Of the six universities she applied to, in order to fulfill the requirements for a scholarship under the Fulbright United States (US) Student Programme, only one accepted popular associate clinical psychologist and host of the JN Circle Thrive Together Life Class series, Kamala McWhinney.
That alone tells the tale of how devastated McWhinney was a year ago when the rejections came one after the other and the hope of becoming a Fulbright scholar slowly dimmed.
But, as fate would have it, she was accepted by the University of Miami to pursue a Doctor of Philosophy in community well-being, and made it in time to meet the May 2022 deadline for the closure of applications.
“It’s been a long journey. The deadline was last year May. So it’s been one year plus and just all the pieces of it. Applying for the scholarship is just one piece, which was interesting in its own way. But then there is also applying to universities, which was very rigorous for me,” McWhinney explained to The Gleaner on Wednesday during an interview before the official announcement of her scholarship by the US Embassy in Jamaica.
“For me personally, who has not been in the academy for many many years, just being mindful of all the requirements, in terms of being published and all of those academic pieces, it brought up a lot of academic trauma for me. So it was rigorous,” she said.
One of the major reasons she experienced roadblocks was the fact that she finished her master’s degree 13 years ago.
Now that she has overcome that hurdle and was selected for a Fulbright scholarship, she is relieved and ready to take on studies in Miami.
“I consider it an honour and I’m getting excited. I’m right at the point of getting excited now,” McWhinney said.
She said moving to another country for a year is another experience she is taking one step at a time to bask in, as it is “real and very intense”.
As a clinical psychologist by profession, she said one of the main reasons she applied for the Fulbright programme, and the choice of study, is that she wants to give more of herself to solving issues among youth.
She told The Gleaner that it was at the UWI Mona, while teaching students, that she felt she needed to use her skills in a different way and she moved into the creative part of her life where she launched several initiatives, such as a life-class series, which has been sponsored by the Jamaica National (JN) Group and posted on its YouTube and Facebook pages.
“A lot of my students were 21 [years] and below and I could see the fact that they were not fully being prepared for life outside of school. So the idea of having a class where we could actually talk about how to do relationships and how to manage self-esteem and boundary-setting and using the psychologist skills and tools in a more relatable way, and that came off the ground and I’ve been very grateful to be the host of that for the past five seasons,” McWhinney told The Gleaner.
Her inspiration for the life-class series came to her mind while lecturing at the UWI Mona as well.
When she returns to Jamaica from the University of Miami, she hopes to have garnered enough knowledge to impact “the crisis of relationships in Jamaica”.
“Specifically, I want to focus on intervention in the high schools and the primary schools, to have a curriculum-based solution or part of a solution to intimate partner violence. I feel like that problem in particular is growing and it’s worsening and I feel as though, if we don’t catch our people at that early level of learning and learning about what love is and dealing with our trauma, then it’s going to be hard to solve the problem later in life,” McWhinney said.
“I feel as though our crime situation can be summed up in that way. I feel like we are not the best at relating to each other and that’s where we have the spill-off ... [and] that’s the major reason I applied for the Fulbright programme, and that’s the major reason I decided to pursue a PhD after writing it off completely,” she said.
Another reason she applied to the University of Miami and for the Fulbright programme is that she wanted to grow her knowledge base, to connect with other scholars and use all that she learnt to continue driving change in Jamaica.
Sharing how her career in psychology began, Kamala McWhinney said she faced many challenges.
“So, I wanted to be a paediatrician, and then I went to university and was pursuing biochemistry and all that good stuff and ended up literally having a meltdown. And so I decided to make a radical decision to switch gears and to pursue psychology, which I was interested in since high school, but chose medicine because of the dream of being Dr McWhinney and working with babies. And so I decided to start from ground zero and do psychology and [I now have] absolutely no regrets,” she said.
After finishing her clinical psychology programme, she worked with the Ministry of National Security, supporting persons in communities that are impacted by violence.
She told The Gleaner that she then moved out of private practice because she felt she was not fully in love with it anymore, and ventured into consultancy, which she has been doing for the past four years through her organisation, White Lotus Consulting.
When she returns to Jamaica from the Fulbright programme at the University of Miami, with the knowledge and network, she hopes to work with the likes of the Ministry of Education and Youth and to pull on private sector partners to continue making a positive impact.
Other Fulbright Graduate Student Programme recipients for this year are Denise Brown, under the Fulbright Faculty Development Program; Dr Imani Tafari Ama, Nickania Pryce, and Dr Paulette Ramsay under the Fulbright Scholar-In-Residence Program.