I thought it might be helpful to describe at length how my undergraduate days were like studying Psychology.
You will recall from my previous post that I had made a somewhat coin-toss decision* to study Psychology in the University of York in northern England. It was a BSc (Hons) degree that was to be completed in 3 years. At the time I had no concept of a 4th year in Psychology known as the Honours year that is offered in Australian and Singaporean higher learning institutions. I also had zero idea of the course content, who were in the faculty, and what to expect – basically not the best way to begin studying for a degree. I would urge would-be Psychology students to look up the course modules at the very minimum, maybe even find out who’s who on the teaching staff, and what are some ongoing research projects that you might be able to hop on.
So the UK undergraduate academic year consists of three terms beginning in September/October and ending in June/July. I arrived in York in October 2003. The first months were a blur, and it wasn’t till winter of 2004 (not a typo) that I realised I was not taking this seriously enough**. A friend had once described me as “work hard, play harder”, but in my first year in York I lost this fine balance and was really only concentrating on the latter.
Anyway see below for the modules I had back then***. Each had a weightage of 20 credits across the first 2 years, while in the final year the four teaching modules were weighted at 10 credits each, the Literature Survey (which was essentially a short written project) at 20 credits, and the Research Project (i.e. dissertation) at 60 hefty credits.
In the first year (2003/4) as one would expect, the course content centred around introductory stuff to build a foundation in core subjects in Psychology including statistics and research design. I scored in the 60s range (i.e. horrifically) across all modules. My best subject was Experimental Design & Statistics at 68.
In my second year (2004/5), I decided to pull up my socks and got a couple of distinctions (the UK does not have high distinctions like in Australia) in Cognition and Neuropsychology. In hindsight it all made sense, but honestly at that point in time I hated all the models of cognition I had to learn and did not find the subject matter of neuropsychology at all interesting. I loved Animal Learning & Cognition, but sadly scored the lowest out of all modules across the 3 years. I remember feeling gutted and seeking out my lecturer for a debrief – turned out that I had misunderstood one of the essay questions and lost a lot of marks for that. Oh wells. Just another reminder that interest does not always equate to good performance, although it certainly does help one get through the academic term more easily!
In the summer of 2005 (i.e. at the end of my second year), I somehow managed to land a month-long internship with the Behavioural Neuroscience lab, along with a bursary of £720. I was ecstatic and over the moon, because the lab was run by the lecturers who taught Animal Learning & Cognition (i.e. my favourite module) and at the time I was still trying to find a way to marry my interests in psychology and animals (since it was looking less and less likely that I would end up as a veterinarian!).
I remember that summer well. I didn’t know it then, but it would lead me directly to right where I needed to be.
More on that in Part 2.
*The thought process was pretty much “let’s study something to do with humans in a British university with a proper campus”. The feature image is a photo I took of one of the colleges (can’t quite recall which one now) from across the lake on the main campus.
**We had only 17 hours of lectures a week at one point, and I remember using that as a compelling reason for people to choose me as a student rep for the international students society as I would have heaps of time to champion for their rights. Needless to say, that didn’t fly.
***This is a screenshot from an electronic version of my actual transcript, hence the blotty appearance.