When professor of graduate education Peter Desberg interviewed comedy writers from the golden age of television to the present for his new book, “Show Me the Funny: At the Writers’ Table with Hollywood’s Top Comedy Writers,” he and co-author Jeffrey Davis, a professor of screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University, had the opportunity to ask the age-old question, “What’s so funny?” The answers surprised them. As a licensed clinical psychologist who specializes in treating stage fright, Desberg has worked with numerous stand-up comics. He says that many of the writers he and Davis interviewed had experience as comedians and that they learned what was funny as a survival ... Read More
Psychology
CSU Dominguez Hills Represented at SACNAS
Eleven students from the Minority Biomedical Research Support program (MBRS) and the Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) program at California State University, Dominguez Hills attended the 2010 national conference of the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), which took place from Sept. 30 to Oct. 3 in Anaheim. MBRS students in attendance included senior psychology majors Vanessa Black, Esbeyde Garcia, John Gibson, and Monique Turner; Ashley Martin, senior, biochemistry; Brittany Tillman, senior, biology; Destinie Thompson, freshman, biochemistry; Kumar Tiger, junior, biology; and Ludivina Vasquez, junior, psychology. The MARC cohort was ... Read More
Brandilynn Villarreal: Alumna Finds Path to Doctorate By Mentoring McNair Scholars
When Brandilynn Villarreal (Class of ’09, M.A., clinical psychology) took a job as a grad assistant for the McNair Scholars Program at California State University, Dominguez Hills, she had thought the responsibility of helping underrepresented, first-generation college students prepare for advanced degrees was interesting. So much so, that as a doctoral candidate in social and personality psychology at the University of California, Irvine she decided to analyze how that same student population copes with graduate school. “I had to come here and see that I was really interested in doing that,” says Villarreal, who had earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology at UCLA with a focus on ... Read More
