In the following Q&A, Kai-Ning Wang, a new doctoral student of human development and family studies and graduate research assistant at the Family Resiliency Center, discusses her motivations for enrolling in the program, her history with and continued interest in mindfulness, and how her bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and professional experience as an engineer aligns with her subsequent education in clinical psychology and current training in human development and family studies.
Tell me a little bit about your background. What do you do at FRC, and what is your research history?
I work on the mindful movement program, which the center introduced into local preschools to study emotional regulation. Mindful movement is a skill that children who are not good at expression can use in their daily life—just follow the movement, follow the body. The program teaches them how to feel and express how they feel. My personal research interest is focused on parent-child relationships, and I hope that one day I can add that element into this kind of mindfulness program, because I think there is something interesting there. I think that could give children and families more resilience to recover from traumatic events or challenges in their daily life.
Prior to enrolling in the Ph.D. program here, I trained as a clinical psychologist and worked for about four years teaching mindfulness techniques to children, adolescents and parents in a hospital setting. There I could observe development from infancy to adolescence and the importance of parent-child relationships. Let me tell you: there are a lot of stories working in the psychiatry department that I could not have imagined—personal stories, developmental histories—and the clinical situation was a great chance for me to experience how the “real world” is. The real thing is more exaggerated than any television show!
At university, I earned my bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and served as an engineer for three years. However, I felt that my personality was more suited to interacting with people. I enjoyed when people came to me to talk about their life; I thought, “this is more interesting than being an engineer.” I still like to fix things and create tools that help with convenience, but now mechanical engineering is my hobby, a thing that brings more fun to my daily life.
How did you become interested in mindfulness?
My advisor in my master’s training focused on acceptance and commitment psychotherapy (ACT) and mindful eating. That was my first exposure to mindfulness. Once I was working full-time as a clinical psychologist, I encountered a variety of types of psychotherapy, but mindfulness and ACT were the ones that helped me focus on the present and make strategies more concrete for many of my clients. Mindfulness has a clear process—clear steps for a client to follow and then practice themselves—as opposed to analyzing oneself and knowing that there is a traumatic event in one’s childhood. Exploring one’s childhood can help some patients, of course, but I found it was less effective for others. In general, mindfulness really resonates with me, and I enjoyed the approach when it benefited my clients.
I also use mindful eating in my daily life. Sometimes when I have no time, I just grab some food and don’t remember what I’ve eaten. But when I calm down take a few minutes to enjoy the food, I can taste—taking today’s lunch sandwich as an example—how sweet the bread is, how juicy the lettuce is and how full of water. When I eat without intention, as a kind of guilty pleasure, I realize that I didn’t notice how sweet or how salty, say, my potato chips were. But when I eat a cookie and use mindfulness, I can feel it—so sweet!
You say that mechanical engineering is now more of a hobby for you, but is there anything about that training that you still use professionally?
Mechanical engineering provides me with a thought process to make things logical and organized. It helped me to focus on the causes and reasons of things and to build better working habits. My past training also helped me get used to psychology quicker than others, because they both have the same thinking process. As sciences, both engineering and psychology need to follow a structured process to think about questions, find a solution and test a hypothesis. It’s the same thinking process. And especially for mindfulness—mindfulness focuses on the current moment, focuses on now. When I need to think about whether a machine is going to run and how to fix it, I need to focus on the moment. The connection between psychology, engineering, and mindfulness is a focus on current point. Does that make sense?
It makes sense as a description for mindfulness, but how or why do mechanical engineers focus on the current moment? Can you tease that out?
Ok, yes, let me clarify. The point of mindfulness is not just focusing on the current moment but also focusing without judgment. As an engineer, for me, when I found a question or an issue, I needed to focus on how to fix it. I needed to do this without other emotions or strange thoughts, like “Oh, what happened? Why? I feel bad. I cannot fix it—help me!” These are distractions for a mechanical engineer to fix a problem. In other words, focusing on the present and without judgment gets it done, makes it work.
Do you know what kind of project you would like to pursue in your doctoral education? Do you want to keep working with mindfulness?
I definitely want to explore mindfulness more, because I am still in the process of learning about it. I also have an interest in another project that Dr. Dariotis is working on with biomarkers. With that project, I can learn another technique to explore how to measure emotional regulation and stress reaction. I’m excited to join different projects that will help me to build my toolbox. So mindfulness is a priority, yes, but I hope I have the opportunity to come into contact with other projects too.
Finally, I know that this can be a difficult question, but what do you think you would like to do after the Ph.D.?
Hmm. I feel a little shy about saying this, but for me, I think the goal to pursue my Ph.D. is a desire to do more for the community. I want to be the person who can advocate for building a more nurturing environment for children’s development. Because in my clinical observation, I found that many children are actually—they have resilience, a good personality, a good temperament, but their environment is not so friendly. Maybe their parents, maybe the schools, maybe society puts too much pressure on them or cannot help them to grow up smoothly. I would like to influence others to focus on the struggles of these children. For example, children diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or autism spectrum disorder often acquire unfriendly feedback from others even though they are not intentioned to be a bother. If I can introduce to more people the real situation they face and how to interact with them in appropriate way, or how to help the children enhance their emotional regulation so that they will not have an outburst when they feel something challenging, then that would help bridge research and community and translate research findings into the public. Maybe I can influence policy makers to build better, more useful educational protocols. Maybe I can provide parents with more support to help them overcome their life issues and have more time, more patience with their child. It’s just a dream. Maybe it’s a little naïve, but I want to be that bridge to help each side understand the other more.