The Standard Deviants

Hey all, This is Justin here and I will be reflecting on my internship so far. Compared to my peers, my experience thus far has been quite the atypical one, filled with much uncertainty and stress. So please keep your hands, arms and legs inside the carriage at all times and enjoy the ride. I discovered the hard way (over the past 4 weeks) that supervisors are not always stellar at handling their email inboxes. Week 1 swings by and everyone seems to have sorted out their projects with their supervisors. Meanwhile I have yet to have received a response from my supervisors about lab meeting times, details of my project, relevant readings and what I can do in the lab. At that time I figured that maybe this is normal, since it is still the start of the semester. Week 2, 3 then 4 swings by. Everyone else it seems, are already well established in their projects, somewhere through data collection and already analysing results. Meanwhile, I was as clueless about my project in wee

Hello everyone! This is Elizabeth here to talk about the first 4 weeks of my internship. Despite having minimal knowledge on the research process or what this course would encompass, I was still super excited going into this course.  I’m working with the wonderful Lenny and Lydia and we’re focusing on the effects of imagined intergroup contact on prejudice towards overweight and obese individuals. I’m in the process of piecing together the method and choosing scales and measurements. It's taking a lot longer than I expected. I’ve spent hours and hours on readings and researching related studies but this week, Kate warned us about “The Reading Trap” which completely opened my eyes. I Googled my symptoms I’ve spent an enormous chunk of my time reading article upon article because I’m that type of person that wants to know everything before I have put it down in ink. It also doesn’t help that I enjoy reading the literature too. Leading up to the research propo

Welcome to 'The Standard Deviants' blog! Who are these ' Deviants ' you ask? We are merely 5 psyche students trying to get by, Alex, Elizabeth, Justin, Luana and Mikayla. Over the next 12 weeks, we will be regularly updating this space to share and reflect on our experiences, successes and struggles as we go about our research internship. We hope that this space will add to the many research experiences and provide an open, supportive and reflective space on what psychology research involves. We invite you, aspiring psychology students or simply interested readers, to join us during our 12 weeks to read along and revel in our achievements and progress, and learn from any troubles and setbacks we encounter along the way. Watch this space to see how we deviate from the rest.