Doing a dissertation

Hi Guys! Hope you have all had a great week!

The past week has been a busy one, I've been at home to see my family and I've had a friend to come to visit for a day as well. It is now getting to the stage where assessments are due in again soon so I have been doing work on that, and lots of work on trying to get my dissertation questionnaires distributed, it has been one busy week!

In just 26 days it will be the end of second term, and there are just 54 days until dissertation hand in day! For this blog post, I thought I would talk about dissertation truths and myths as it was not until around second year that I started to learn the truths from the myths about doing your dissertation.

To begin with, doing your dissertation is not as scary as it sounds, in fact I am probably finding it the most fun out of all of our modules! Doing a dissertation in Psychology means that you are able to choose the area of Psychology you are most interested in and conduct your own research in it with help. You spend two years at university learning about research that Psychologists have conducted, and you find yourselves thinking about changes that could be made, or what you would do if you were the researcher and then in third year you are able to do exactly that!

Before third year, I thought that writing a dissertation would be at least 10,000 words however I was very happy to find out that for Psychology at the University of
Bedfordshire, the word count is between 4,500 and 8,000 words. Another myth that I had heard but did not know the truth to until second year was that the dissertation was all the word for third year. However, the dissertation is one of four modules in third year and so accounts for 25% of the year which is a lot less frightening than my previous perceptions. Another thing that I did not know until I had started university was that when doing your dissertation you choose a supervisor who specialises in the topic you wish to do for your dissertation. The supervisor gives you advice and help so you are not alone conducting your research, which also makes the dissertation a lot less frightening.

I hope this has helped anyone currently applying to do Psychology to learn a little bit more about final year. Good luck to everyone who is currently getting offers from their uni choices, hope everything is going just as you hope!

See you next week!
Robyn