Senior Cleo Jacobs stands in the Dean's Garden behind Warren Hall. Robert Barker/University Photography
Senior Cleo Jacobs has made a college career out of learning about children and their psychological development.
Preparing to graduate his month with a 3.49 grade point average in human ecology, Jacobs has made the study of human development her academic focus and her extracurricular focus as well.
Looking back at her decision to enroll at Cornell after graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, she remembers feeling comfortable walking through the College of Human Ecology.
"I chose to come here because I knew I would get a great education, and there are so many opportunities available for undergraduates. I knew I would get a lot out of my time at Cornell." she said.
She began working at human service agencies in the summer of her freshman year at the Cornell Cooperative Extension Youth-to-Youth Literacy Project in Harlem. The program put Jacobs at the front of a classroom with kids ages 6 to 12, where she helped build reading and writing skills.
Since then she has worked on several other projects, including one that took her to the opposite end of the country. She spent this past summer at the University of California at Berkeley as part of a summer research program where she studied the social development of summer camp students with attention deficit hyperactive disorder.
During the school year she served as the co-chair of career development for the Association for Students of Color. She organized workshops to help students with resume writing and job-hunting skills, and also helped organize an alumni-student career forum in April.
In the meantime she completed her senior honors thesis in Cornell's Early Social Development Lab, investigating the emotion expression of low-income mothers. She compared mothers' self-reported emotion expression with emotion expression demonstrated during play activities with their children.
"I focused on this area because we know very little about emotion expression in low-income families, and it is an important area," she explained.
Jacobs also works as an undergraduate research assistant in the early development lab supervising a team of delay-task coders and collecting data during visits to local Head Start programs both in Ithaca and Rochester.
Her supervisor, Assistant Professor Cybele Raver, made a great impact on her career plan, she said. "[Raver] allowed me to come into her lab and become involved in all the areas of research. I realized that I enjoy doing research and that I want to continue conducting research in the future."
The work Jacobs has done with children has inspired her to seek further research opportunities studying clinical issues, such as depression, in low-income and minority children. After graduation, she will report to the Devereux Foundation in Villanova, Pa., to begin a one-year clinical psychology research and training program.
"My ultimate goal," she said, "is to be a child psychologist and, maybe, a professor."
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