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.
