Undergraduate Research Conference

Hello all! Hope you're doing well and the exams and final assessments are going well too!

It has now been over a full week since my final exam and therefore finishing all the work I need to do for my undergraduate degree in Psychology. In this last week I have tried to make the most of my remaining time in Luton; spending quality time with friends I am going to miss very much, volunteering and I also went down to visit London for the day which was very fun!

On Friday, it was the day of the Undergraduate Research Conference for my Psychology year group. The Undergraduate Research Conference is a conference organised by our lecturers in which we were able to present posters of our dissertation work, a selected few were able to present oral presentations of their dissertation work and guests from outside of the university were able to come and look at the work we had done.

It was an incredible feeling to have my dissertation presented in a poster form and have people read it and talk to me about and take an interest in it; all those months of late nights and early morning trying to make my dissertation the best it could be was suddenly all worth it, and it was really fun! You could tell when going to look at other people's posters too that they felt exactly the same and were so proud to show off the hard work they had done. It was a brilliant opportunity to have a look at other people's work and learn a little about different aspects of Psychology that I had not studied much on and to hear what people had to say about their own dissertations and the findings they had found.

Six people were also given the opportunity to give an oral presentation of their dissertation research to all those who attended the conference, including three of my friends (well done Mo, Diksha and Shona, your presentations were great!) It was a brilliant opportunity to hear more in detail about the research people from my year had done on their dissertations, and to hear the great lengths they had gone to conduct their research; there was one person who had conducted research using school children meaning that the ethics were very difficult and had taken many months to get the ethics right.

It was a brilliant and fun day, a lovely way to celebrate the hard work of the three years together and to spend time with the friends we had made over the three years. It was also slightly emotional. It was last day that I would be at university with my friends and saying goodbye to them adding "I'll see you at graduation" rather than "I'll see you after the weekend" made me realise that university life is now over aside from graduation, and that the next time I will see most of my university friends will be at graduation!

All in all, it has been a great week and I am very lucky to have made such good friends at university that saying goodbye to them is such a difficult thing. But now I have graduation to look forward to with them and lots of visits to see them!

Hope you're all having a great week and any work that you are still doing is going well!

See you next week!
Robyn