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Credit: Nick Romanenko
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Not every college student can go from being dismissed from school to presenting at a major conference in Kyoto, Japan. Charlene Dunkley, who recently graduated from Rutgers-Camden with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, learned many things at Rutgers – among them, that there is a place at Rutgers for every type of student.
After a rough two years attending Rutgers in New Brunswick, Dunkley was dismissed for poor academic performance. She felt lost among the campus’ 26,000 undergraduates. Undeterred, Dunkley earned her associate’s degree and enrolled at Rutgers-Camden, where she flourished in the intimate environment and worked alongside a junior faculty member performing research in developmental psychology. “I went to Rutgers-Camden and everything changed. I got into psychology and just dove into it,” Dunkley said. “I wanted to make up for the fact that I was such a poor student before.”
Dunkley started her Rutgers career at Cook College. An animal lover, she wanted to be a veterinarian. But when she took a course in lab animal management, she realized she loved animals too much to dissect them and put them to sleep for the sake of her education.
She transferred to Mason Gross School of the Arts to study photography, a passion she still nurtures today. But Dunkley had trouble finding guidance. In December 2003, Dunkley received a dismissal letter. “I said to myself, ‘Wow, you need to fix some things.’ I wanted to give Rutgers another try, but I didn’t know if I wanted to go back to New Brunswick because it was so big.”
At Burlington County College, Dunkley took an introductory psychology class and was intrigued. When she arrived on the Camden campus in fall 2005, the aimless student was gone. Dunkley registered for several psychology classes, and sought out Assistant Professor Sean Duffy for research opportunities even before he arrived the same semester as Dunkley.
“Charlene really impressed the colleagues I was working with. She takes tasks on herself, and she does a great job,” Duffy said. Under Duffy’s tutelage, Dunkley produced a poster and displayed it at an undergraduate research fair in Camden last month.
Her research compared the way that children in America pay attention to details and think about the world with the way Japanese children do. “In Japan, it might be more important to pay attention to the context of things,” she said. “In America, the ‘I’ is more important – the details, the abstractions. We’re trying to figure out when this starts to occur in development.”
Dunkley will present different research at the biennial conference of the International Society on Infant Studies next month in Kyoto. She received both the Dean’s Undergraduate Research Prize and a Dean’s Undergraduate Research Grant to help fund the weeklong trip. While most of the presenters will be graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty, Dunkley will be one of just a handful of recent undergraduates.
“I think that psychology and research have helped me look at the world in a way that’s more curious and questioning,” said Dunkley, who will apply to some of the top Ph.D. programs in developmental psychology. Since bouncing back from a rough collegiate beginning, “I am a much better student. I think more about the world and what I have to offer it.”
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