Changes to my study program

Good morning everyone!

Today I'm going to talk about some changes I think that should be implemented in my career (By the way, I'm studying psychology, I think all of you know it, but if there are doubts yet... ha ha ha, I don't think so, but who knows?)

Firstly, I would like to say that I'm just at the third semester of my career, so I have only had 18 courses until now and maybe I would like or dislike the rest of them. I can't exactly know it, but at this moment, in general, I have liked my study program, in fact, that was one of the reasons of why I chose to study psychology at the "Universidad de Chile", because I like its curriculum. Anyway, even when I like it, it doesn't mean that I don't want to change some things, so...

Regarding the curriculum, I consider the first year is very general. I think it's because we have to balance our skills and knowledge (as the education in Chile it's unequal, so the university it's an instance to prepare professionals with the same skills or at least that is the ideal), also that year in psychology maybe is general, because it's important for us to constitute as social scientists. In those terms I reckon it would be useful and an important part of our professional training.

Then, the second year it's a little more psychological, because we have more courses related with the basic knowledge in psychology, I think this year is more like an introduction in our career. At this moment, I have liked almost all my courses, actually I have only disliked "Historia Social de Chile" and it could be because I have never liked too much the history, but also because I consider that it doesn't related with our career, I guess that if we take it out the curriculum, it wouldn't happen nothing.

Talking now about the courses I haven't have yet, I suppose they are very relevant in our professional training and I love that in the 6th, 7th and 8th semester we have to take elective courses of the 5 mainly areas in psychology (Clinical psychology, Social psychology, Organizational psychology, Educational psychology and Legal psychology), I only feel that we could have a sixth elective in experimental psychology and neurosciences (if we would have it, I believe our formation in psychology would be integral), anyway I like a lot our curriculum just the way it is. Maybe, I would like to add a course of quantitative methodology, because I consider it's important too (In our curriculum we have a course of qualitative methodology, but no one in quantitative).

Psychology curriculum

In connection with the things I previous mentioned, I guess that the length in our career could be less than it currently is, maybe we shouldn't have general courses (related with other social sciences), so we could minimize the length in one year, having only 4 years to get the degree of psychology. But I'm unsure if I would like to do that, because if we hadn't had those courses, maybe it had been more difficult for us to get used to university life.

If I have to refer now about the workload in our career, I consider that it isn't difficult in comparison with others. I think that our courses, tests, projects and times for study are balanced, in some weeks we have more workload, but it isn't something impossible to handle.

Referring now to the use of technology, I think that we could improve more this aspect, because our classes in general are expository and in almost all our courses we don't use the tech too much. (Statistic course is the more representative exception, because we use computers to complement our theoretical knowledge, applying statistical programs and also we get points by playing online with a website called kahoot.it).

I suppose we could improve the teaching methods, because as I said, our courses are mostly theoretical. In this way I think we could have more practice instances, because we learn a lot about psychological theories, but not too much about practice.

We could learn more than these basic concepts and theories

That's all for today, I hope you read me in the next post, see you...