Psychology Student Starter Pack ✨

Hello freshies! First of all, PSG would like to welcome and congratulate you on stepping into another huge milestone of your life, and into a new chapter. We are glad that you are passionate or at least interested to choose a Psychology major to equip you throughout your life and of course, career. Despite tough times like this allowing us not to meet physically, this starter pack prepared by us would hopefully give you a little glimpse of what it takes to be a Psychology student in HELP. Honestly speaking, being a psychology student at HELP is definitely not the easiest thing to be! But fret not, it would definitely be worth it as you learn something that is not only beneficial for your career, but also how you view and understand people as you learn more about human beings and why they act, behave and think in a certain way.

Studying psychology for your bachelor degree would require you to grasp a lot of theories and would require you to fully understand them in order to apply it to your finals, lab reports, and tests. Hence, having notes especially for important theories can be helpful for your journey as a HELP Psychology student.

While studying, don’t forget to wear something that you are comfortable with! (psstt.. It could be your favorite over-sized hoodie paired with your favorite shorts). Anything would work as long as you’re wearing something you perceive as comfy clothes :)

Despite psychology being related to people, studying psychology would still involve numbers as we would like to quantify things that seem qualitative in order to have concrete results and better understanding of what actually affects human behavior. This is made possible with ….. *drum rolls* STATS! Don’t worry, your lecturers will guide you through the basics of statistics and do not hesitate to ask them or your peers when things get confusing. Trust us, it is not as complicated as you go along and understand the basics of it!

As mentioned stats would help you better understand the result of research findings. Speaking of research findings, you would be required to read a lot of journal articles to know more and have a better gist of what researchers are currently researching on that particular topic of your interest. Hence, you would need your laptop and be ready to read a lot of journal articles.

When your family members or your circle of friends know that you are currently studying Psychology as your major, do be prepared to experience the common questions and jokes that people would ask/tell you. Remember, studying Psychology does not make you a wizard or fortune teller :) (Hence, just be ready for these convos.)

Although you are not a coffee person, you would still remember coffee for your uni life. This is because our campus has a coffee vending machine that serves hot cups of coffee. Hence, during lecturers you would smell coffee as quite a lot of students enjoy their hot coffees during lectures. If you are a coffee person, you will definitely find the vending machine tempting.

Being a Psychology student at HELP, or a HELP student in general, you would need to be able to access LMS because that is a platform where all the resources would be uploaded by your respective lecturers. Syncing to LMS is the Outlook email; it is where you would be notified when lecturers post any announcements on LMS. Given the current circumstance (having online classes through the semester) you would like to constantly check your Outlook and LMS as frequently as possible so that you won’t be too overwhelmed with too many announcements (if you rarely check on them).

Above all, you wouldn’t be able to check on LMS, Outlook, Journals, and Online lecturers without the all mighty and important …. WI-FI!

Last but not the least, you would need textbooks and/or printed slides as it would ease your learning process when you listen to online lectures as you would be able to write notes on the printed slide. However, it would still depend on your learning style; hence, you would like to experiment with different learning styles to suit yourself throughout these 3 years.

That’s all from us! We hope you are not overwhelmed with all this information. Do not hesitate to reach out to our Outreach Directors or Peer Supporters when you have any inquiries or confusions. We are here, ready and glad to help you out :)

Yours faithfully,

Peer Support Group (PSG).