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I did a psychology degree at the University of Strathclyde as a mature student between September 2002 and June 2006. I would recommend it as a good thing to do for your mind, but as a terrible thing for your bank balance. Anyway, here are some of the highlights of the whole undergraduate experience.
I have included some of my coursework here. You are welcome to read them and use any references you find to be useful, but if you attempt to plagiarise them you will get caught. They are freely available on the internet, so the computer that searches for similarities between essays and web documents will have you fair and square (yes, they've all got one now). Think about getting done for speeding: if a policeman stops you, you can maybe talk your way out of it; if a machine catches you, you get done and no questions asked. You can explain inadvertently failing to reference something to your tutor or lecturer, but you cannot reason with the machine. Do not plagiarise: you will get caught.
| first year | second year | third year | fourth year |
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First year.
The first year basic psychology class is run by Dr. Jim Baxter. On no account play poker with this man. You can go for a drink with him, but only if you know exactly what you are doing, and are of legal age and a strong constitution. The basic class is one of the largest single classes in the whole University, approximately 650 students when I was doing it, so it is held between two lecture theatres using a video link system. Highly recommended, and extremely entertaining, even if you do not want to continue to study psychology as a main subject.
| there is no assessed coursework in first year |
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Second Year.
Entry into second year is competitive. 650 in first year; 120 in second year. You get the picture. You take 4 half classes (that is, they run for one semester) for which you submit two pieces of classwork and take an exam at the end of the semester. Here are the classes I took.
Brain and Behaviour.
This class starts from the brain end of things and works back towards behaviour (if you want to characterise this as top-down or bottom-up or whatever, be aware that you will start a schism within your peers. But then, if you study psychology you're going to do that anyway). Well worth the effort, pay particular attention to the whole bit about J.J. Gibson. It is important, and one of the major fault lines around which psychology revolves at the moment
Perception and Cognition.
Perception and Cognition approaches things from the other end, from the philosophical nature of consciousness and the nature of reality, perception and what have you, and works back towards the brain from there. You might get a different perspective of the whole Gibson nativist / empiricist, direct perception / symbolic representation thing. No, I don't have a position to take on this one, so don't ask.
Quantitative Methods.
Scary one, this. Statistics. You need to do this otherwise none of the rest of your course makes sense. One of the things you will notice in this class is that as coursework time approaches, all your classmates freak out and can't remember what they're supposed to be doing. When this happens, leave the room and go work on your own with the book. You will find out about the mechanisms underlying this mass freak-out behaviour in your other second year class, Social Influence.
Social Influence.
This is a good one, pay attention to what goes on even if, as happened with us, the class takes place right after lunch and you're half asleep. This class introduces you to the mechanisms of social interactions. Again, a bit philosophical sometimes, but worth the effort. Even if your interest is in neuropsychology or reflex actions, you still need to know how the social interactions with experimental participants etc. work.
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Third Year.
In third year you can take up to seven classes in psychology, leaving you one to take elsewhere. I was considering a joint honours in politics at the beginning of the year, but changed my mind at Christmas, between first and second semesters. As a result I did 5 half classes in psychology. I did another 3 in politics, but least said, soonest mended, that's my motto.
If you want to join the British Psychological Society (BPS) as a graduate member, you need to make sure that your choice of classes over third and fourth year satisfies their Graduate Basis for Recruitment (GBR). You need to join the BPS if you want to have any sort of career in psychology or its allied professions. The criteria for GBR change from time to time (in fact they changed between me picking my options in third year and starting fourth year - that was a bit of a shocker, but never mind, eh?) Here are my psychology classes (and only one piece of coursework per class this time).
Biological Aspects of Behaviour
Biological Aspects is the first real hardcore neuropsychology class you are offered. I really enjoyed this one, and you get to colour in pictures of brains with coloured pencils. No, really, you do. It helps if you know a bit of chemistry and a bit of anatomy, but it's not compulsory. Dr. Marc Obonsawin gives some of the best lectures you will ever have, and he uses two computers and an overhead projector all together fairly flawlessly. No coursework, continuous assessment by class tests every few weeks. You get to learn how the brain works, and how a really good lecture is given to boot, and no essay deadlines. Bonus.
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Individual Differences
Most of what you've done up to now is about finding similarities between people. Individual Differences is about the differences between them, so the methodologies you will be exposed to are a bit different. Psychometric testing, long discussions on the nature of intelligence, stuff about psychology's shameful past, and eugenics and all that kind of stuff. Interesting and distinctly different from most other classes you've done.
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Research Methods in Psychology
The Research Methods class is a mixture of quantitative methods, qualitative methods, and issues and problems with experimental design. There is a bit of philosophy involved in the whole epistemology and ontology area, especially with the qualitative methods aspect. It sounds a bit scary, but you need to know this stuff if you're going to pass your fourth year classes. There is a bit of a step up from Quantitative Methods in second year. We did a bit of discourse analysis as coursework.
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Social Identity and Social Cognition
SISC develops on the themes covered in Social Influence in second year, and involves a lot of theories with things written in bubbles connected by arrows. It also involves a bit of qualitative methodology, so you need to concentrate on the stuff in Research Methods, and it also helps if you stayed awake during all the boring philosophical bits earlier in your university career. Unfortunately, the lectures for this class were scheduled right after lunch, and I occasionally had a wee snooze when I should have been listening.
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Thinking and Language
Thinking and Language is all about the way we represent things symbolically, and the protocols our brains observe, as well as the tricks they do and the mistakes they make in the process. Taught by Tony Anderson for the most part, it deals with aspects of logic like syllogisms etc. Bear in mind that there is the big divide in psychology between the Gibsonian direct perception school and the more classical symbolic representation school, and you get an idea of what the issues in this class are.
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Fourth Year
In fourth year I did seven classes, a special topics essay, and a dissertation. All of your classes are assessed by examination only, because all your work may have to be assessed by an external examiner, so they don't want to give you back marks for coursework before they have been assessed externally. As a result I have no coursework for you, but my special topics essay and dissertation are available.
Special Topics Essay
The title of this essay is 'The psychological determinants of aberrant driving behaviour'. My supervisor was Dr. Jim Baxter who does the basic class in first year, but when he was at Manchester University he was part of a team that produced the Manchester Driver Behaviour Questionnaire. This is a fairly robust tool for measuring self-reported attitudes and beliefs about driving. It is therefore given quite a central role in this essay.
Dissertation
My dissertation was a qualitative piece on the decline in voting in recent years. As I mentioned earlier I studied politics for three years and came across some explanations and theories of political behaviour that appeared to be counter-intuitive, and I was interested in how the lay voter perceived these things. I did an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis on interviews with eight non-voters from the 2005 General Election, and as it turns out they are not apathetic, disengaged or even anarchists, they just don't like what they see and hear from politicians.
I plan to write some more stuff about some of the issues that were thrown up by these interviews, but it's just at the planning stages just now. Watch this space.
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