Friday 24 February 2012

Happy Red Day

Today is officially the British Heart Foundation day where everyone is encouraged to wear red and donate to support this important charity. Here in the enquiry unit we’ve all turned up dressed in red, as well as eating red themed food and running various competitions throughout the office to try and raise as much as we can :), and if you would like to know more about the charity and do your part you can click on this link which will take you to their website: http://www.bhf.org.uk/get-involved/fundraising/red-for-heart.aspx or alternatively you can donate by texting WIWT24 £XX to 70700 , replacing XX With the amount of money you wish to donate.
















On a slightly unrelated note, finally got my grade back for my portfolio that I was stressing so much about. I did in that time where I had 3 deadlines due in 3 days, so I was seriously questioning whether or not I would get a good grade for it or not....BUT I did.....WOOOHOOO :D ended up get a 75 (1st) which I was over the moon about!! It was worth 50% of my module which now means I only need another 2.5% in order to pass :D definitely a weight of my mind!!

AND the good news keeps on flowing; I also found out that I got the job I applied for as a research assistant working alongside the MET police :D which will be great experience for me!! Additionally, I also have been asked to come along for an interview for another research assistant position next week, but I’m debating whether or not I should go, as I barely have time to manage everything I’m doing at the moment, with assignments, netball, working for the enquiry unit and actually going to uni, I don’t even know how i’m going to fit in this new job let alone another one :/ and i’d hate to go to the interview, get it, and then be in the horrible position of having to turn/let them down :/ it’s definitely something I need to think about either way!!

But yeah, that’s my week pretty much summed up, hopefully all of you have had a good week, :)

Bye for now xx

Friday 10 February 2012

A year in the life of a first year psychology student...


Rather than my usual blog of tales of my life, I decided to focus this one on what it is like studying psychology and my personal experience of the models I did in my first year, so then if anyone is thinking of choosing psychology for their degree it’ll (hopefully) give them a bit more of an insight to it and what it's actually like. (Although don’t let my experiences put you off....everyone is different after all, and all have different interests!!)




Year One (Fresherrssss).

This was made up of 4 modules; 3 compulsory ones and 1 we could choose.  And was spread over 3 days (Monday, Tuesday and Friday) with 7 hours of lectures and 5 hours of seminars.

The modules were:

Academic and Personal Development (30 Credits).
This in my opinion was probably the easiest module of them all....this one involved working on a lot of the basic skills needed to study psychology, such as literature searchers, essay writing as well as filming a video of us conducting a psychology experiment. This module was helpful as it allowed us to practice our key skills and as I found the assignments relatively easy, this module helped to boost my overall grade for the year.

Introduction for Psychology (30 Credits).
This module was literally what it says on tin, an introduction to psychology; luckily for me I did A level psychology, so I already had a fair bit of knowledge about the key psychology studies, such as Milgram, Zimbardo etc...which helped me a lot with this side of this course, although saying that this was probably the one that I had to work the hardest foras there was just so much information that we had to remember, especially when it came to the mini tests or the final exam.

Research Methods (30 Credits).
This module is probably the most important one of both the first and second year because this one you NEED to pass in order to pass the year, where as if you fail another module, it doesn’t matter as long as your overall grade is above 40. Another thing people were surprised about when we started this module was that it is largely based on statistics; this plays a key role in psychology as statistics help examine the relationship between two variables and is used in nearly every psychology study conducted, and when it came to producing our three lab reports for the year, as well as writing up the studies we conducted, we also needed to analysis it using the appropriate statistics as well as producing graphs and stuff to illustrate the data. On this module we alternated each week between research method lectures/seminars, (which were mainly all about ways to conduct research and the problems with certain methods etc) and statistic lectures. As well as the 3 lab reports we were also assessed using fortnightly statistics tests and method work books as well as an open book statistics exam at the end of the year and a closed book methods exam.

Counselling (30 Credits) or Applied Psychology (30 Credits). 
Here I mistakenly choose to do counselling as I was filled with the deluded ideas of helping people through all their problems etc.....unfortunately for me, when we had to watch the videos of case studies,  I soon realised that I could not stand the idea of sitting there listening to other people go on and on about their problems. I just don’t have it in my personality to sit there and actually listen instead of just saying ‘MAN UP’. And as that’s kind of the main focus of counselling, needless to say I quickly lost interest in this subject. There were 3 assessments on this course, 2 open book mini exams and 1 seen exam at the end of the year, and as it was seen it meant that we were given the exam questions 2 weeks before the exam so we could prepare our exam questions ahead of time...if it wasn’t for that fact I really don’t think I would have passed as if it’s not something i’m interested in I don’t really tend to retain the information as easy as other course. 
But I passed.....so I guess that’s all that matters, and I we don’t have to do it in second or third year, so thats a big yaaaay from me :D.
On the other side of things, we were also able to choose to do applied psychology, which looks at the application of psychology in the real world. The thing my friends loved about doing this module was the fact that there is no exam for it...it’s all coursework based, which had I known before I would have been really tempted to choose this instead, as I hate exams!!!!



But yeah.....Thats pretty much my first year in a nutshell....I’ll write another one about second year sometime in the future. ...but for now I hope this blog will shed some light on what psychology is really like as a degree.

Soooo goodbye for now xx