Final Grade: A+

 First Impression: This was my first course in the mornings and quite an easy course to wake up to. I was a little bit disappointed in the subject material as it was a little slow. Almost everyone I talked to explained to me that seen as it was an introductory, “overview” psychology course the material would be boring and that it is only in third or fourth year that you get to the interesting stuff.

Textbook: Themes and Variations, Nelson. I did not really like this textbook, mainly because there was so much useless information included in the text, you had to wade through piles of quotes, names of things you would never hear from again, to finally find the small amount of subject matter. The text tries to make things easier by being “user-friendly” with lots of pictures and coloured boxes, but every time I opened it I always felt like there was an information overload. Doing the pre-reading properly took me a good couple of hours…and I am usually a fast reader =P.
Study Guide is optional,  but I would highly recommend it, do all the questions and you will be golden.

 How much work is required? This was probably my easiest course by far, although the average was 68% (not that high). We had about 6 pre-reading tests to do, one midterm exam and a final. We also had 3 mini-quizzes (5 questions each). If you wanted extra credit you could be a “research participant” which was cool.

How to do well in this course:
Memorize, memorize, memorize. There are millions of quoted names without much in the way of important information. Use the study guide, do every single question in every chapter that you cover. Star things that you are not so sure about, make notes from the book on them, make good notes in class and memorize, memorize, memorize some more…

What I got out of the course:
For the most part many of the theories on memory and learning were presented to us as boxes, and charts. I thought this was kind of weird seen as the brain is not box shaped. I suppose in the future things will be changed as we learn more about how the brain actually functions, but for now many of the theories that we learnt about were highly “theoretical”. I find it frustrating how they talk about two theories both being correct.. maybe this is the physics in me talking… but I like it when theories are unified!
Being a research participant was also interesting. For the most part this involved filling out lots of questionnaires.  I wondered how well the results would really show anything meaningful. When you take research out of the lab setting is it really going to have the same.. or any effect?

Interesting links:
Inattentional Blindness: cool things to show your friends from Dr.Rensink’s Visual Cognition Lab at UBC
http://psyclab1.psych.ubc.ca/~viscoglab/demonstrations/
McGill: The brain from top to bottom
http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/index_d.html
Big Bang Theory: Operant Conditioning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euINCrDbbD4 

Should you take this course? If you are good at memorizing, need psych 101 as a pre-requisite and want a class that is large enough that you can go to sleep in without anyone noticing, this is the class for you. For others it might seem like a bit of waste of time/ and money so maybe taking a language course as your elective might be more interesting.

Useful Mnemonics e.t.c.:
*** Will add these when I get back to residence (where I have all my notes and cue cards)***

*** One last tip: The Loop cafe in the CIRS has the most AMAZING yoghurt with fruit and granola in the mornings. It isn’t cheap, but it is delicious! Seriously, once I discovered their yoghurt I was not late for class again!