Evaluations and Reflections

                As the year is beginning to come to a close, it’s time to reflect on the courses and professors of the semester. In class, we fill out professor evaluation forms to assess the success in the professor of many categories including enthusiasm for teaching, how they convey material, and how the course was run overall. I’m leaving out many things, of course. There are about twenty questions about the professor and then it goes on to ask what class you’re in, your major, things like that. On the back of the evaluation, you are given the opportunity to write briefly about the professor and the course. These evaluations are extremely helpful in ensuring that Clark University maintains a high standard for their professors. What I have found this semester and the one previous is that my professors are really great at what they do. They are all very knowledgeable on course material and make themselves available to any concerns or needs of students.

                Psychology has been extremely interesting this week in particular. We’ve been learning about developmental psychology. Today, we talked a bit about children’s attachment to their caregivers. (Caregivers is used because the person who cares most for a child may not necessarily be the parent of that child.) There are two kinds of attachment: secure and insecure. About 65% of children in the United States have secure attachment to their parents while the other approximate 35% have an insecure attachment. If a child has a secure attachment to their parents, it means that they will explore freely in the presence of their caregiver, be upset when that caregiver leaves, and greet them warmly once that caregiver has returned. Insecure attachments have many different categories which can range from children being extremely upset when their caregiver leaves to hardly noticing the separation. When that caregiver returns, reactions may vary from resistance to seeming to be oblivious to the presence of their caregiver. This may not be interesting to everyone, but I think it’s cool how psychologists can classify children’s behavior and even make predictions, based on this data, of how these kids will interact with their own children when they are parents.

                In economics, we’re continuing to discuss macroeconomics. Currently, we are discussing topics such as unemployment rates and today we briefly touched on what it means for a country to be “developed.” Of course, there are only a couple of weeks of the course dedicated to macroeconomics, so everything we’ve been learning is on an extremely general level. I like that, though, because it allows me to decide if I have interest in the material and if I would like to seek out more courses in the future so that I can learn in greater detail. What I am discovering is that I have a much keener interest in microeconomics than macroeconomics, but I will keep an open mind and possibly take more macroeconomics classes in the future.

                Well, this entry is already starting to get on the longer side, so I suppose now would be a good time to come up with a closing topic. This is one of my final entries as a first-year student at Clark. I’d like to thank you for taking the time to read my blog and learn a little bit more about what life is like at Clark University. I hope you have found my information and insight to be useful and please do not hesitate to send me a message through this blog if there’s anything additional you’d like to know about my experience which I have not covered in my entries.

Spring Has Sprung: Beginning Wrap Up the Year

                I’m relieved to tell you that spring has finally sprung here at Clark University. The sun’s shining, flowers are being planted around campus, and The Green is actually green. It’s wonderful. The only down side is that finals are approaching which means a lot more studying – most of which, unfortunately, is done indoors. Yes, there are people who read outside, but for writing papers, inside is really the best place.

                Anyway, the paper I’m working on is for managerial communications. I’m sure I’ve stated this in almost every entry, but my paper is discussing the differences in motivation between paid and volunteer workers. What I’m finding is that pay really doesn’t have very much influence in motivating workers to reach their potential. It will get them out of bed to get to work every day, but if someone doesn’t have other motivators, they will put in the minimal effort to get their paycheck at the end of the week. Along with the paper, I will be giving a PowerPoint present to the class which will discuss the same things. The difference is that I am choosing what kind of audience I want to address and adjust my presentation accordingly. I am going to be speaking to managers of both volunteer and paid workers since I have found that my research is equally applicable to both groups of workers.

                In economics, we’re beginning to touch on macroeconomics. Literally, we’ve just started, so I don’t have too much information I can tell you about the topic. For the majority of this semester, we have been focusing on microeconomics, but because this is an introductory course, it’s important that both major divisions of economics are covered. What we are starting to talk about is GDP and how that changes from year to year. There are factors that make data less clear such as inflation and right now we are learning about how to measure GDP on the same scale for each year. I apologize for being vague, but truthfully, I don’t know enough right now to go into further detail.

                Psychology is focusing on the development of children. It’s really cool. We’ve learned about the development from the joining of egg and sperm to birth and now we’re discussing the rate at which babies learn different things. One element studied is conservation. That means if we have two of the same size glasses filled with the same amount of liquid, if one glass is emptied into another shape glass, do we know that the amount of liquid has remained constant? Yes. We know that. However, this skill takes time for children to develop. Their intuition tells them that a taller glass must hold more liquid because the level of liquid is higher. There are lots of other examples of tasks which children are tested on, but I particularly liked that example.

                Course registration has come and gone and I got into all of the classes I mentioned last week! It’s such a relief when you’re worried about classes filling up, you send in your request, and then the web page says you have successfully registered for the class. It eliminates so many stresses. Well, I’m looking forward to getting out and enjoying this beautiful weather. I hope you have the chance to do the same and have a great week. Thanks for reading.

Choosing Classes & Majors -- The Year Isn't Over Yet!

                It’s hard to believe that there’s only one month left of this year. That said, my classes are getting into their last sections of material and course selection is going on next week. As you may imagine, it’s a rather stressful time of the year. It feels a lot more manageable than finals last semester, though. Maybe it’s because I’m taking better courses for me, but it may also be that I’m more adjusted to what’s expected of me in college.

One of the Clark University Lecture Halls

                Tomorrow is my third exam in economics. What I haven’t mentioned about my economics exams is that we take them in a different room than we normally meet for class. While not all classes take advantage of the opportunity to test elsewhere, it’s nice that there is the capability to move. My economics class has fifty students in it, so we move to a lecture hall for tests so no one is sitting next to each other. Cheating really isn’t a big problem here from my understanding, but it’s nice to remove the temptation altogether by relocating for exams.

                Also tomorrow is my second psychology discussion presentation. For the project, each member of my group had to do three trials of a traditional IQ test and a non-traditional IQ test. We tried to take different tests so we could best analyze which tests are more representative of intelligence. Surprisingly, I had a wide range of IQ scores when I took the traditional IQ test, ranging from 130 to 152. However, my non-traditional test seemed fairly consistent. I took an emotional IQ test. This attempted to rate my ability to deal with emotional situations and be perceptive of other peoples’ emotions. As I said, my scores were rather similar, ranging from 83% to 85%. I was a little surprised by this score, to tell you the truth. I see myself as a fairly perceptive person. My thoughts were that this test may be more accurate since my score remained the same from trial to trial. However, another member in my group had a large range of scores for the emotional IQ test and consistent scores for the traditional. It’s hard to determine which test would best represent intelligence. Perhaps a combination of the two is the best method. By the way, there are lots of other kinds of non-traditional tests. For example, there’s also a multiple-intelligence test which gives scores on different types of intelligence like spatial, musical, math, linguistic, etc. I think as far as non-traditional tests go, that’s the best one. Anyway, that’s basically what my group will be presenting in class tomorrow. Wish us luck!

                The last thing I’d like to talk about is course selection. As I’m going into my sophomore year, it’s time to start gearing towards what I’d like to major in. I think I’m mostly decided on psychology and economics. It’s strange to see how much my interests have changed over the years and I’m still trying to keep an open mind to my major changing. For now, though, I’m taking two psychology courses, an economics course, and a perspective requirement class. For psychology, I am hoping to take statistics and qualitative methods. In economics, I’ll be taking the course which comes after 010 – 011: Principles of Economics. It’s basically what I’ve been learning this semester, but more in depth and more math involved. Fun, right? The last class I’m planning to take is called Creative Actor. I’m looking forward to being involved in acting again. I was fairly involved with theater in high school, but I didn’t have the time to fit it in my schedule this year. The perspectives at Clark are actually a lot more interesting than I thought they would be and I’m really grateful for that.