Day in the Life of a Psychology Student

Are you interested in science, but not sure what you want to study? You’re not alone!

When I first came to CC, I knew that I liked biology and health-related topics, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to major in. I had been thinking about neuroscience, but I’d also heard that it was hard and I wasn’t sure if I was up to the challenge. Introduction to Psychology, which is also the introduction to the neuroscience major at CC, was the class that made me decide to be a neuro major despite that anxiety. I took Intro to Psych in my first year of college, but I’m still using what I learned from it every day in my upper-level courses!

Link to Photo

My classmates and I spent the block learning about the basic anatomy of the brain, as well as the psychological processes behind development, memory, perception, language, and more! We also learned how to conduct a psychological experiment and how to write a lab report. The best part of the course was that, working with a lab partner, we each got to train a rat! My rat was named Max, and I’ll tell you a bit about how my lab partner and I trained him over the course of the block.

The first thing we taught Max was how to collect his food reward, which we would then use to teach him how to do other tasks. The box he was in during our training sessions had a hole in the side, and we taught him that every time we knocked on the side of the box, we would give him a bit of food through the hole.

Once Max had mastered collecting his food when he heard a knock, we used the food reward to train him to press a lever. This is called operant conditioning - because we rewarded Max every time he successfully pushed the lever down, he learned that pressing the lever would get him food, and he started to do it more frequently!

Finally, we added a step where Max had to roll a marble down a track and out of the box before we would put the lever in, and then he had to press the lever to get his food. Here’s the end result of our training:

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/ebc7cc_144f14aeba8d4f4b9873d69a571c6957/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Training Max was my favorite part of taking Intro to Psych, but I also enjoyed learning about what happens in our brains as we learn and grow, and about mental illnesses and how they’re treated. I liked it so much that I decided to become a neuro major, and now I’m taking a senior seminar on neuropharmacology, or how drugs interact with the brain!

Majoring in neuroscience can be challenging sometimes, because the brain is such a complicated organ, but I also think it can be fun and rewarding, and I’m glad I decided to do it. If you’re interested in neuro but think it sounds intimidating, my advice is to go for it!

Sincerely,

Christine C. '21