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
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