I definitely wanted to become a clinical psychologist. Shortly after I graduated from college, I started applying to clinical Ph.D. programs and I got into the program at Long Island University – Brooklyn, where I got my Ph.D. in 2001. I studied a wide variety of things related to clinical psychology there, but I really emphasized assessment, and in particular personality assessment. That’s what my dissertation was on and that was how I got started with my teaching and research interests in that area. I had a teaching fellowship as a graduate student where I taught some undergraduate psychology courses and I stayed on there as an adjunct professor after I graduated for several years and taught both in the undergraduate and graduate programs that they have there.

RJ: How did you come to be a faculty member here at GIPP?

PW: I had been teaching as an adjunct professor at Long Island University for several years and decided that was what I really wanted to do. I was sending out CVs and application packets to a number of schools whose job descriptions I felt I fit reasonably well. The one here at GIPP struck me as being a particularly good one because they were looking for a clinical psychologist to teach in the doctoral program who had an emphasis on psychological assessment. I had been doing research and had quite a bit of experience teaching assessment in the internship programs that I supervised in, particularly at Interfaith Medical Center where I supervised a lot of the assessment for interns. I thought that this one’s going to be a good fit. So I sent in the application last January and Kathy McCloskey called me and let me know that I was one of the people that they wanted to interview. I came up and I think that, in addition to the fact that the position looked like a pretty good fit, I knew I wanted to make the switch to becoming a full-time academic. That had been one of my goals for a while before I took the job.

RJ: What do you see as your role among the faculty here at GIPP?

PW: I think that there are a couple of different roles. One of them is the general role of being a faculty member here, being an advisor and also mentoring dissertations. As far as my role within the other faculty I think that I bring the expertise and interest in assessment and also in forensic psychology. I envision my role as teaching those courses and supervising dissertations for a lot of students who are interested in those areas, and so far I think that has gone pretty well.

RJ: How would you characterize your overall experience as a faculty member at GIPP thus far?

PW: I really like it. It’s been fun because I’ve been teaching courses that are in my areas of expertise and interest. I also really enjoy the students. I think that this is a top-notch doctoral program and I think the students that I have in class, in addition to being hard workers and being very bright and capable, I think that our discussions in class are very thought-provoking and I get a lot out of the classes myself. I think it’s a learning experience for me as well as for them.

RJ: What do you like most about teaching here?

PW: Like I said, I’m really teaching courses that I enjoy very much, and I think that the students I’ve had this year are super and they are a lot of fun to be around.

RJ: What have been some of your most rewarding experiences?

PW: I think that there are a couple of things. I think I was very flattered by the feedback I got from students about my teaching first semester and particularly from the Psychological Assessment III course. They really said a lot of nice things, and that made me feel good. Also, picking up some students for dissertation work and beginning that process has really been rewarding and eye-opening.  It is my first time on the other side of the fence so to speak. I think I’ve gotten a lot out of that. I’ve learned a lot about the dissertation process, and I’ve really enjoyed mentoring students in that area as well.

RJ: What have been some of your biggest challenges?

PW: I think the biggest challenge was coming in as a brand new faculty member and having to put together several courses in my first year, some of which I hadn’t taught before and that is a lot of work. But I think that it has worked out so far.

RJ: What is your philosophy on education and training?

PW: I think that my philosophy of teaching really depends on the course. I think that, for some courses, particularly the assessment courses, I do a lot of lecturing and also practical ‘how-to’ kinds of things. But there are other courses in which I hang back and make it more of a discussion. I think the Individual Psychotherapy class and the Dissertation Seminar that I teach are examples of those. The class is less structured because I want to encourage students to think about the things that they read and discuss ideas more than I want to give them a lot of facts. I think that there are some classes that lend themselves more to a discussion format and others more of a lecture or informative format. It just depends on a course and how I feel about it and also what the students want out of it.

RJ: One of the core commitments of our program is an appreciation of diversity. How do you see that manifested within the program?

PW: I think that it is manifested in a number of ways. I think that the biggest way is that issues of diversity are incorporated into every course. It doesn’t matter what class you’re taking, there is always going to be a section on applying psychological knowledge to work with diverse populations. I think the nice thing is that we try to cover as many different populations that we can within each course.

RJ: Are there any specific projects that you are working on right now?

PW: I recently had a book chapter published in the Handbook of Forensic Rorschach Assessment. I also have an article that is coming out in the Fall issue of a journal called Policing and Society on using the Personality Assessment Inventory as a pre-employment selection tool for law enforcement officers. In addition to that, I have a couple of manuscripts under review. The main thing I am doing right now is utilizing a database of MMPI profiles of law enforcement officers who were eventually hired. There is performance-based information on them, and we’re going to be doing criterion-related validity research with that to see if specific MMPI scales can be predictive of performance as a law enforcement officer.

RJ: What are some things that you do outside of GIPP? Do you have any hobbies or interests outside the field of psychology?

PW: Yes, absolutely. One of the things I like to do during the summer months is play golf, and I am a big soccer fan. I played a lot of soccer while I was in New York, but I haven’t found a place to play yet. I also just recently got back into mountain biking after not having done it for a while.

RJ: Is there anything that I haven’t asked that you would like to add?

PW: I think your list of questions was pretty comprehensive, so nothing really comes to mind.

RJ: Well, then I would like to thank you for taking the time to talk to me today. I appreciate hearing about your experiences and your perspective on the program.