My reflections:
Coding and R
This term has been packed with learning lots of new skills in coding. I cannot believe how far I have come and how much I’ve learnt in just 10 weeks! I can confidently say that I know how to code now, which is quite a big achievement. In the beginning of the course, I never even knew that coding was used in psychology, and the very thought of it made me default to the stereotypical thoughts about coding relating to computer science, website, machine learning etc etc. But after learning about R and how it’s so useful for science and psychology in particular, it completely changed my mind. There are so many things you can do in R, and I found myself quite enjoying learning how to code as well was solving all sorts of problems (allbeit there were frustrating times). I’m also very proud of myself in terms of applying my coding knowledge to solve real questions, and use it to deal with real data (as in data that someone else had collected), and as a result of that I am much more confident with myself and abilities to learn new skills such as coding than I was before.
The value of group work
Good team work actually makes the dream work. I don’t think I’ve had one single good group experience in uni ever until I worked with the group I had for this course. And dare I say, I actually enjoy teamwork now. Past experiences had really made myself dread future courses that involved teamwork components as the chances to be randomly assigned to a group of students with similar high levels of motivation is super rare. Thinking back, even the thought of needing to do group work had made the experience of groupwork poor before it even started.But after working with my group this term, with everyone being highly motivated, pulling their wight, eager to learn, and supportive of each other I realised how much easier groupwork was, and how quickly we moved through the task. So basically, having group members on the same page as you is super valuable as it really elevates the level of collaboration and quality of work produced.
How I learn
Since this course was structured differently to the other psychology courses, I initially didn’t really know how to prepare, or take notes, or what to revise. However, I think that having this different structure was really good for me to broaden my ways of learning as I usually use the default note taking, revising notes etc. methods. eg. I tried to apply my usual methods of notetaking to jot down what each function does, the different markdown formatting as I followed Danielle’s videos. However, since coding is so hands on I scratched all of the notetaking and began just working on code, a lot of it, to keep practicing instead.It worked so much better and I also quickly realised that annotating code was super useful in helping me remember different functions, packages etc. I also think that coding itself being having so many and different ways of solving problems made me realise how much I value variety and challenges when I learn something. I also learnt how useful it was to see what others have learnt and take it from there, rather than solving everything myself which is definitely more time consuming.