Students agree: Psychology is more than study of mind, behavior

This spring, approximately 690 students will be graduating with a degree from the psychology department, one of the largest at UCLA. Daily Bruin Radio speaks with students, exploring why these majors are so popular and the reason why so many students enter the psychology department.

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TRANSCRIPT:

BLAKE: How do people learn things? And what makes them good at it? And when do they know that they know something, and why do they know that?

PHAN: A definition of psychology from the Merriam-Webster dictionary is: the “study of the mind and behavior.” However, there’s more to psychology than just this simple definition, and students here at UCLA agree.
According to Melina Dorian, the undergraduate advising supervisor for the psychology department, there are 3,000 undergraduate students in the program, making it one of the largest departments at UCLA,with a graduating class of approximately 690 students this spring.
The psychology department oversees three distinct majors: psychology, cognitive science and psychobiology. Each explores different facets of psychological study.

KOMMERS: I was originally a physics major and I wanted to minor in psychology. We don’t have a psychology minor on campus. I thought, huh, cognitive science – that sounds conspicuously like psychology.

PHAN: Cody Kommers, a third-year cognitive science student, argues that despite cognitive science being the smallest major in the department, it offers its students multiple specializations and fields of interest. He tells me this is why so many students are interested in psychology.

KOMMERS: You can answer it almost any way you like. I’d like to do something useful. I’d like to help people. I’d like to make money. I’d like to be intellectually rewarded with what I do. With whatever you answer it with, you can find a segment of cognitive science that fulfills that and maybe even multiple.
And so, to me, cognitive science (when you find the right part of it) allows you to make of it whatever you want to get out of it. I think a lot of majors offer a lot of different things, but I don’t think any of them offer everything that cognitive science has the capability of doing.

PHAN: Adam Blake, a graduate student in the cognitive psychology Ph.D. program, describes how psychology also requires a variety of academic disciplines to succeed, from writing research papers to analyzing statistics.

BLAKE: Psychology is interesting because it is more than a social science and it’s perceived as a little bit less than a hard science, maybe. That being the case, you get the best of both worlds. […] A lot of psychologists end up becoming a little bit more computer-literate than their friends might be. But more than that you learn to write complicated ideas in succinct and understandable ways. A lot of psychology is taking some complicated finding you have and turning it into something that has meaning.

PHAN: Despite psychology being one of the most popular majors at UCLA, Kommers warns that not all students might benefit equally from their degrees, especially post-graduation.

KOMMERS: Psychology doesn’t give you a skill set: Psychology gives you a curriculum in which every class tests you on multiple choice. Multiple choice does not reflect anything you will ever be asked to do once in the real world. So it’s entirely what you make of it.

PHAN: Blake partially disagrees. He believes that psychology offers vital critical thinking skills that he says can be applicable in both research and day-to-day life.

BLAKE: Taking psychology courses forces you to be very analytical and critical in your thinking. You develop problem-solving skills, you develop the ability to look at something that might seem obvious to other people and break it down to why it’s actually very surprising. Or the opposite: Take something that’s very surprising to other people and break it down.

PHAN: They did agree, however, on what attracted them to psychology to begin with.

BLAKE: I think that psychology is interesting because it tells you something about yourself, and people want to know what’s going on inside their own heads. And I think that’s why it’s so attractive, because psychology is about human nature, and what better to study than yourself?

KOMMERS: More than just the interdisciplinary study of the mind, as the textbooks will tell you, it’s the study of who I am as a person as far as it can be studied empirically. And every class that I take, my worldview is expanded or challenged in some way, and so cognitive science is a view into who I am “up here” – and to me that’s very important.

PHAN: Whether students entered psychology in order to advance their academic, career-oriented goals or their personal goals (like Kommers), they will be well-equipped with not only a greater understanding of the “mind and behavior,” but also of themselves as well. And congratulations to the class of 2014 – particularly to those graduating from the psychology department.
For Daily Bruin Radio, I’m Stephen Phan.