ITP and SSP

I started to write this post on my phone, which was ridiculously exciting ("Feeling too lazy to get to your laptop? There's an app for that."), but then I closed the application by accident and lost the post. I guess even the great and wonderful Apple isn't without its faults.*

Basically, the gist of it was that I tend to think of blog posts as having to be very long and detailed accounts of everything going on in my life at the time, which is just silly - look at most blogs out there, and they're as boring as a three-hour Statistics lecture:

Today I woke up and looked at the birds. They were really pretty. Here's a poem I wrote about it:

Oh birds, birds, birds,
You are so lovely,
And your plumage is so colourful
It makes you look... dovely...

Christ.

So anyway, I've started lectures now (*gaspshockhorrorgasp*). The first term of Psychology BSc at York is basically two modules: Scientific Skills for Psychologists (SSP) and An Introduction to Psychology as a Biological Science (ITP). SSP is, obviously, just two weeks' worth of Research Methods and Statistics packed into two months of lectures. Fortunately, though, the lecturer is really animated and enthusiastic, so she manages to maintain interest in the subject to the point where you suddenly realise after about an hour that you're still listening to the differences between Independent Groups and Repeated Measures.

ITP, on the other hand, is a collection of diverse and different lectures, each on a different topic and taken by a different lecturer. So, as you could probably guess, it varies quite dramatically. The first lecture we had was an introduction to the history and methodologies of Psychology (apparently psychologists carry out experiments. Who knew?), which was paradoxically engaging, while the second was Psychobiology and the Central Nervous System, but it was taken by a guy who just read the slides back to us.

Seriously. Quite possibly the most interesting field in the entire bloody subject, and I might as well have grabbed the lecture notes and left. Thoroughly disappointing. It's a good thing that the SSP lecturer doesn't use that approach, or I don't think I'd survive until Term 2.

Still, I read about the subject in the book later, and wrote up all my notes into nice pretty, colour-coded folders, which is ridiculously pleasing, so I can't really complain. And he did talk about his research into Alzheimer's and recognition of words based on age of acquisition, which was fascinating.

Ooh, but the best part of it is undoubtedly the fact that our tenth lecture is on Memory, and the lecturer is Prof. Alan Baddeley. Baddeley!! Of 'and Hitch' notoriety! He's a real person, and he's taking one of our lectures!! I'm sorry for the abuse of exclamation marks, but this is ridiculously exciting. Apparently Graham Hitch also works in this department, but he doesn't associate with Freshers. THEY'RE REAL PEOPLE!!!!!! Why was I not informed of this before? All of my Psychology teachers neglected to inform me of this important fact.

I'm also in the running to be a Course Rep for the Psychology Department on the YUSU Academic Affairs Committee. It's difficult to describe, but basically I get to yell at department heads until they pay attention to us little people down below. Not quite as exciting as discovering that psychologists are real, but still note-worthy, I feel.

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*Note: Actually, the app isn't made by Apple, so I don't think they can be held accountable for its faults.