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My name is Thomas Spengler; I’m a third year Psychology with Business student. So
it’s my final year now and I have to kind of make my mind up about the future.
As you might have heard from my accent I am originally from Germany, so I chose Kingston
for actually two reasons. One of them it’s like a really, really small university from
what I understood – it’s not that small, but it keeps up a small university feeling,
which I really appreciate. The second thing is that there is like a high percentage of
international students, which kind of helps me to get an insight about different cultures,
different – the way different people are ticking. So I can actually conduct some field
research, if you want to put it this way.
Actually, I enjoy the whole scientific approach to understanding people the most, because
from my point of view you can always make your theories about how individuals are ticking,
but if you really boil it down and you do surveys and all the statistics it’s really
appealing to me because it follows a certain logical aspect and you can actually compare
it, which kind of – yes, I’m a logical person, I have to admit. So this is the aspect
of my psychology part that I enjoy the most. When it comes to my business part on the other
side, I enjoy having like an insight about how different strategies are ticking and actually
bringing those two sides together. It is something that is quite a challenge but it really works
for me.
Well, I didn’t study psychology when I was in high school, but I have to admit I did
a lot of acting and I love acting, not only kind of pretending to be someone else, but
also thinking my way into like another character’s perspective. Also I was quite the person of
trust for most of my colleagues and friends and when I heard about psychology and also
looked about the different aspects of psychology, I could basically run through it and say tick,
tick. tick; I like to talk to people, I’m interested into going scientific, I like statistics
– it’s one of the areas of math which I was actually good at and so I wasn’t kind
of afraid of doing a lot of statistical analysis. Yeah, so I would say lots of transferable
skills I already had, but I didn’t have psychology as a subject.
Well, first of all of course you have psychology labs which offer a wide range of applications,
so it’s not only a simple room where you kind of observe or participate, we have facilities
in which we can have actually installed CCTV cameras so we can observe the people, but
also avoid that they see how we observe them to kind of avoid a bit of biasing. We also
have small computer labs and also recently I think we acquired eye-tracking software,
so we can actually kind of measure cognitive procedures such as how often people are looking
and where. And we also have a bit of bio-medical equipment so we have, for example, measurements
for experiments with stimulants, which is – yeah, which I haven’t had fun to work
with, but I know they are available and some of the students are actually using them.
The whole style of assessment and learning is a bit different from module to module,
whether it’s a business or a psychology one, but in general it’s assessed of two
or three big assessment bits; so you usually have a mixture of an exam at the end of the
year and some sort of essay, report, something on the other side. However, sometimes it could
happen that you do something like on a weekly basis test, especially in the first year when
it comes to statistical methods where you can like get yourself tested and checked on
a weekly basis and it’s an easy way to get credit points, because it’s not a big amount
you have to learn, so it has all its pros and cons; but it’s definitely more like
wide-ranged, wide planned activities where we have to learn to manage our own time.
In terms of lectures and seminars it’s about – I have usually like four lectures, each
is about one hour, and then you have for each module also a two hour seminar, or the other
way round – two hour lecture, one hour seminar. On top of that you also have the opportunity
to get in touch with your lecturers and stuff on their open hours, so you can get in touch
with them, go in the office or make an appointment and ask individual questions that you weren’t
– that you didn’t have while you were in the seminar. So you can get more support,
you can get more help, more feedback, if you want to. Of course if you overdo it at some
point every lecturer has his limit, but definitely there is support available if you need it.
Since the lecturers are really kind of widespread and the rest is managing your own time I do
work also on a wide range of different jobs. For me personally, it’s not so much about
the cash because I get sufficient support, but for me it’s just work experience, so
just transferrable skills if it comes from presentation, if it comes from kind of working
in a group or something like this. It’s all transferrable skills that help me out
and I went to some interviews for like a job search after my graduation, and one of the
first questions I always encounter ‘Do you have work experience of some kind? What sort
of experience do you have already?’ And so I think it is quite a good bit to have
some work experience, as long as it’s not the majority of your effort going into working.
I would like to do a masters in terms of I want to study further in order to specialise
in the field I’m interested in, which is occupational psychology or applied psychology
in the business world. But on the other hand I’m also looking for a work opportunity,
for example, in HR or in marketing, just to get a feeling and get some more relevant work
experience that I could then later on include in a masters, so I don’t only have the theory
but also know how to apply it and in which context.