Hey everyone! My name is Grace, I am a first year Psychology undergraduate student. Since joining Bath, I have had the fantastic opportunity to join a VIP which really interests me, and furthermore I am thrilled to be writing my first blog about my experience being part of it so far!
Before starting university, I was scavenging through the website to see what sort of opportunities were available. I came across Vertically Intergrated Projects, and after reading about them I loved what their goals were. Creative, real-life research-based projects working with a whole range of staff and students in order to help tackle societal issues. As a psychology student, I really wanted to be part of long-term research myself. So, as an eager fresher student, I applied to ‘Creating immersive training experiences in virtual reality’ and was accepted!
This project aims to compare the use of a virtual reality experience where participants are placed in a bar scene witnessing a character experiencing sexual harassment. The participant can speak up and intervene. This intervention is then compared to a standard seminar intervention. Both of these focus on the 4 Ds of bystander intervention: Direct, Delay, Delegate, Distract. For me, not only was this an interesting and unique project to gain research experience in, but it is also fantastic knowing I am contributing to research that is helping such a big issue, especially for young people. Not only this, but I can also develop brand new personal skills such as analysis which I could not do before university.
So, when I finally got to meet my fellow project team, it was lovely to meet such a range of people with experience in numerous different fields. I will admit, being the only fresher within the group did scare me a lot, but my team reassured me this was a great thing to do to push myself right from the start! Since then, I have felt that is exactly what I have done. With weekly hour-long meetings, our team has been able to delegate tasks to everyone appropriately with flexibility. You can see me trying the VR below, which was a very ‘out of this world’ experience. I also took the challenge of helping one of the student leads on the project adjusting, editing, and proofreading the ethics approval for our project. Furthermore, I proofread the scripts and procedures that will be used in each condition, whilst providing constructive feedback. This genuinely gave me so much insight into how much time, work and effort goes into a research project from so many aspects to allow it to be precise and optimal for success. It was particularly great to see what an ethics application looked like, seeing I will have to be doing that for my own research one day!
Towards the end of this semester, our team were able to showcase the project at the Bath Research Assembly at the Percy Centre. Unfortunately, I could not be there, but knowing our project was able to reach out to members of the public who may have related issues gave me satisfaction that we are doing a great thing.
Considering our next VIP meeting, showcasing all the different VIPs progress this semester, I took responsibility to make an engaging summary poster (which you can see above) of all our team achievements which I thought was great to look back on our hard work.
I am really excited to get this research into action early next semester, and to provide updates of how it is going and what it is like being a researcher!!
Blog Post by: Grace Smith, BSc(Hons) Psychology, Department of Psychology.
Respond
