Student Spotlight: Chiara Ogan

“When I got my first master’s in library science, I told myself I was done with school. Famous last words because here I am again,” laughed Chiara Ogan, a second year student in the Wright Institute’s Counseling Psychology Program. “I’ve been so excited about my classes and what we’re learning - I haven't felt this invigorated about my work for years.”

Chiara was born in Virginia, but raised mostly in Connecticut. Her father’s side of the family is Italian and Chiara remembers her early childhood filled with delicious food and the company of her extended family. After high school, Chiara enrolled at Western Maryland College (now McDaniel College) in Westminster, MD for her undergraduate studies. It was and still is a very small liberal arts school, where Chiara lived on campus. “I chose to major in English because I liked to read and didn’t know what I wanted to do,” she admitted candidly. “I learned how to construct an argument and how to write.” In 1996, she graduated with a BA in English, but no plans for what to do with it.

When Chiara was in high school, she worked at her town library as an afterschool job, so she decided to move back home and go back to work at the Cyrenius H. Booth Library in Newtown, CT after graduating. “I loved working with people and connecting them with information,” she recalled. “I also really enjoyed cataloging - getting the books, finding just the right terms to describe them, and printing out the cards.” A year later, in 1997, Chiara decided to pursue this interest further. Chiara moved to Boston and enrolled in Simmons College, where she earned her MA in Library Science in 1999.

Before enrolling at Simmons, Chiara worked as a Library Clerk at the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, MA. “It was really interesting to work at the scientific library because of the different types of questions and different types of research being done,” she explained. “I mean, they slowed the speed of light two stories up from where my office was - it was a really amazing place.” After graduating from Simmons, she became the Technical Services Librarian. In this role, Chiara spent half of her time as a cataloger and the other half working on the institute’s website. “I bought a book for the library called Information Architecture for the World Wide Web - it was all about taking library science ideas and using that to organize information on websites,” she shared. “It was written by two guys who had a consulting company in Michigan. The back of the book said they were always hiring.” Chiara sent them her resume and, two months later, she was heading to Michigan.

The company that drew Chiara to Michigan, Argus Associates, was a small consulting business run by mostly former librarians, organizing digital information instead of books. When they closed in 2001, Chiara moved to California to accept a position as an Information Architect at PeopleSoft, later progressing to the role of Senior Information Architect. “I went from being a consultant to being in-house and seeing the other side of how decisions get made and what it's like to work in corporate America,” she recalled. “I had no idea, coming from libraries and a small consulting company, so it was really great to understand how those wheels move.” At PeopleSoft, Chiara hired a company called Adaptive Path to help with their large-scale website redesigns. Four years later, one of their founders asked Chiara when she was coming to work for them. A few weeks after that, she was working at Adaptive Path as a Senior Information Architect, which was another consulting position. “Consulting is like being a midwife - you're the specialist that comes in and is there for the birth, it’s all very exciting, but then you leave,” she explained. “Whereas my time working internally was more like being a nanny - you really get a sense of ownership and deep understanding and relationships, but sometimes it feels like you’re just changing dirty diapers all the time.” Chiara was promoted to Senior Experience Designer five years later and really enjoyed her work at Adaptive Path, partnering with new people all the time and figuring out how to best support them.

In 2011, Chiara left Adaptive Path and founded her own consulting company called Three Cats Studio in San Francisco, CA, focusing on user experience design and information architecture. She had recently been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and was completely burnt out from years of international travel, running trainings, and completing client projects. Chiara realized she had to make a change and prioritize her well-being. “I gave myself a cap of 20 hours a week for things related to the business and otherwise, I took care of myself,” she recalled. “That was phenomenal and world-changing for me - I was able to really deal with my fibromyalgia, get my flares and symptoms under control, as well as doing a lot of really great work because I got to choose my clients.” Chiara took on one client at a time and was able to focus on their needs. Over the twelve years that she ran Three Cats Studio, Chiara worked with a variety of amazing clients on many phenomenal projects.

In the final few years of running Three Cats Studio, Chiara found herself doing more user experience research than information architecture work. On one particular project for the Ministry of Health in British Columbia, she had the opportunity to travel all around the province and into people’s homes to interview them about their experiences with the healthcare system. This experience helped Chiara realize how much she enjoyed deeply connecting with people, and hearing their personal stories. After eleven years, she was feeling burnt out in her current work. “I was down at Esalen for my birthday, looking out over the ocean and I realized I could be a therapist - it was like a lightning bolt,” she laughed. “I had done a lot of meditation as part of my fibromyalgia care which led me to Buddhism, and I realized what I wanted to do was reduce suffering.” Her biggest client at the time was a company that made violent video games, and although Chiara was very proud of helping them see their players as real people and improving the gaming experience for users, the violent aspects of their games didn’t align with her values.

That fall, Chiara enrolled in the Wright Institute’s Counseling Psychology program. “I had heard really good things from my own therapist,” she recalled. “They had done supervision and shared that students from the Wright Institute were always super well-prepared.” As she began her studies, she quickly saw how the skills she honed as a user experience designer were applicable to counseling. “I always considered myself a user advocate and my job was to be the voice of the user,” she reflected. “As a therapist, I’m expanding on those deep listening skills, empathy, compassion, and advocacy as well.”

One of Chiara’s favorite things about the Counseling program is the cohort model and the strong bonds it fosters. “I made friends in my previous career, but there was always a sense of competition among us and there’s none of that in our cohort,” she explained. “We know that there's more than enough work to go around and we just want to celebrate each other, which is really lovely.” Looking back on her time at the Wright Institute thus far, her happiest memories have been with her cohort. “After our first semester, we had a cohort potluck dinner at my house and three-quarters of the group came,” she shared. “It was so much fun and it was so wonderful to get to know everybody on a deeper level.” As they get busier in their second year, they’re working on finding time to meet as a cohort for lunches, walks, and other activities.

Chiara has enjoyed all of her professors, but she has particularly connected with Professor Elizabeth Greivel, Dr. Mary Clarke, and Professor MacKenzie Stuart. “The professors are so different in their orientation, the populations they serve, and their philosophy,” she reflected. “It's been so enlightening to see how each one approaches the work in a slightly different way and how they bring themselves to the work in an authentic way.” Seeing how each professor brings their unique personality, identity, and life experiences into the classroom has been an excellent example for Chiara of how she can bring herself into therapy with clients in the future.

Last year, Chiara attended a meeting with other Wright Institute students with the goal of brainstorming actions they could take to promote racial justice and change. There she connected with another student, Katie Leary, and they decided to explore experiences of anti-blackness in master’s level therapy programs in the Bay Area. “If we are going to make changes for the better, we have to first know what needs to be changed,” Chiara reflected. “This research project will shed some light on the real-world experiences of future clinicians so we know as a field if we are living up to our social and racial justice ideals.” This work builds nicely upon Chiara’s previous experience as a user experience designer and researcher. “I’ve spent a lot of time coming up with research goals, recruiting participants, designing studies, and doing results analysis, but this project is different because academic research is held to a higher standard of rigor,” she explained. “I was interested to see where my skills could fit in and where my growth edges would be.” Under the guidance of Dr. Mary Clarke, Chiara and Katie have been planning the study and they’re excited to have a few more folks joining the team soon.

Chiara is the founder of the Mindfulness and Meditation student affinity group, a role she truly enjoys. “In classes, we hear about mindfulness techniques that you can use, but we don't really do them,” she explained. “I wanted to put this affinity group together so we could learn about different techniques and interventions, but also try them for ourselves as self-care.” The group meets monthly and covers a different approach to meditation and mindfulness in each meeting. In March of 2025, they held a special Qigong for Mental Health workshop that was open to the entire Wright Institute community, led by master practitioner Tyra Ferlatte. “I’m hoping that, throughout the year, the folks who have been coming will get a better sense of how they can use these interventions in their practice,” she shared, “but also that they can build their own personal practice around mindfulness and meditation that will help them as they move forward.”

From the start, Chiara’s plan has been to defer practicum to her third year in order to prioritize her health. “To me, it was really important not to start this career already in a place of deficit,” she explained. “Taking the extra year has just meant a lot more spaciousness.” In addition to having the time she needs to focus on her course content and readings, Chiara has the bandwidth to work on her research project and lead a student group. Although at times she has felt a little left out as her classmates bring their practicum experiences into class discussions, Chiara knows that she made the best choice for her needs and she’s excited to begin her practicum at The Psychotherapy Institute in the fall.

Chiara has been involved in her local chapter of the P.E.O. Sisterhood, an organization focused on providing educational opportunities to female students worldwide. She has been a member since 2003, serving over the years as its President among several other positions. “My mother dropped out of college to marry my dad, so she never had a college education,” she shared. “After my dad died when I was 16, my mom went back to school and graduated college the year I graduated high school. She was able to do that because she got a loan from P.E.O.” A few years later, Chiara received a P.E.O. loan for her graduate studies and joined the group a few years later. “What I love is it’s an intergenerational group of women from all walks of life, but everybody is really interested in women's education and supporting each other,” she explained.

From 2015-2023, Chiara volunteered at Project Homeless Connect in San Francisco, work inspired by her father. “He would spend one night a month at a women's homeless shelter in New York City, just to keep the peace and make sure everything was okay,” she recalled. “And he would always pack two sandwiches when he packed his lunch, so he could give something away to whoever he met on the street.” Once Chiara began her own business and limited her work to 20 hours a week, she had more time to give back. She began by passing out coffee at the Project Homeless Connect office and ended up running their Volunteer Central for large-scale events. “It was a way to really give back to the community and be there for the folks who are struggling the most,” she reflected. “Especially since my dad’s not here anymore, it felt like a really nice way to honor him.”

In her spare time, Chiara enjoys spending time with her husband, Erik, and their four cats: Spooky, Jonesy, and two kittens named Ziggy and Bonnie. The two kittens are a recent addition to the family, and she now officially refers to herself as a “crazy cat lady.” Chiara likes to spend her free time knitting, sewing, and embroidering, and even made her own dress for Dickens Fair, which she recently attended. “One of the reasons I got into knitting and stuff was because the yarn or the fabric was something tactile that I could touch and hold,” she recalled. “I just felt like I needed that grounding after working digitally all day.” As in her professional life, Chiara has selected hobbies that help her achieve balance.

Looking to the future, Chiara is excited about where her career will take her after graduation. “I feel like I’m getting a really good foundation in psychodynamic and humanistic approaches, but I want to bring in elements of Buddhist psychology and meditation as well,” she explained. “Combining a psychodynamic approach with a Hakomi certification or some kind of somatic and mindfulness work is going to be a sweet spot for me.” Chiara hopes to join a group practice where she can work with and learn from other therapists. She plans to specialize in treating clients with chronic pain and chronic illness, helping those with similar experiences to her own. “In addition to seeing my clients, I want to lead retreats, run groups, and hold workshops,” she mused. “I want to do a lot of things like be a speaker at Spirit Rock or at the Sangha night at the San Francisco Buddhist Center.” After years of helping others through her career in user experience design and her extensive volunteer work, Chiara can’t wait to begin work as a psychotherapist after graduation.