Psychology: Thinking Ahead

“Psycho”. A word that is often heard by many people and often misinterpreted too. I could still remember when I was a small kid last time, every single moment that I heard the word “psycho” being mentioned, my mind will automatically associate the word with the state of being mentally deranged or better yet, insane. What I thought was indeed a naive ones of which most people and not just me could not understand fully the concept of psychology itself. And when I saw adults working as a psychologist, I have always thought how much worse could it be for a person to deal with such people that are mentally deranged. I was completely clueless of what psychology really means, not until I had a few friends who in Psychology major of which the first question that popped up in my mind was “How is the work of a psychologist?”. Just one simple question, but it made them instantly knew what had I been thinking all this while about psychology. And so, they just told me that psychology is something much more than that and is divided into many different branches. For sure, I could recall them saying that one day if I had the opportunity to learn psychology, I would really be interested in the whole concept of psychology. Hence, that was the first exposure that I had about psychology. What an absurd perception to have of psychology at first, but it all changed ever since I entered a Psychology class. 

All this while, I have always been curious of how the mind really works and how we react upon what is in the mind. Nevertheless, I have never really had the time to look up for answers, and amazingly I manage to find them in my Psychology class. The first time that I received the textbook, I was completely amazed as there were an immense amount of knowledgeable contents and definite answers to all of my questions that I have long pondered about. I then started to feel enthusiastic and excited to be a part of the class as I was given the opportunity that I have wished for quite some time. I looked forward to discover the real meaning of psychology and to know about what I never seemed to know before this. Throughout my psychology studies, there were certainly a lot of inputs that I received and outputs that I can work on with in real life situations. During the first day of my class, I still remember that the class was basically all about psychology — an overview of the subject. That was when I truly learned about the conceptual meaning of psychology, and even during the first class I have managed to gain interests as what has been said by my friends. For one that really cleared up my understandings would be in the career of psychology itself, in which that was the time that I knew how to differentiate between a psychologist and a psychiatrist. It might be  a simple matter or the most basic ones, but in my context of being naive about psychology, I was thrilled to learn such facts! 

Besides that, I have also learned something that is unnoticeable in my life and that would be in one of the processes of acquiring knowledge on psychology; maintenance rehearsal. Who would have thought that all this while when I was learning and trying to memorize the facts for my examinations, I actually used this method that researches have been able to discover a long time back; a method used to retain informations in short-term memory. When memorizing, I tend to repeat one thing over and over again, so I thought that it might just be one of the effective ways for myself to study but true enough I was applying one of the mechanisms in psychology. All to all, I can say that psychology is yet an important field in life because through psychology that we are able to find the reasons behind  every single thing that happened around us. Even if we could not see with our own eyes, we feel the psychology mechanisms or we experience it or we deal with it in everyday lives. It is indeed really amazing to be learning such things. I was always once curious of how all of these personality and multiple intelligence tests that I have taken are so accurate to my own self. They could be seen as some sort of psychic activities, but what I can say is they are not! In fact, the results are all accurate because of step-by-step researches that have been made by professionals. One thing that I agree is that through all these researches and perceptions that we have towards something, we are always bound to what is called confirmation bias in psychology of which we agree to the things that are parallel to our beliefs and ignore those that are against our beliefs. Hence why, I can say that psychology is a form of definite reasoning to the happenings around us or in our minds. 

At the end of the day, I see psychology as life and life as psychology; both of which work simultaneously. Learning psychology has certainly been able to make myself to think ahead and to learn about myself - my personality, learning capabilities, feelings, thoughts, behaviours, and most importantly my interaction with other people. Last time, before taking Psychology class, I wondered  how can psychology help me in my engineering major; the relation between both opposite fields.
But now, I realised that it truly helps me in so many ways especially in understanding the process that I will go through along the way of becoming an engineer and also understanding the human psychology mechanism (social psychology) between people of different perceptions as mine.
Even though, the period of learning psychology was no longer than 2 months, I am truly glad that this opportunity came along during my foundation years. Learning psychology was indeed an eye opener for me to value things in life through concrete reasonings that have been done by researches in this field. 

- Nabilah Aina Taufek