Don’t be afraid to get involved

In the last blog post I wrote about the ways of Aberdonian life and the pros and cons that come with it. In today’s post, I would like to partially follow up on what I said before.

A lot of people said to me “You’ll get used to it” and even though I did not believe them at first I must admit that it’s true. I came to realize that when you are in a new place with new people and friends you got to find your way, your stereotype or routine which will guide you every week of the month. It should be the same like at Open Gate when I didn’t know what time it was must of the day. Since the only thing that mattered was that if I had a lunch already. Apart from that, I also learned to spend my days with something meaningful, instead of just “surviving”.

Hence, after the Christmas holidays I got to pick between two choices, start working part time or do volunteering. Since I had no need for other financial income due to the kind support from the Kellner Family Foundation I decided to choose the latter option. I thought that it would be a cool idea to join some of the psychological researches that are organized by our university as so called “research assistant”. Even though this work place is usually offered to students from year 2 and 3, I still gave it a shot. I sent e-mails to all the researchers on whose experiments I participated on and got three responses out of which I chose one.

The research, that I have joined, was to my surprise investigating the eye movements of participants while they are reading comic stories. This is done by using an eye tracking device that can precisely tell where and for how long are the participants looking. My job is to set up the machine and basically everything from recruiting the participants to saying goodbye. This activity allows me to understand what it is like to do a research.

Now I would like to go back to the primary to the main idea of this blog. To be honest, I wasn’t feeling that well during my first semester here. Nothing interested me and I did not try anything new, which was a huge mistake. It is crucial to participate and to get involved in something that might make your days different.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that my cooking is not improving at all, since I found that I can have lunch directly at the university and the fish soup they’re making is just awesome. Now excuse me please as I go to prepare yet another spaghetti with ketchup and cheese.

 

More blog articles

All news