Rachel Mahoney

Psychology

I've been studying psychology since GCSE level 

And when it came to looking at university psychology courses, I already knew the types of things I was interested in. Looking at the modules, Oxford Brookes stood out to me for the areas of psychology that I was interested in. I'm in my second year now, I'm doing a clinical neuropsychology module, which is something I'm really interested in. The course wasn't tailored for me obviously, but it was a really good choice for me.

So I had a module on Friday for neuropsychology

We were talking about language disorders. And I had already gone over some disorders of language before, just from personal interest and other courses that I had done. So I knew two of them that we spoke about in the lecture. But then the kind of opportunity to learn about those in more detail. Then being able to learn about all these new things and how everything connects together. It was really interesting because there were just a lot more details than I had learned before. You get more specialised, in depth knowledge.

I was really nervous

About meeting and talking to tutors/ professors. They actually encouraged me to book office hours, because I would kind of say I'm having an issue with this specific thing in methods and statistics. For example, I would be having issues with running the programs and not really understanding how it works. They'd be like, no, chat with me outside of lecture time, I can help you. I wasn't expecting it, but they're really friendly. So make sure you book those times, make sure you take their time, they’re a resource for you as a student. Because if they explained it one way in the lecture that didn't really make sense to you, then you can go over it again. They really care about how you are overall.

I've really seen that I have an interest

In the neuropsychology side of things. I think psychology is a really good pathway to other things. So going forward, for me that would be looking deeper into neuroscience or neuropsychology at a master's level to get that detail, and gain a good understanding of that specific area. Then maybe going into academia or research type things through psychology, I think you can also do things like medical school and then specialise in neurology as well, which is still all about the brain and is very closely linked to neuropsychology in certain ways.