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Since she received her first telescope in third grade, Geraldine Oades-Sese knew she wanted to work in the hard sciences. As an undergraduate chemistry major at Rutgers University, she was well on her way until a psychology course and a 6-year-old boy changed her mind.
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| Geraldine Oades-Sese |
Oades-Sese, who will receive a doctorate in school psychology from the Graduate School of Education, traces her current career trajectory back to an undergraduate internship she had working with poor, behaviorally challenged children in Passaic, N.J.
One day, while playing a “thinking-feeling” game with a young boy, teaching him to express his emotions in positive, healthy ways, Oades-Sese realized that working with abused children was her calling.
“From then on, I knew what I wanted to do because I had made a difference. I have a great rapport with children and I love helping them heal,” she said.
Oades-Sese attended school part time, while working for Colgate-Palmolive as an analytical chemist, testing hand soap and detergent and conducting research for a variety of other products. Although she said the scientific part of the job appealed to her, “I just didn’t see myself working in a lab for the rest of my life.”
At Fordham, she was able to combine her knack for helping children and her analytical skills.
While working with children who had been traumatized by abuse and poverty, Oades-Sese noted the factors that allowed some kids to overcome adversity and thrive while others were permanently sidetracked. Resilience, the term used to describe the host of factors that allow children to recover from harrowing situations, became the focus of her dissertation.
Oadses-Sese found that children from non-English-speaking families who are allowed to learn both their parents’ language and English stand a much better chance of being resilient.
“My study found that a child’s intellect, temperament, autonomy and ability to regulate their own emotions determine their resilience,” she said. “I loved Fordham because it’s an environment with countless resources and I maximized all of them.”
One of her favorite Fordham resources was Professor Giselle Esquivel, Psy.D., who mentored Oades-Sese and invited her to contribute a chapter to a book on identifying gifted children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
Oades-Sese will spend the summer writing journal articles on topics culled from all the information she collected while working on her dissertation. She also plans to take workshops on advanced statistical methods. And she ultimately hopes to integrate all the science she has studied into psychology, to move the field away from its image as a “soft science.”
Born in the Philippines, Oades-Sese moved to New Jersey when she was 5 and has been a Garden State resident ever since. She recently bought a home in Piscataway, N.J., and lives with her daughter, son and husband, whom she describes as “my true source of resilience.”
And while her family keeps Oades-Sese grounded, when the night sky above Piscataway is clear, she still likes looking at the stars through her backyard telescope.
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