Introduction to Psychology

Hi! My name is Katie Miller and I will be an incoming freshman; however, I will be attending Drexel University in the fall. I plan to be a nursing major which is one of the reasons that I will be going to school in Philadelphia. I wanted to start my college courses early, and I am currently finishing another online class while starting this course. I chose to take classes from Elizabethtown because my dad is a professor here. I took this class because I knew I needed to have a psychology class for my major. I have always found psychology to be very interesting, at least from the little knowledge I have of the subject.

I have a little bit of psychology background. I took a class in my senior year of high school, but I am excited to go more in-depth with different topics. In high school, we learned about a lot of different psychologists and their studies. We also discussed a lot about isolation in people and what it does to the mind. My teacher liked to show videos of what we were learning, so we watched some Skinner’s experiments. We also watched a film on “Genie” while we were talking about isolation. I think my teacher did a nice job with the timeline he was given, but I am excited to learn more at the college level. When I hear the word “psychology”, I think of the study of how people behave and why people are the way they are. I also think of how the brain itself works, different emotions and feelings, and some mental disorders. From what I have learned in my psychology class, a couple of psychologists come to mind as well, including Freud and Skinner, and their different theories.

Looking over the course schedule, I found some topics that I thought would be very interesting to go deeper into learning. Memory and how to improve memory is something that I would like to more about. I think this topic would be interesting because everyone has different memories and things that could jog their memory. It is intriguing when I talk to my family and my brother will recall one thing from a vacation that I have no recollection of or vice versa. I would love to learn about how and why some memories can come to the front of your mind while others are buried deeper. Another topic that I find interesting is coping and understanding stress. I think that at one time or another everyone feels stressed. It would be cool to go deeper into stress and see why it happens to certain people while others can stay cool under pressure or under a deadline. Only going into my freshman year, I know that college will be nothing like high school, so learning some coping methods for stress could help when I have those late nights of writing papers or studying. A final topic that I find to be interesting is mental illness and mood disorders. I think it is fascinating to study because there are so many people with illnesses or disorders that need help. As I am looking to enter the nursing field, I will be working with patients that have mental illness or disorders and would like to be able to better address their needs.

Some topics that may not be the most intriguing to me is neuro imaging, the brain and why research design matters. I am not a huge fan of taking a look at the brain and seeing what it is. I am more interested in why the brain thinks the way it does, or why certain people think and at the way they do. 

I think the only question I really have that I hope could be answered by the end of this class would be “what causes some people to become murderers and why do their brains think that way?” I have always been curious as to why people such as Ted Bundy did the things he did, or, a topic more recently, why a California couple who had 13 children left them isolated and neglected.