Crazy last couple of weeks!

Okay! So I officially stink at time management. This past month has been killer. I’ve been preparing for my trip to the Jungle for May Term, picking up extra hours at work, and all my huge assignments for my classes happened in the past two weeks. Needless to say, I have barely had time to sleep or eat, let alone blog. I’m so sorry! I missed being able to actually put my thought down.
I’ll give you a run down of the exciting things that happened!

1) I conducted my first official Psychology experiment, and more than that, found my first statistically significant result! I was researching the effect of familiarity with narrative content on “transportation into literature,” which is basically “getting lost in a story.” This is what I’m hoping to research in graduate school—this “transportation into literature” stuff. It’s awesome! Basically, it has been found that a higher degree of transportation leads to a higher degree of story-consistent attitude and belief change. It’s like a perfect combination of English and Psychology! Needless to say, I poured my heart and time into the study for a while, hoping to find something. I found that English majors have a significantly higher degree of transportation than Science majors, which makes sense in hindsight, but I can only speculate as to the reason why. One possible reason is that people who are more highly transported into literature just choose to become English majors, or it could be that transportation could be trained, so to speak! I can’t wait to do a whole semester of independent research on it next year!

2) I acted as the main organizer of a huge service event for Psi Chi National Psychology Honorary here at Transy. Basically, we organized a day of review for local high school students to help them prepare for the AP Psychology test coming up in May. We all organized and led sessions that included lots of fun review games and question and answer sessions. It was incredibly successful, and at the end of the day, the students said it helped them a lot, so I was pretty proud! Here are some pictures!

Nick and Seth teach kids about the biological bases of behavior.

Hillary shows the kids Sniffy the Virtual Rat to review the concepts of learning.

The kids learn about the History of Psychology by playing a speed dating game and guessing which important figure in psychology each of them represented!

I (that's me standing) lead my kids in a matching game competition to review important concepts in Social Psychology, Motivation and Personality!

3) I turned 21! I don’t feel any differently, really, and I couldn’t do much to celebrate because I turned 21 on reading day, which is the first day of finals week here a Transy. It does, however, feel pretty cool to be officially an adult.

Be expecting at least one more post from me this week before I head out to Suriname and Guyana for May term! Ahhhhh! The jungle! I’m so excited! Wish me luck! =D