Life Of A Psychology Student

First things first

No, we do not know what you are thinking. We certainly do not read minds
if we did, we would’ve known what our crush thinks about us.
Apparently, we didn’t save heartbreaks.

This article is a tribute to all my psychology peeps and non-psychology peeps to break down what our psychology schooling is like. It is a purely subjective perspective of mine.

Entering as babies

We enter the first year all excited thinking that we need not deal with maths, science and all things that don’t come naturally to us. Or at least I thought that.

Then the syllabus throws a rock at our face in the name of biological bases of behaviour, statistics, and SPSS.

So basically science and math follow us wherever we go. But we do not lose hope there because we do a lot of other cool stuff.

Any psychology student will tell what a badass, Sigmund Freud is.
We get so wooed by his theories that we keep applying it on us and all others. We do enjoy the self-introspection we get to do on ourselves. And Maslow’s hierarchy of needs might sometimes intervene with our normal lives. We try to be forever Jung (psychology student’s reference) and try to bridge the gaps between our ideal self and real self.

Sometimes we conduct experiments too and we get to bring a person as the subjects for the exam. The whole tragedy is when the subject starts questioning us about our experiment. We try explaining them but our mind voice says ‘Oh subject you need to chill, if we knew what we are doing, we wouldn’t be panicking here’

As we move on to study psychopathology, we keep contemplating that we have all the disorders we learn about. We also secretly diagnose our friends and family to have certain disorders. Which is only normal because of psychology-student syndrome and we eventually get over it with guilt.

Hustling

We hustle through numerous core and allied subjects, seminars, presentations, internal components, semester exams and struggle to get decent marks but the whole fun package come in the name of Research papers.

Yes, I was being sarcastic there. We slog to do research with the little knowledge of statistics and Spss we have and end up producing something which we deeply believe will be of some contribution to the society. Well, at least it did help us graduate. All the viva sessions we attend makes us question our own existence. Sometimes the viva examiner feels pity at our melancholic faces and ends up asking questions which make us believe she might be interested in our personal life as well.

Actual Learning

While the learning is all nice the actual learning happens in the numerous workshops and conferences we attend and the internships we do. Workshops are the place where we get to interact a lot with our classmates and we get to know a lot about what beautiful field psychology is. We enjoy how we get to express ourselves, get to know more about ourselves, de-stress ourselves and take back a lot of learning from the field. I basically feel every psychology students opt for this course mainly for the self-exploration about themselves. We do attend a lot of conference from another college for the pure satisfaction of getting on-duty.

No psychology student will ever forget the first case he/she observes at the internship. Sometimes it can be so overwhelming that we ourselves feel like getting some therapy while we observe the therapy sessions. We take back a lot of experiential learning and sometimes feel like Little Freuds while talking with our friends about it. We eventually learn to be empathetic, non-judgemental and become experts at maintaining confidentiality. Now our best friends have another reason to blurt their secrets to us.

YAAASSS WE DOOO

We sometimes get accused that being a psychology student we keep expressing our anger or outbursts. Well, we do not learn to suppress our feelings in psychology and we learn to express them articulately.

We do not accuse a doctor of catching a cold. Do we?

We do at times wonder if we have chosen the right course like any student of any-other course does.

We struggle from the start of our course with the jokes on us being called a psycho, random people ranting their problems to us then asking for a solution, and random relatives telling us that they will be our first patient when we graduate. We eventually get tired of explaining to people that there is a lot more in psychology than counselling and hearing a lot of people claiming that we can never earn much in this field.

Well at least we learn and do what we like and when we go to bed, we sleep with the satisfaction that someday we will be someone’s hope to rejuvenate their life.