Stepping stone – Summer 2015

Mentoring

by Ricosha Okine

I bet your probably thinking odd title right? However Before going into actual detail about my current stepping stone, I think it may or may not interest you to provide a small background about myself…

I’m an A level student currently studying  Psychology, Sociology, Business and Applied Science which are my choice of subjects which on success should lead me onto the next stepping stone in becoming a Child Psychologist.  A battle I have with myself is wasted time and leaving everything to the last minute so I decided to learn as much as I could this summer in preparation for an intense but fascinating year of A2 studies and Undergraduate Psychology in 2016. I did this through attending a summer school at Plymouth University and in2scienceUK placement at UCL where I’m currently writing this blog entry.. The past few days have been very exciting with a range of activities from observing at an airport… I didn’t really do this but observing a computer science/ psychology based pilot (pun not intended) project was close enough, transcribing data on participants and parents of those with conduct disorder at a child psychology research lab, observing how deaf patients were tested on an FMRI scanner, coding mainly in the computer science department but also at the psychology research centre, numerous meetings, attending a practice conference, trying kangaroo (very odd experience), creating my own codes on Engduinos to eating lasagne from the local Farmers market under a tree with a colleague on a sunny Thursday Afternoon.

 Engduino…  its cooler than it looks

Richosha pic 1Well this short blog entry is literally about my summer 2015 stepping stone, life’s such an interesting journey which takes us all on a variety of pathways but I see it all as a learning experience on stepping stones, whether we’re taking a step forward or taking a step backwards we’re moving; which partly explains my future dreams of becoming a child psychologist because in my role I would be able to help children whilst moving through difficult stepping stones into more positive ones.

The whole In2science scheme has truly been a phenomenal experience for me, not only was it two weeks of professional experience and networking but it was also two weeks practicing my not so perfect time management skills.

What I loved most about being at UCL was that no day was the same and I was able to gain an insight into areas I never even knew about. In my 2 weeks I was mainly based in the UCL computer science department which a few weeks ago I only had about 3% knowledge of, however my supervisor had a psychology background which he used to his advantage to get me into contact with a variety of people within the psychology departments. Reading journals was fairly new to me, although during the 2 weeks I spent at UCL, I attempted to cram in a range of articles associated with my psychological based interests, as well as a new but interesting subject of computer science which by the way isn’t all about technical stuff explaining how clever computers are, as I learnt “Computers are Very Stupid… but extremely fast!”

Richosha pic 2 Richosha pic 3One of my final tasks at UCL, before having an extremely informative chat with a group of PhD students was to coincidently write a blog entry, this was an attempt to shrink and deliver some psychology based research to readers in the hope of widening peoples perspective of private speech, even if it was only slightly. The title was “Talking to yourself is the first sign of madness! Private speech – the Infant oyster for the developmental journey” which was an attempt to metaphorically make 10 pages of research short, snappy, and fun to read. I was successful in this and I’m due to start  up a psychology blog which I never even considered previously. I also have a much clearer perspective of the psychology field and I’ve considered other routes/stepping stones in which I could potentially take rather than just clinical psychology thanks to my current stepping stone of summer 2015.

Read Ricosha’s full report here: Full blog Ricosha (pdf)

Richosha 2