DivineAsia Miller was primarily raised in Brooklyn, New York. She attended one of New York City’s specialized high schools, Brooklyn Technical High School, where she ended up majoring in Law and Society. Brooklyn Tech was comprised of a new crowd of students who had a lot in common with her compared to her previous schools, and so she came out of her shell for the first time to become a prominent figure in her school’s community. She helped coordinate numerous events ranging from Senior Pajama Day to her major’s Christmas gifts for their teachers to the creation of Big Siblings, the school’s group for helping freshmen orient themselves at Brooklyn Tech.
While taking classes in Law and Society, she discovered her passion for psychology while taking an introductory course on it her junior year. In independent reading and research she did on a number of psychological concepts, she was always primarily attracted to studying mental illness and a natural inclination towards helping people made clinical psychology a perfect fit for her. Since then, it has always been her goal to become a psychotherapist, with a primary employment of psychodynamic techniques.
She went on to Amherst College, where she majored in psychology. While there, she also worked at Amherst College’s Child Learning and Development (CLAD) Lab as a research assistant. In the CLAD Lab, she conducted cognitive experiments with preschool- and middle school- aged human subjects, designed research paradigms, and recruited dozens of families for participation in research studies. Her senior year, she designed the paradigm of, collected and statistically analyzed the data for, and wrote the manuscript for an experimental honors thesis. Using Silvan Tomkins’ affective script theory as a lens, the thesis focused on the differing biases in autobiographical memory that depressed individuals have when compared to healthy controls.
Still, despite a fixation on a single career since a relatively young age, DivineAsia kept herself well rounded at Amherst. She participated in four years of Mock Trial, serving as an executive member her junior and senior years. Other interests of hers included philosophy (particularly the philosophy of religion), creative writing, and fine arts, a department in which she completed several courses in drawing, painting and printmaking. DivineAsia also continued learning Spanish and took up Korean while there, the study of the latter language culminating in a semester abroad in Korea at Yonsei University. She graduated magna cum laude in June of 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology.
DivineAsia intends to get a Masters of Social Work in the near future, and then go on to practice psychotherapy in clinical settings.
