Climbing up a mountain: Mount Uni

Bianca Ton
Aug 23, 2017 · 3 min read

CURRENT STATUS

Stress, stress and…more stress!

There have been so many assessments and assignments coming up that it is quite daunting. There’s a group assignment…Korean exam…Multivariate assignment…the draft proposal…and I’m probably forgetting something off the top of my head. After next Friday (the day the draft proposal is due) things will calm down a bit so I just need to hang in there for more 2 weeks!

Tips for handling stress:

How I handle it?

How you should handle it?

TIP: TAKE LEGIT BREAKS

Besides fattening myself up, a tip I find really useful is actually allowing myself to take decent breaks. By that, I mean after I am productive for an hour or two, I go on a break by watching an episode of a show or by watching a few videos on Youtube. It’s like a reward without any guilt because technically I deserved it. It also makes you feel a lot better! I find that it helps a lot with procrastination because you don’t feel guilty when you’re not doing your work and this makes you more likely to go back to working after.

Before, when I was very strict with myself and my work, I would be like I can’t take any breaks because I really need to get this done today. But that honestly made me procrastinate throughout the day, plus it would make me feel bad and I would stress even more because I wasn’t sticking to my unreasonably strict plan. We’re only human, and keeping our mindsets healthy is really important during times of stress.

UPDATES ON MY PROJECT:

I’m just about ready to launch my questionnaires on MTurk! One of my supervisors has said that the next step is to get someone to actually test out my experiment to see if the data collects properly and to pick out any last minute issues before it is released out onto the MTurk world. However, it has been a long road (I’ve been working on the questionnaires for a few weeks now) and it seems like the things I have to fix will never end, I’m glad I had the experience to familiarise myself with how Qualtrics works so that in Honours if I want to run any questionnaires using it I’ll have less trial and (hopefully) less errors! I ended up having 18 different questionnaires (due to counterbalancing) with some linking to each other since my pre-test, training and post-test couldn’t be put into one questionnaire due to formatting errors when I tried to import them (aka. One of my Qualtrics nightmares). If you looked at my folder you would probably be like “what the heck is going on?” but there is some kind of order, trust me!

DRAFT PROPOSAL?

My lab meeting presentation last week went really well! Everyone was really friendly and one of my supervisors told me “Great job!” after it which made me feel more confident with how much I know about the readings and my experiment. I’ve got some ideas together for how I want my introduction to flow because of the presentation, but I won’t know if there’s any gaps unless I actually start writing it. So that’s the next step!

I think another issue for me is figuring out how to format my proposal, because my study does have two parts but their methods are pretty similar so I don’t want to seem too repetitive…I’ll have to test out different formats and see which one I like best. For now, I’ll start off by spitting words out and brainstorming my ideas onto a Word doc!

Journey of a Psychology Research Internship

Students completing a research internship

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Bianca Ton

Written by

Journey of a Psychology Research Internship

Students completing a research internship

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