What psychology research can you get involved in as a student? video transcript

Prof Frances Maratos, Professor of Psychology and Affective Science: Within the School of Psychology and the research that we focus on, it's really wide-ranging. We have staff that research maths anxiety, we have staff that research nature connections, the paranormal, which is quite an interesting area. Of course, we have staff that have worked in the area of Covid-19. We also have staff that work in hospital situations, in collaborations with hospitals.
One of the main things about having such a wide area of research is it informs what we teach and what's in our curriculum.
 
Dr Ed Stupple, Associate Professor in Psychology: Having research-active academics is really essential to having a cutting edge curriculum. Students are learning about the latest psychological research, and they need to learn that from people who are at the cutting edge and are producing that research.
 
Dr Ian Baker, Programme Leader BSc (Hons) Psychology: Students often get involved in our research, we have a number of different opportunities throughout an undergraduate degree where you can get involved with research. We're always looking for research assistants to help out with our research.
 
Dr Stuart Pugh, Lecturer in Psychology: Taking part in research will actually benefit students in a number of ways. First and foremost, it will help them with their studies, because rather than just sitting in a lecture theatre and learning about these topics, they're actually participating in the research that is exploring those topics. So it helps develop a deeper level of knowledge.
 
One of the reasons that students do stay at the University of Derby and tend to stick with us all the way through undergraduate through to post-graduate, through to doctoral studies, is the opportunity to be part of an active research community.
 
The staff members, the lecturing team are all incredibly accessible and very open, they're really focussed on making sure that the experience for the students is the best possible.
 
Rhys Furlong, Psychology PhD student: I've found the staff that I've worked with to be incredibly supportive, incredibly encouraging as well. The experience of doing something that you find more interesting than anything and being allowed the opportunity to, sort of, take that where you want it
is the main thing that I enjoy most about research at Derby.
 
Ria Patel, BSc (Hons) Psychology student: I've done research such as face perception, so looking at facial perceptions and how people recognise faces depending on their own race. I worked in a mental health support home as a health care assistant, and I met a lot of people with different needs and it gave me a lot of insight into their past experiences, what they struggle with, at present too, which was quite insightful.
 
Dr Dean Fido, Programme Leader MSc Forensic Psychology: Over the last year, I have been heavily involved in the Aftermath: Surviving Psychopathy charity. Now this is a charity aimed at helping victims or individuals identified as psychopaths, within the general community. It helps victims of psychopathy to re-build their lives and find those elements of closure. This allows our students to see, first-hand, the great impactful research which we're doing across Europe. Moreover, it can potentially provide a placement opportunity for some of our year 2 students who are heavily interested in psychopathy, specifically.
 
Prof Frances Maratos: Taking part in research really helps our students develop critical thinking skills. They might be involved in writing an ethics application, or they might be involved in responding to feedback, or they might be involved in coordinating a project, so that's quite a lot of responsibility individuals gain.
 
Dr Ian Baker: A lot of students, when they get to their final year project, they'll do a large scale piece of research that's driven by them, and supervised by a member of staff. We've had a number of examples over the years, where students have actually had their work published.
 
The importance of publishing research, particularly if you get an opportunity to as an undergraduate student, is that, if you're interested in becoming a psychologist, it already gives you that springboard for being a published researcher. But even if you want to go into a different career path being able to evidence that you've done high quality research that's peer-reviewed and published in the international journal, working alongside established academics, can give you a really important talking point for your CV for pretty much any career that you might be interested in going into.

What psychology research can you get involved in as a student? video

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