Study Psychology at Otago

Roger Yan:

Kia ora, guys. My name is Roger, and I’m a fourth-year Psychology student here at the University of Otago.

One of the reasons why I picked Psychology is because of the myriad of ways that it affects us on a daily basis—from the way that we remember things that happened to us to the way that our personality develops as a byproduct of what happens to us growing up. Even the way that we talk to people and how we change that based on who it is that we’re talking to.

These are just some of the things that we look at in the Department of Psychology here at the University of Otago. If this sounds interesting to you, I definitely recommend you check it out.

Dr. Brent Alsop:

Hi, everybody. My name’s Dr. Brent Alsop. I’m from the Psychology Department at the University of Otago.

Our department is one of the best in Psychology in New Zealand. We have an international reputation for research, we win awards for the standard of our teaching, and we’re one of the most popular departments within the University of Otago.

So, what is Psychology about? Basically, it’s about the way people behave and why they behave the way that they do. If you think about it, that’s such an incredibly broad question, and you can approach it from all sorts of different perspectives. And that's what happens.

I have colleagues who are investigating the way children’s memory gets shaped and manipulated by events, so you may have some doubts about how reliable they are as witnesses in a court of law. On the other end of the scale, I have a colleague who’s studying the way physical changes in the brain seem to be important for how we store memories and what that means for people with diseases such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer's.

These varieties of areas are reflected in what we do at first-year Psychology. We want you to have a broad understanding of factors that contribute to the way people behave. We look at the structure of the brain in very general terms, the way the nervous system works, how our senses process information that our brain then tunes into cognitions, and the way that this goes on to lead into behavioural relations.

We’re also interested in things like language—how we learn it and what we use it for. We’re interested in development across the lifespan, how children change in their abilities and capabilities as they move into adulthood. We’re interested in the way people interact as part of groups.

We’re also interested in the way people behave when things go wrong. You’ll get an introduction to things like what schizophrenia and depression are like and what the long-term prospects are for people with those sorts of disorders.

That’s our lecture content, and to accompany that, we have a lab programme where students get together with a very senior student who takes them through the basic mechanisms of how psychologists go about studying the world. They do experiments on themselves largely and learn about psychological research.

It’s a very enjoyable programme. It gets rated very highly by students, and it’s a lot of fun.

So, if you’re thinking about doing Psychology or taking Psychology as part of your degree, we welcome you to enjoy the experience. Thank you very much.