A Little Introduction

Hello and welcome to my SP blog! My name is Daria Strojek and I am a senior at BASIS Peoria.

           

             Growing up, I have always loved animals, especially dogs. At one point, I even wanted to be a vet. But then I took AP Psychology in 8^th grade and my perspective changed. I realized that I loved learning about the brain and the nervous system and how they interacted to create our everyday responses. After that class, I decided I wanted to one day become a psychiatrist/neurologist.

            Today, I own three dogs, all of which I love to the moon and back. I even delivered three puppy litters and raised them up until they were adopted. As a result, when I asked my parents if we could adopt a golden retriever, they naturally said no. Too many dogs in the house as it is. When our senior projects came around, I decided that I wanted to do something that combined my love for psychology and golden retrievers, or big dogs as a whole. And that’s how A Man’s Best Friend… And Helper was born.

            My senior project I will research how service dogs are trained differently for various purposes and how breed determines pairing with new owners. I will be interning with two service dog training facilities and observing/helping with their classes. Through these two internships, I will be able to observe a wide pool of training classes and record how these dogs are prepared for their individual cases. With such observations, I will be able to deduce how different psychological needs are applied to the training process and how the specific dog breed needs to be approached during training. In addition, between these two internships I will also be able to determine how effective the breed matching is at each facility and which breeds should be chosen for individual needs in the future.

            While this project will be a great learning experience for psychology and dog training as a whole, I look forward to working with my favorite dog breeds as they are prepared to help individuals with special psychological or physical needs.