Psychology GLOBA LLY M IN D E D
UNLOCKING HUMAN POTENTIAL
I-O psychology program prepares leaders for the workplace Call it the “Shark Tank” of CBU.
Each semester, students in the Master of Science in Industrial and Organizational Psychology program find a client, investigate their workplace challenges, conduct research and provide solutions. Then they present their findings and recommendations to an audience that includes CEOs from the community for evaluation. Sometimes the audience likes what they hear. Sometimes they don’t.
And that’s part of the program.
In those experiences, “the students are asked to fail. You only learn when you fall down,” said Dr. Nathan Iverson, program director. “The next semester, they work twice as hard.”
I-O psychology is the science of people at work, the combination of business, psychology and statistics, Iverson said. Alumni typically work for governments, in city and county roles, or as consultants, providing solutions to fix a challenge, whether it be high turnover or low employee satisfaction or challenges on inclusion.
transferred to CBU for the program’s hands-on approach.
CBU students do a consulting project every semester, even their first semester. Iverson is not aware of another program that offers that. Students usually work with a different client each time, allowing them to graduate with two years of consulting experience.
“The consulting projects taught me about asking questions, being genuinely curious and listening to the challenges an organization faces,” Fink-Keith said. “It’s about what my client wants and what I have the ability to give them. It’s a practice I still incorporate with my current job, and it’s been invaluable.” She now works at Southern California Edison in the human resources enterprise learning and development department where she supervises training programs.
The program equipped Gonzalo Munoz (’21) with a comprehensive understanding of organizations and how Fink-Keith
The program’s approach encourages students to try new things.
“You’ll have a safe place to learn from failures. For a lot of people, failure is a bad word, but failure is where growth happens,” said Teanna Fink-Keith (’23), who started the I-O psychology program at another university and then
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