Going home and upcoming assessments

Today is Thursday as I am writing this and it is about half two in the afternoon. I’m currently on a train home to see my family for the weekend for the first time since the start of January (this includes my Dad who keeps asking me to mention him on this blog. Hi Dad). One of the things that my university experience has taught me the most is appreciation for my family. Not living at home with them or even in the same county makes me really appreciate the time which I spend with them when I get the chance, and that nothing beats a home cooked meal from your parents.

This week has been a busy but fun week at university. Assessments are slowly starting to creep up now once again, and this week was my first in which I took part in an assessment very different to ones I had done before. As a Psychology student, assessments are usually reports, essays, exams and occasionally presentations but this week for my Mental Health module, it was the first week in which we were assessed on our class participation which will go towards 25% of our end of unit grade. For this it is essential that you attend the tutorials which are every other week and do the essential reading so that you can discuss in class your thoughts and what you have learnt from the set reading. Class debates are my favourite kind of tutorials and I feel that I learn a lot from them. Being marked on class participation is a little out of my comfort zone as I am quite quiet, but I feel that from the first tutorial in which class participation was marked I am becoming more confident in expressing my ideas to the class and that it teaches organisation and presentation skills which will be very useful for life after university.

Another assessment slightly different to what I am used to is a group presentation which I will take part in possibly two weeks from today! I have only ever done one group presentation at university as part of an assessment and that was at the beginning of first year. This assessment is for the Applied Health Psychology module, and I’m pretty excited about it! The idea is to present a theoretical intervention but we are able to choose the topic of the intervention and how we plan to do it so it is very much free choice which always makes it much more interesting! We were assigned into groups and have to organise meeting up to plan the presentation as a group which can be quite stressful, but teaches good organisational skills, good team work skills, and of course good presentational skills. Again, being a quiet person, presentations are out of my comfort zone but this only means that I will learn more from this assignment than others who already have good presentation skills.

And of course, an ongoing assignment that I have been working on this week is my dissertation. I have still quite a way to go but I am getting there and the thing about doing your dissertation is that it is based on what you personally find interesting, so reading around the subject is more fun than subjects which you may not be as interested in.

That’s all for this week. Hope you have a wonderful weekend and I will see you next week for my next post!

Robyn