This University Week

Hello All! Hope you're doing well!

This week I planned to do a video blog, but I filmed it on my phone and I have just got the footage ready to upload only to realise I have filmed it upside down! So I will do a written post today and next week upload a video blog the right way round! What I tried to do in my video blog was summarise each day between Monday and Friday so you can get a good idea of what a general week at uni is like, so for this week I will do it in written format :)

My uni week started 9AM on Monday morning for a Cognitive Neuropsychology lecture, which looked at how brain injuries and impairments affect language perception and ability which was really interesting, even for a 9AM start! I had an hours break before my next lecture and so I went into town with my friend before my 11AM lecture on Mental health which looked at treatments for depression. Following this I had another hour break before my tutorial in which I went to the silent library to do some work and to re-read over the papers I was going to have to discuss for the following tutorial. At 1PM I had my Mental Health tutorial in which we discussed two papers on depression, both looking at different theories and we were graded on our discussion although we do not find out our grades until the end of the assessment. We are currently halfway through this assessment with 2 more tutorials like this to go which will make up for 25% of our overall grade for the Mental Health module. Then it was time for a little more work in the library before going home for the day.

My uni day started at 10AM with an Applied Health Psychology lecture looking at stress and its health implications which is something I always find really interesting. Then I had a group meeting with the group I am working on a presentation with for Applied Health. We discussed the work we were to do for the next meeting and it was very productive. I had a tutorial at 3PM which gave me another 3 hours spare so again I went to the silent area to do some studying and to reread the paper I was going to need for my Cognitive Neuropsychology tutorial at 3. In the tutorial we looked at 'Aphasia' which is a disorder that people with brain injuries often have in which they find it difficult to read, write or speak. After this my day was finished and so I went home and got a little more work done.

Wednesday's are my days off at uni this semester -  that means I have no tutorial, no lectures and so it may seem like no real reason to go into uni. But as a third year there is always a reason to go into uni and this week I went into uni on Wednesday to do some more work for my upcoming assessment for a few hours.

My uni day on Thursday started at 10AM as I met up with my group again for the Applied Health presentation to discuss what we had found and try to piece it together a bit. Following this we had an Applied Health tutorial in which we watched the other groups do their presentations and asked questions on their intervention. After this at 12PM I met with two of my friends for lunch for an hour. After this I went to the research cubicles to recruit participants and it went better than expected with the majority of people that I asked to take part were more than happy to! So I am finally at the stage where I have almost finished getting my participants! At around 5PM when they start closing the research cubicle, I went to meet my friends in the it suite for about an hour and a half for a chat and to do some work at the same time. Then at 6.30 I went home for a well deserved break.

At 9AM I had my last research dissertation lecture. The very last one! Although it will be nice not to have to get up at 9AM on Fridays any more, it is a very daunting feeling to realise the dissertation lectures are finishing because the time is running out! Following this I went to, yes you guessed it, the silent area to do some more work on my assignment. At midday I met with my friend to go to a buffet for our friend's birthday. After this at 2PM there was a careers talk on Clinical Psychology which is the area I eventually want to go into and so it was definitely something I needed to attend. A Clinical Psychologist who had graduated from the uni had come in to talk about what kind of work experience we would need, how to go about applying for a doctorate in clinical psychology, what type of grades we would need and everything we would need to know really! It was very helpful and I would strongly recommend going to careers talks that are available to you, even if you are only just starting uni. After this I went back to do some more work in the silent area and at around 5PM I went home.

I hope this has been helpful and has shown you what a week at uni is like! As you can see it is not all lectures and tutorials, a lot of it is preparing for the lectures and tutorials, doing research for assignments and other things. No two days at uni are the same!

See you next week, when I will hopefully have figured out how to do a video blog the right way up!
Robyn

Ps. 47 days until dissertation deadline day! 

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

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

Weekend at the library and a productive week

Hello all! I hope you're all having a great weekend so far!

As I'm writing this it is about 1PM on a Sunday afternoon and I'm currently at the university library ready to do some work. Yes, in university at a weekend. The fact that the university has a 24 hour library open 7 days a week is extremely helpful as it means I know I always have somewhere to study in silence whenever I need it. Also at the weekends it is usually quite empty in all of the learning resource areas so I always know I will be able to access the books that I want with ease or get to a computer in any part of the learning resource area that I want.

This week has been a good, productive week. I've finally got my dissertation questionnaire online and am currently getting participants for my study which is really exciting - there is no bigger feeling of relief than making progress on your dissertation (apart from perhaps finishing your dissertation, but we've still a long way to go until then!) I have also been researching the assessments for this semester and doing reading which will hopefully help me to write them.

I have also had some grades back this week meaning I have now got all my results for semester 1 and have definitely passed semester 1 units! However it does mean that I have spent an hour or two in total this week playing on the award predictor to figure out combinations of grades that I need to get to reach my targeted degree classification. I am still trying to work out whether the award predictor is a blessing or a curse, I cannot spend longer than a day without going on it (a lot like flappy bird).

Next week I am going home for the weekend to visit my family and to celebrate my sister's 18th birthday, I am really excited about it because it's the first time I'll have been home since the start of January so almost 2 months without seeing my family. I can't wait to see my family and friends from home!

Thank you for reading, see you next week for my next post!
Robyn

Tutorials and not so spare time

Hello all! Hope you are having a great weekend!

This week I have started my tutorials for the second semester and am now also two weeks into the lectures. It has been a fairly busy week and the time has just gone so fast. Now that the January deadlines are just a distant nightmare, I have made some time to catch up with friends this week and even see my sister which was lovely.

Whilst I have no looming deadlines for the next month, it is very easy to forget about them and to think that I have lots of spare time at the minute. I definitely do not have spare time. From the previous two years at university I have come to notice that the work load is ever so much harder in the second semester and with a dissertation to produce this semester I know that this will be the case this year. The next couple of weeks will be concentrating on my dissertation and trying to get as much of it as I can done before other deadline dates. I am attending a workshop tomorrow to learn how to use the software that I need to write my questionnaire which is very exciting and also means I can start data collection tomorrow! Very exciting.

I have noticed that this semester there is more work expected of you to prepare for tutorials than the last semester. Whilst rarely we were set work to do to prepare us for the tutorials, this semester we are set reading that must be completed otherwise we will be asked to leave the tutorial. Although this sounds quite daunting, it is also reassuring because you have no choice but to do extra reading and ultimately it will only improve your grades.

This week I have also found myself counting down to dissertation hand in date. As of today, there are 74 days until Thursday 1st May 2014, my dissertation deadline day and also the deadline day of my health assessment. After this day, I have only 2 exams until the end of the modules and the end of my undergraduate degree, I can't tell you how scary it sounds to me!
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See you next week, where no doubt I will be panicking again how little time I have left at university,
Robyn

First week of the second semester.

Hello again :)

This week at university has been my first week of new modules, and it is all very exciting. Because this week has been about starting up new modules, I have had no tutorials. Also this is the first time in about two months that I have been free from deadlines being very close, so it constantly feels like there is something missing and that I have been forgetting about something really important that needs handing in. 

I do not have any deadlines coming up now until the 20th of March which seems like a long way from now, but I know that each year at university seems to pass faster than the others and so deadline season will soon be round again.

I've spent this past week thinking of ways in which I can improve from the previous semester and how I plan to arrange my time to avoid having lots of work to do in a short space of time. Whilst I have no deadlines very close, I am trying to keep on top of the reading which I have been set and to try to read as much as I can around the topics now so that I am not panicking when it comes to revision. I am also planning on trying to do as much work on my dissertation as possible over the following weeks so that there is less to do when other deadlines start to crop up.

This week has been very much planning time management for my final unit choices, it is terrifying how close it is until the end of university now! It has also just been about keeping up with essential reading and trying to remember that it is okay, there is nothing I have forgotten to hand in. 

Next week will be much more eventful as I start my tutorials and the lectures will follow on from the introductions, and also I start my new plan to try even harder for my final units.

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

Robyn

Halfway through final year!

Hi guys

Finally January is over and all the deadlines and exams are done! (For a little while). Tomorrow is the start of my new modules which means one thing - halfway through the final year! This is both a terrifying and exciting prospect. I'm another step closer to graduating, and another step closer to stepping out into the world and trying to make a career.

Today I thought I would talk a little bit about the new modules I am taking for this semester which will also be my last semester if I graduate in July. The great thing about your final year is that you get to choose some of your modules so they're more tailored to the things you are interested in. Because I am on the C800 Psychology course which is just the basic Psychology degree I was able to choose two for the first semester and two for this one. For this semester I am still carrying on the compulsory Research Dissertation module but here are the three new ones and what they will be about.

Applied Health Psychology
This is a unit I've chosen because in second year we did health psychology as a compulsory unit and I loved it. I am very excited to have the chance to learn about health psychology more in depth. Here are the main areas of this module.

• Health promotion, behaviour and disease prevention
• Health communication and intervention
• Stress, illness and the healthcare system
• The role of individual differences and social factors in health and illness

Psychology of Mental Health
This is the other unit I have chosen and I'm so excited to learn about this! At A-level this was my favorite topic and I cannot wait to learn about it in more detail. This will be looking at areas of mental health such as schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, personality disorders and more! This is my favourite aspect of psychology and the module I am most excited to learn about.

Cognitive Neuropsychology
This is a compulsory unit, but I am very excited to learn about it and look forward to the first lecture! It will look at  the history of it, the methods and assumption and research an application into the real world. I've not learnt anything before about neuropsychology but I'm very excited to start learning about it tomorrow!

Thanks for reading, see you next week for my next post!
Robyn