Meet Our Graduates

Shawna Mitchell describes her life as "a string of odd experiences and even odder outcomes."

"I am a free spirit, spending much of my time experientially absorbing the world," she says. My lust for 'being' has taken me from the harsh environmental challenge of CBS's Survivor: Amazon, to researching hope models in the underbelly of Tanzania's indigenous cultures."

A graduate of the College of William and Mary with a degree in business administration, Shawna earned a master's degree in counseling psychology from Santa Clara University. With experience as a psychological researcher at University of California, San Francisco, and as a residential counselor at a Bay Area group home for at-risk youth, she notes that "my roots lie in a craving to understand how to best apply psychological theory for the betterment of communities and the cultivation of self-healers."

"I was first introduced to positive psychology two months before I moved to Tanzania to do some solo research in health psychology with local tribes around Mt. Kilimanjaro. Equipped with my counseling psychology background, I ventured out to understand what constructs and belief systems could assist in shaping resiliency and hope. Using any and every orientation I could muster up for answers and effective communication, I became fascinated by what worked, what did not, and how the techniques could trigger these awesome emotional buffers. As time passed, all the traditional theories and treatment models seemed to fall to the wayside except positive psychology and cognitive therapy. A strength-based approach felt like the only technique that transcended the cultural boundaries. By the cultivation of strength and positive emotions, hope did surface and the process blew me away."

Which is what led to her interest in entering the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program. "When given the chance to join the first MAPP class, I knew I wanted to dive head first with positive psychology pioneers; the opportunity was too beautiful to pass up. To be surrounded with incredible theories, such incredible minds this is what education truly is. I could not imagine a more phenomenal and exciting field with which to be associated. The opportunity seemed endless from the beginning, as it does still now. My immersion into all these wonderful theories and amazing people ended up opening worlds for me at Penn and in life. It has been such an amazing adventure so far, I cannot imagine where it will lead me in the future. I know that I want to take all the knowledge, the shared experiences of my mentors, and the vision of what can evolve into new arenas for positive psychology. I now find myself hunting for the perfect Ph.D. program to help launch myself into the world of research and teaching."

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