Psychology (NL)

I spend the other days of the week mostly working with technology in education, locating issues and trying to solve them efficiently. There have been many developments in the past few years when it comes to digitalization in education.
I have a cross-faculty research Master’s degree in Behavioural and Cognitive Neuroscience, as well as a Master’s degree in Cognitive Psychology from this faculty. My original plan was to pursue a PhD; I applied but nothing came of it. I then applied for a teaching position here and soon realized that I actually prefer teaching about research instead of conducting research.

The thing I like about the course units I teach is that the Teaching Unit has a sort of omnipresence: every student must follow our course units. My colleague lecturers and I at the unit teach students the basics of academic learning, academic writing skills, giving academic presentations or carrying out empirical research. This lays the foundations for an academic future, so that students can decide where their interests lie in the more specialized departments. Specifically, I tend to focus on developing on critical thinking.

Psychology ties in nicely with the concept of the Teaching Unit; you put it to good use anywhere. It’s a very broad concept, so it’s not only useful in psychology itself, but also in lots of smaller fields. Learning from each other about all the different disciplines and understanding the links between them is great fun. I think that for many people, a Bachelor's degree in Psychology together with a master’s degree in a subject related to psychology forms a solid basis for a career. Psychology covers so much ground, whatever your specialization and whatever you plan to do.

Prospective students can expect an international learning environment, as we teach the bachelor’s programme in Psychology in both English and Dutch. Students are given a lot of freedom; they can compile their own package of course units, and new initiatives and ideas are welcomed. Finally, they can look forward to living in a beautiful, young, vibrant city.

Thanks to first-year Statistics I realized that I could use statistics to work out what the optimum number was! I was using it not only for knowledge but in my everyday life.What are my research passions? My field actually acts as a kind of umbrella science – statistics is the means that is used to help many different fields draw conclusions. It is very important that it is done properly and I always try to make that clear to students. I think I succeed in the main – there are always fanatical students who want to continue in statistics.In the Psychology degree programme, Statistics is used for the social case studies we work with. In principle you can use statistics for just about everything, it’s simply the method you use that varies. Psychology is incredibly broad. You can research many different topics. For example, I have researched ‘speedy decision-making’ – how do people make decisions under time pressure? Psychology can be used to deal with many different themes, but when it comes down to it it’s all about ourselves.Compared with other psychology degrees in the Netherlands, the Groningen programme is very research-oriented. This means that students get a relatively broad training in statistics. The biggest advantage of this is that if your ambitions lie in academia, you’re in the right place.

These disorders teach us a lot about how the brain works. We can use this knowledge to help patients cope with their functional impairment as well as possible and to participate in society. That’s what I find so great about my work – the link between academic research and clinical practice, where the patient takes centre stage.Patients also play an important role in my lectures. I present many case studies, and I invite people with a cerebral condition to tell my students about the problems they experience. The scientific theories I deal with in my course unit help students to understand the problems these people have. At the same time, the patients help us to constantly test our theories and put them in context. Students learn to examine the theories with a critical eye, making them concrete. You see immediate results in actual practice!Neuropsychology is also very interesting because it’s constantly developing. New things are constantly being discovered about the brain. Research helps us to understand the brain more and better, which knowledge we can then benefit from!