This post is about how I ended up studying Psychology at the undergraduate level.

The year was 2003, in the month of June. I had just received my Cambridge GCE Advanced Level (A-Level) certificate from Taylor’s College in Malaysia*. I remember well the setting of the great hall in which we collected our results slips, the friends who were around, and the mixture of relief and annoyance I felt upon reviewing my results. Relief because they were not bad, and annoyance because I had had the most interest in Biology but ended up getting a B for it. 

(This would be the lesson that I would continue to learn later on in my academic life and is an important point to take note of – that interest does not equate to performance, and vice versa.) 

So the A-Level programme that I had chosen was what they called a “Pre-Medicine” stream, because students typically required this combination of subjects (Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics) in order to apply to medical school and the like, as opposed to a “Pre-Engineering” stream which focused on the “hard” sciences such as Advanced Mathematics and Physics.

I titled this post “At Crossroads” because that was exactly how I had felt back then, with my results slip in hand, wondering what I ought to be doing next. Of course I had had conversations with my friends and family about the future, and it had always been my intention to go abroad and specifically to the UK, thanks to all the Enid Blyton and Mallory Towers I had read growing up**. Looking back, I feel an immense sense of gratitude for the privileged position I was in – to have had supportive parents who had both the intellectual and financial capabilities to guide me in achieving my best. Through discussions with my dad, I had a general idea of wanting to work with animals (which he firmly discouraged – “why help animals when you can be helping humans?” LOL) and humans, and of not wanting to work in the corporate world or with anything to do with numbers. We ended up thinking that perhaps Psychology might be useful to study as a degree, since it deals with human behaviours and pretty much everything involves decoding what makes humans tick.

Going back to the day when I received my A-Level results, I remember walking across the road from the college to a well-known centre (the name of which eludes me now) that guides students through the application process to UK universities. I had to apply through the centralised system that all UK undergraduate hopefuls had to go through, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS). I remember holding a very short and efficient conversation with the admissions counsellor:

“Hi, I just got my A-Level results from Taylor’s and am looking for a university to apply to in the UK.”

“Okay, what are your results? AAB? Okay not bad, you can apply to a number of universities. Any courses in mind?”

“I’m not sure, maybe Psychology, at a not bad university. And I would like a proper campus, not one of those crowded city campuses.”

“Okay, I think University of York is good. In the Top 10 for Psychology in the UK.”

So I went away, filled out some paperwork, and voilà! I was on my way to studying Psychology in the UK. It might be worth noting that Clinical Neuropsychology did not exist on my radar at that point in time.

In my next post I talk about my days in York in the form of modules I took, projects I did, and people I worked with, as well as my next steps post-York***.