Ellie Bauer

• LGBTQ+

• Student/Trainee Assistant
• Student/Trainee Scholarship

• Thursday, June 12, 2025 (Morning)
• Thursday, June 12, 2025 (Afternoon)
• Friday, June 13, 2025 (Morning)
• Friday, June 13, 2025 (Afternoon)
• Saturday, June 14, 2025 (Morning)

I decided I wanted to pursue a career in psychology at a middle school career day. I can recall going from classroom to classroom, listening to entrepreneurs, stylists, accountants, and sales people share their experiences with 11-13 year old children. I was entirely uninterested in the careers they presented. "I want to help people," I thought to myself, "I want to connect with them". In one of the final classrooms, a therapist was sharing her experiences and I was sold. At 12 years old, I had my heart set on serving my community by becoming a psychologist. My career pathway has since shifted from typical therapy to neuropsychology, but my passion for connecting with people has been steadfast. Throughout my life, I have used volunteering as a way to share this passion and uplift my community. Throughout my undergraduate education, I volunteered as an aid in kindergarten through third grade classrooms, using the skills I was learning in my psychology classes to connect with the students and guide them through emotion processing. I also helped facilitated a youth softball camp, providing a free opportunity for children to learn softball skills coupled with leadership, self-advocacy, and confidence. Given the demands of graduate school, I have taken a step back from volunteering. However, my commitment to serving my community persists. I am currently engaged in research investigating the relationship between COVID-19 and cognitive status. In doing so, we provide our participants with a free memory evaluation, and offer non-diagnostic feedback to anyone who requests it. Through this research opportunity, I am able to not only contribute to the growing field of literature on the long term effects of COVID-19, but I am also able to provide non-diagnostic neuropsychological evaluation to individuals who have reported that they would otherwise not be able to afford it. In my future career, my goal is to continue down this pathway of making neuropsychological evaluation available and affordable for all, serving my community by ensuring that the resources I provide are not only available to a select population, but to anyone who wants or needs them.

In April, 2024, I learned that I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder. When I say 'learned', what I really mean is that I received a formal diagnosis. I have been affected by anxiety for most of my life. It has, for the most part, been adaptive, fueling me to complete big assignments and perform at 110% at all times. It is also exhausting and draining. While I can recall instances of anxiety dating back to when I was a small child, it first started interfering with my daily life in early high school. I put unimaginable pressure on myself to achieve the best grades possible, be the best softball player on my team, and engage in every social and familial activity I could. This pressure, and subsequent fear of disappointing everyone I loved, resulted in suicidal ideation from ages 14-19. However, I felt that I was 'too strong' and 'too successful' to talk to anyone and seek help. I suffered alone, battling my own emotional state and closing myself off to the possibility that others could help me. "I'm supposed to be a therapist," I thought, "I can manage this on my own." Eventually, I experienced some symptom remission through my own "self-help" work and by confiding in friends and family members. However, my symptoms came back stronger than ever when I began graduate school, eventually reaching a peak as I prepared to defend my master's thesis. During this time, I made the decision to seek professional help. This went against the belief system that I had engrained in myself that I was too strong, too successful, to independent to take help from anyone else. I put aside this bias, and began seeing a therapist. And what do you know, it helped! Through hard work and open, honest discussion, I was again able to experience symptom regression, this time by utilizing evidence-based skills and techniques to address the root of my anxiety. I can acknowledge that there are others who experience adversity and barriers as a result of discrimination, prejudice, illness, and tragedy that I have not experienced as a result of my privilege. However, I take pride in my ability to separate myself from the belief system that I engaged in as a teenager, and finally seek help and persevere despite my anxiety. I passed my master's thesis and am now in the process of completing my dissertation analyzing the relationship between perseveration and repetition errors and cognitive status on measures of visual-spatial memory.

As a graduate student trainee and aspiring neuropsychologist, my goal is to gain exposure to the plethora of domains that the field of neuropsychology has to offer. Thus far in my training, I have benefited from neuropsychological practicum experience in private practice, community mental health, and research settings. These settings have enhanced my knowledge of neuropsychological assessment skills including administration, test battery selection, scoring, interpretation, clinical interviewing, and report writing. While these experiences have helped me learn and grow as a budding neuropsychologist, my exposure to various perspectives, populations, and environment has been limited by geographic confounds. I have the utmost respect for my supervisors and advisors who have guided me through my training thus far. However, many of my advisors have practiced primarily in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area for the entirety of their careers. The majority of my training has been centered around the treatment of patients e in this area who have insurance or are able to afford the cost of neuropsychological testing. As a result, I have not yet had experience engaging with a wide range of diverse individuals. Furthermore, my supervisors and advisors have also primarily treated middle to upper class, white, straight, older adults throughout their career. Therefore, my perspective is limited regarding how to apply neuropsychological practice to diverse populations. Despite my lack of experience, this topic is of extreme importance to me. I am curious about how to utilize normative data within underrepresented populations, how to avoid bias in administration and the scoring and interpretation of results, and how to tailor interviews and assessments to diverse individuals. Attending the AACN conference last year helped me to gain insight into different perspectives and opinions. It allowed me to explore new assessments, different treatment settings, and methods of interpretation and diagnosis within diverse and marginalized populations. Attending the AACN conference allows me to broaden my perspective and speak to individuals from all over the United States and beyond who have different experiences than myself and my supervisors. This conference provides me with the unique opportunity to further explore the field of neuropsychology and expand my skills as a future neuropsychologist by introducing me to new ideas, new perspectives, and new opportunities.

Additionally, attending this conferences gives me an opportunity to share my own experience with other neuropsychologists. My current research, which I plan to submit as a poster presentation at the upcoming AACN conference, explores the relationship between COVID-19 and cognitive impairment in older adults presenting with subjective cognitive concerns. Mine and my colleagues research adds to the rapidly growing body of literature investigating which cognitive functions are most impacted by long-COVID, and which factors may influence the relationship between long-COVID and cognitive impairment. Presenting this research at the AACN 2025 conference student poster session will further the field's understanding of long-COVID and prompt discussions between myself and other professionals on this important emerging topic.