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Student Profiles
Shannon Arriola,
Ph.D. Candidate Organizational Systems Creating Tools for Dialogue and Peacekeeping
Denita Benyshek,
MFT Graduate Applying Creative Studies To Counseling
Laura Pasquale,
Ph.D. Candidate HumanScience Promoting Environmental Sustainability by Involving People
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 Shannon Arriola, Ph.D. Candidate
Organizational Systems
Creating Tools for Dialogue and Peacekeeping
I chose Saybrook after a very extensive two-year search for doctoral programs
that would challenge me to look at accountability and social transformation within
organizations, communities and families. Saybrook does that.
I've always been interested peacekeeping. My family is Spanish-Basque and
my grandparents left Spain because of the bias and discrimination against the
Basque people, so it has always been part of my lineage and my history to understand
why it's not okay to coexist with different values and different beliefs.
I was married to a very wonderful man for a number of years and when we divorced,
we decided to mediate. Then I fell so in love with the mediation process that
I digressed from going to law school and chose psychology and mediation as a
career path. So I've been in private practice for 13 years as a mediator,
with eight of those years as a divorce mediator helping families move through
a very difficult transition.
My intellectual work at Saybrook involves the whole premise of the potential
for peacekeeping and models of dialogue. One of things that I've most enjoyed
is seeing how that dialogue permeates the whole curriculum interdisciplinary.
We dialogue about dialogue in the psychology area, in the OS concentration and
are championing it in the conflict resolution program. Being able to follow my
passion and finding it in all these concentrations has made Saybrook the perfect
program.
A lot of mediators tend to be middle children, and I happen to be a middle child,
so I guess it was inevitable for me, but its good work and I enjoy it. I see
that as a culture we are shifting from violence to really wanting more coexistence,
but we may not have the tools yet to create that. And I think that one of the
things that Saybrook is working to do is to help to create those tools. It's
exciting work and it is a dance. There was no other institution of higher education
that I could find that integrated three disciplines so beautifully. And then
having this responsive faculty makes it even more phenomenal.
I chose Saybrook because it provides innovative, leading edge education for the
adult learner, and it really creates the potential for us to transform the world. |
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 Denita Benyshek
MFT Graduate
Applying Creative Studies To Counseling
I have a son who is five years old and I live in a remote mountain valley near
Seattle. It's near enough to Seattle that I could commute to school there
if I chose to. The Saybrook model allowed me to be flexible enough about when
I attended class and did homework. So if my son were sick, I could stay home
with him. I could slow my work when I needed and speed up at other times. Even
though I was accepted into two schools with walls, I chose to not do that. My
finding Saybrook was either luck or fate and I had no idea how lucky I was, and
what a good fit this school is for me.
Some more background - my early childhood was spent in a house without plumbing
in a small immigrant community in Kansas. When my parents moved to a bigger city
I did dance training, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and began teaching.
I worked 15 years in a remote bush village in Alaska and in native villages and
I taught Visual Arts, Dance and Performance Art. During that period I might be
on the north coast of Alaska in an Eskimo village one day and the next day I
would be doing a 12-hour photo shoot as a model in Seattle. I was also working
in theater and exhibiting my artwork.
So I've had a very unusual set of life experiences. However at Saybrook
the unusual is usual. I find that I am amongst peers here. There is acceptance.
I did a traditional fine arts program and there was certain kind of dogmatic
hierarchical rigid set of expectations and rules, and here there is far more
freedom, acceptance and permission and it is a place where I can work in an interdisciplinary
way. I'm a MFA and now an MFT, but I've also been able to participate
in the Creative Studies Program and attend seminars at the RC in other disciplines.
This has been great because here the level of intellectual discourse is really
high. The thinking is very sophisticated and vivid and it's very exploratory,
so it's a place where I can spread my wings and get a lot of support.
Another thing that's very special about this school is that the students
are amazing - the most extraordinary group of women I've ever been with
in my life. It's not a school that has eight token women teaching. Even
the president is a woman. This has been a perfect fit for me. Little did I know
when I came here. I didn't know that. I just feel extremely lucky to have
found this just through a website. |
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 Laura Pasquale, Ph.D. Candidate
Human Science
Promoting Environmental Sustainability by Involving People
One reason I chose Saybrook was the distance-learning format. I'm
self-supporting, so it was essential for me to find a program that would allow
me to continue working. In addition, I didn't know where I would
be living in the year or two after I applied, and distance learning meant that
location wasn't going to be a factor. The other piece is the academic
program and its intellectual foundations. I was intrigued by the respect
for, and the attempt to integrate, different intellectual traditions. It
wasn't just the humanistic psychology or the organizational systems focus
per se; it was the fact that Saybrook was attempting to take into account a variety
of intellectual traditions, rather than simply a Western focus. The third
factor was the ¨Organizational Systems program itself. I had gone into it
looking for an organizational focus and also an application of my training in
psychology. I wanted those aspects of my career to be meshed programmatically
as well as professionally. The coursework has really lived up to my expectations.
Right now, I'm a senior management analyst for a state regulatory agency. We
work with environmental issues, and my own professional focus has shifted toward
issues of environmental sustainability. As a therapist, I tended to see the health
of systems and individual health as being intrinsically linked, and so for me
to work with individuals in a system that perpetuated their dysfunction often
made little sense. Now, I can see ways in which systems might be altered
or enhanced in order to support more sustainable and healthier ways of living,
both at the global and the individual levels.
I'm a Ph.D. candidate, working on my dissertation proposal on environmental
management systems. I want find out how an organization or an individual can
promote meaningful, successful involvement of community members or individuals
from other organizations in order to develop and implement an environmental management
system. I think without appropriate levels of involvement, those systems will
not work.
At Saybrook, you get out what you put in. Because the structure of the
program is "non-traditional" (whatever that means!), people need
to be prepared to change their expectations about how things are going to work. The
strategies I used to get my Masters degree were not as effective here. I
would also encourage students to get comfortable with electronic communication. If
they aren't already using the Internet regularly, or if they don't
use e-mail at work, they should start experimenting with it as soon as possible - maybe
get an e-mail account and start writing back and forth to family members and
friends - just do something to get acquainted with that technology. I've
also found that the unexpected learning has often been the most valuable: the
unplanned conversation, the course that I just felt compelled to take even if
I wasn't really sure why. As time allows, take courses outside of
your strict plan of study. That's part of the beauty of being here. |
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Please direct all questions and comments to
Saybrook Admissions Office
800.825.4480
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