School of Ed alumna sponsors new fund to support counseling psychology students

Cindy Pressgrove Buchanan, PhD, still remembers exactly where she was when she found out she had been accepted to the counseling psychology doctorate program at KU’s School of Education and Human Sciences.

At the time, Buchanan was studying at Baker University, but she had started working at a KU lab the previous summer, and when it came time to apply to PhD programs, she knew KU was where she wanted to be. She was spending the evening at her sorority house when she got a call from one of the faculty members she knew from the lab. She answered convinced the phone call would be a disappointment. When, instead, she found out she had been accepted, it quickly became what she still considers one of the happiest days of her life.

“Being a lifelong Jayhawk fan, I felt I now I get to actually claim the university,” she said. “What a dream.”

It was in the KU counseling psychology program that Buchanan, a Topeka native and first-generation college student, developed the principles that have become the core of her professional identity. She learned how to be a good clinician; she also learned how to supervise and mentor others as well as the importance of community service and advocacy.

“I felt like when I went out into the world, I had this advantage over other people that came from similar training programs, because KU really prepared us,” Buchanan said. “There isn’t really a time where I’m not using things that I learned in the program, and I don’t know that a lot of people can say that about their education. I feel so grateful for that.”

Part of that training included opportunities to attend national conferences as well as present papers and network at the events, none of which Buchanan says would have been possible without the fellowships, scholarship and other financial awards that were available at KU.

“My family didn’t have any financial resources that they could support me with at all,” Buchanan said. “I always felt so grateful that I could take part in these professional opportunities that I thought I would never be able to do.”

In hopes that future students will be able to access to the same experiences she did, Buchanan is actively working to create a student support fund for the PhD Counseling Psychology program.

“I envision this other student who wants to have a career like mine in academic medicine or work at a children’s hospital, and I hope they’ll have what they need to be able to do those things that were so important for launching me into these next steps of my career,” she said.

Buchanan is now a licensed clinical psychologist and a professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and a medical staff member at the Children’s Hospital of Colorado. There, she focuses on supporting children with chronic medical conditions as well as their families as they navigate medical stressors, build resilience and work through other issues. And, despite being away from her home state for almost two decades, Buchanan has never forgotten her Kansas roots. (Which means that her colleagues know not to schedule meetings during March Madness.)

“I’m a full professor now at the medical school,” said Buchanan. “I’m our section head of integrated behavioral health at the hospital. I’ve checked all these amazing academic boxes in my career, but if you ask people what they know about me, everybody knows I’m a Jayhawk.”

For more information about supporting students at the KU School of Education and Human Sciences, reach out to Laura Meyer, School of Education and Human Sciences development officer, at KU Endowment, at 785-832-7372 or [email protected].