Welcome to The Standard Deviants

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.

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Week 4: The Starting Line

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...

MID SEMESTER BREAK: The Mysterious World of Programming

Hi all! This is Mikayla here, and I’m going to be sharing my experiences with programming/python so far! Walking into the computer lab on the first week I had absolutely no idea what to expect. With zero coding experience up my sleeve, I was determined to give it a go. I remember that feeling of relief as everyone in the class introduced themselves pointing out their lack of experience and thinking we were all on a similar page. That was until pretty quickly in the lesson I started feeling very lost and when I looked around the room it seemed like everyone was following along quite easily. I remember that overwhelming wave of stress and uncertainty as I left the lab, wondering what exactly I had gotten myself into this semester. The next couple of classes after that consisted of following lesson plans (which were structured incredibly well!) and trying to find my feet in this new and mysterious world of coding. There was certainly a lot of staring blankly a...

Week 7: The Woes and Wonders of Working with Children

Hi everyone, Alex here, I thought I’d share my experience of the many woes and wonders of working with children. One of the main reasons I came from the U.K. to Sydney this year, aside from the vastly more pleasant weather, was it gave me the opportunity to work in a developmental psychology laboratory. During my second year of my undergraduate degree back in Cardiff I took an introduction to developmental psychology course, and it was probably the course I enjoyed most throughout the year. Learning about how children develop gave me an entirely new appreciation for just how amazing it is that they gather so much knowledge and so many skills in such a short space of time. Thus, I decided that I wanted to spend my placement year (as part of degree I had the opportunity to spend a year working in an institution related to psychology) working in a developmental psychology laboratory. Thankfully, I secured a placement here at UNSW working in the Early Learning Lab, under Jenny’s ...

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