When I started my first-year at Royal Holloway as a Psychology student, I did not expect that, six months later, I would be confined to my bedroom as a pandemic roared outside. My interactions with fellow peers became digitised, my lectures buffered, and my daily commute into Egham was paused; it was tough. For instance, …

I completed a research assistant placement as part of the PS3000P: Psychology Work Placement module with Dr Thora Bjornsdottir in the summer between the second and third years of my psychology degree. This primarily involved assisting with studies on preferences for sexual dimorphism in faces (how traditionally masculine or feminine a face is).   First, …

Over the summer of 2021, I completed a 3-month placement at iCope, an Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) service for Camden and Islington NHS Trust. My role as an honorary assistant psychological practitioner (HAPP) was varied; I was responsible for allocating patients to therapists and psychological wellbeing practitioners (PWPs), as well as identifying and …

When entering the second year of my Psychology degree, I had little knowledge of careers that I wanted to pursue, or specific sectors that I was passionate about. For this reason, I set myself a goal: by the end of the academic year, I will have further developed my employability skills and be confident in …

Reflecting on My PS2090 Journey Reflecting on the past four PS2090 (‘Employability for Psychology’) workshops, I am amazed at my progress. I started by feeling very undecided, confused, and a little bit anxious, hence my enthusiasm to register for the course! But, after the first workshop, I already started to see a shift. I was …

During my second year of my psychology degree, I completed a placement as a research assistant with Dr. Anat Bardi. My main tasks were to assist in data collection and to contribute to lab meetings. The first study I collected data for was a paradigm investigating whether values can influence what we hear, specifically, whether …

One of the most attractive things to me about the Royal Holloway MSc Clinical Psychology course was that I would have the opportunity to complete a placement alongside my studies, gaining experience whilst learning theory alongside. In the summer before starting the course, I applied to several work experience opportunities, finding myself most interested in …

  Jessica Di Monaco and Victoria Newell are two former Psychology undergraduates who worked with Dr Eilidh Cage as research assistants. Here, they tell us about what they learned from this experience. You can read about their published research with Eilidh here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-017-3342-7 In January 2016 we began working with Dr Eilidh Cage as research assistants. …