Welcome Week 2018

Monday 

First morning of welcome week means a bright and early start for students and staff. The campus was buzzing with activity this morning. It is exciting and daunting all at the same time. Staff are looking forward to meeting the new students, remembering names, recalling faces and helping everyone settle into the campus and the course. 

First port of call is registration.

The first session was a welcome to psychology and applied psychology. This session had undergraduate and postgraduate students meeting the psychology team for the first time. It was great to see so many past students coming back to start their postgraduate studies, and new students starting their first year as an undergraduates, all meeting and getting to know each other.

A short coffee break, then to the final session of the day, an icebreaker session where the psychology team had to do a short presentation about the students on their table. Highlights included a welcome in Chinese, expertise in cooking roast dinners, pianists, poets and spiritualists along with a lot of humour! 

The day ended with a drink in Calva Bar, with students and psychology team members, socialising and having a pint or a cuppa.

Tuesday

Tuesday was a busy day of team building and more icebreaker activities; getting to know your fellow students, the campus and the psychology team. The morning took a creative theme with a game of consequences.

 Then a photo scavenger hunt around campus, with some great images, prompting some debate over the winners.

Lunch was followed by more activities, this time a quiz and a biscuit decorating competition. The biscuit decorating sparked a major debate from the psychology lecturing team over who was the winner. After much discussion the winner was a very impressive brain diagram with correctly named key!

Wednesday

Volunteering was the topic for the first session on Wednesday morning. There is no work placement on the psychology courses but the team strongly encourage and advise students to start volunteering right from year one. There are many benefits from volunteering, from gaining valuable work experience but also volunteering gives you an opportunity to find out if the type of work is really the career for you. It was really interesting to hear the volunteering experiences of the psychology lecturing team and which organisations they are currently volunteering with. Information was provided to students, giving details of organisations with current volunteering vacancies.

   

The getting to know Blackboard sessions were on Wednesday, an essential part of starting at UoC is Blackboard and being familiar with the system.  Everything is on Blackboard: all the information from your modules, Turnitin submission points and timetables to name just a few.  Everyone who came along to the sessions can now log onto Blackboard and access timetables. Hurray!

The afternoons psychology session was a taster lecture looking at the personality disorder psychopathy.  Many of the people in the room could identify with some of the traits of psychopathy, however, it was explained that most people have elements of psychopathy without having the disorder. Also, if you're worried about having psychopathy, it's unlikely you have it, as people with psychopathy tend not worry about anything!

Thursday

Students had an opportunity to try out the Neurosky Mindwave software and headset, which reads your brainwaves and reports how much attention you are paying to a task. It also measures meditation or stress levels. This equipment can be used by students when conducting research throughout their studies.

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