College Psychology Degree

Hi.

I thought I would write a bit about the degree that I'm pursuing.  I'll be receiving my bachelor's in Behavioral Science in June of next year (2011).  What got me interested in Behavioral Science was the community service work I had started while at Nashua Community College.  Some of the community service was helping at the local soup kitchen or helping homeless vets with creating resumes and checking online jobs boards.  I am a volunteer advocate for victims of violence and have also helped with Habitat for Humanity.  I get such good feelings from volunteering in these groups, it's amazing. 

I wasn't sure if I wanted to focus on psychology, sociology, and social work, but the Behavioral Science degree offered at Granite State College was perfect to sample a bit of each of those areas.  What was interesting too was after taking a quick look at other local colleges, Granite State College appeared to be the only one that offered a Behavioral Science degree.  So far I've taken Counseling, Human Development, and Victim Rights and Advocacy.  Exactly the topics I'm interested in.  Next semester I'll be taking Intro. to Behavioral Science Methods, Social Psychology, and The Human Brain.  Cool courses!  I can't wait.  Which reminds me, don't forget to sign up for courses starting Nov. 22!

It's hard to believe that I'll have my bachelor's in Behavioral Science in less than a year.  Granite State College is helping me obtain my dream of having a bachelor's degree and maybe even move on to another University System of New Hampshire University's to pursue my Master's.  It is soooo exciting!

 
I've fallen in love with the stories people tell in a new project called "Story Corps."  I first heard them on NPR's Morning Edition.  They have their own website and today are being featured on youtube.

I always mention them in my psychology classes, because these slices of life often hold a nugget of inspiration, especially when considering human lifespan development - a course I teach often at Granite State College.  (In case you'd like to see what a course like that is all about here's the syllabus for an intensive course that I taught recently, that covered the whole course in just five weeks.)

Here's a favorite Story Corps story of mine, where a young woman interviews her mother, who was an immigrant.  Her parents cleaned offices at night, and she and her brother remember going to the offices with their parents, since they couldn't afford a babysitter.  The best is at the end, where she asks her mother if she would do anything differently, and her mother answers she wishes she'd spent more time with her when she was a child, but there was so little time with working, raising children and going to school.  Her daughter replies that seeing all that her mother did to get an education helped make her determined to go to college and get her degree.

Reading the comments at the end of the clip, I'm betting it will inspire a lot of people to get that college degree.

Having my first child at age 22, I learned really quickly that there is no manual for child rearing. No matter how great my intentions were, no matter how many books I read, nothing prepared me for the lifelong teaching I was going to be doing when my little man arrived.

A friend of mine helped me get my life back on track. She helped me set up goals, and one of them was to go back to school and get my degree. She even drove me to Granite State College so that I could get the ball rolling on my journey through on-line classes for college. I think the fact that I decided to go with behavioral science classes has helped me gain the knowledge to better my son's life.

People are correct when they tell you that their is no manual on how to raise kids. But, what I am learning through all of my courses is helping me piece together great concepts in how to raise my son he becomes a well-rounded individual. As an adolescent once myself, I know you cannot force your children into getting good grades and volunteering to help the community. I have, however, learned in my adolescent psychology course that there are ways to raise a child to want to do those things, to strive to be a upstanding student and citizen. There are ways you can protect your children from the temptations of sex and drugs without being by your child's side all the time.

The knowledge I am gaining from my classes is not only helping me earn my degree, but also helping me in specific areas of my life. You can sit and talk to me until you are blue in the face about how you raised your child and how it worked for you. Every person and every child is different. I think that studying this information has helped me better appreciate the knowledge that I have gained and helped me understand how I can put these concepts into practice and help my son to be a strong, intelligent, proud and independent individual.

There must have been a time when livestock was expensive enough that it was currency unto itself, hence phrases like "bring home the bacon." I am pretty sure the term bucks came to mean dollars in the frontier days of the U.S for the same reason. There was probably an era, when prosperity and success in life in the developed world could be correlated to the amount of bacon a particular person ate, or at least had access to.

This however, is not the bacon I have in mind; instead, I am thinking of Kevin Bacon. In particular, I think that Kevin Bacon should get his own unit of measure, not shockingly called Bacons.

Let me back up: ever since 7th grade, I thought it would be the coolest thing to have my own unit of measure (after I took chemistry in 10th grade, I added that having my own chemical element would be awesome, too). The greatest names in science, as a tribute to their contributions to knowledge, were made synonymous with units of measure in their fields of endeavor. Some of the are familiar and heard every day, like Fahrenheit, or Newtons, if you've ever taken physics. There are dozens more, and they can get totally obscure, like angstroms, gauss, roentgens, farradays, etc. Since I changed my major in college from chemistry to psychology in my sophomore year, the odds of getting my own element or unit don't look good. Almost everyone else alive today won't get one either, but each of us can make a difference in the world with our Bacons.

The idea is to play off the "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" game, so that your one-Bacons are the people immediately around you: family, friends, colleagues. The two-Bacons and beyond are somewhat harder to measure, but it could certainly be done. Focusing on the one-Bacons, I believe that the well-being of your one-Bacons is a direct measure of yourself. The best part about this is that everyone you've ever seen, spoken, or been around is one of your one-Bacons, and anyone that they've ever seen, spoken to, or been around is one of  your two-Bacons. Similarly, you could very well be a two-Bacon to two complete strangers, who turn out to be within four or five Bacons of each other....whoa, hang on... I'm dizzy.

This all hit me at the Granite State College Commencement ceremony a couple weekends ago. Even though I have been to a dozen graduation ceremonies before, both as a spectator and a graduate, I just realized a couple weeks ago that an elusive concept like success can be easily measured as your one-Bacons. Each speaker at Commencement, including GSC President Dr. Karol LaCroix, Governor John Lynch, and the faculty and student speakers, more or less made this point from different perspectives. When the students thanked their husbands and wives and children and families, they spoke volumes about being the one-Bacons of their family members. The award recipients basically said the same thing - that their personal achievements were possible only because they are the one-Bacons of their families and colleagues.

I also had a great day that Sunday on account of my one-Bacons. For the first graduation since I started here, I had a number of students graduate that "came in" with me, which is to say I was their advisor from their first day, to that Sunday where they graduated. My one-Bacons are everywhere, too. Some of them had been to multiple schools in the University of New Hampshire System, but finished at GSC. Others have a career for years, even decades, before deciding to finish with online classes for criminal justice.

All of this was huge for me, although to be fair, it's sort of rigged: each of my advisees who graduated are some of my one-Bacons, and it felt really good to have helped in the success and graduation of that many folks. The families and friends assembled that afternoon must have also been proud, so that my two-Bacons also had a great day.

Please know, this is not all about me, or about any one of us, individually. Instead, I think the true measure of the success of any one of us can be measured by our Bacons. Ask yourself, just as I do everyday (wait, that's not true; it's not every day, how about a few times a week):

How did I make my organization better today?
How did I make my spouse's/child's/friend's/neighbor's life better today?

Your one-Bacons (and two-Bacons and three-Bacons, and so on) can be your most trusted friends or total strangers on the bus, and any one of them or all of them can be vastly upgraded by the simplest or silliest things. And even though it's true that we have an opportunity to better ourselves by actively bettering the lot of our one-Bacons, it always helps to have a ceremony or event that broadcasts the betterment of your one-Bacons, like when a number of my students walked across that stage when their names were called at Commencement.

During my behavioral science classes at Granite State College, I had the chance to take an assortment of different classes with a variety of instructors. Almost without exception, I enjoyed my classes and found the professors were knowledgable about their subject and seemed to enjoy teaching adult college classes a great deal.

Now that I'm done with my time at GSC, I wish I had had the time and opportunity to take  advantage of more classes. When talking with my fellow classmates, conversations would often turn to classes that were highly recommended or a professor that was held in high regard.

As challenging as it may seem to meet the requirements for your studies, unfortunately there will be many classes of interest that remain unexplored, or professors that you never got to experience as your instructor.


I would have loved to take more classes with Dr. David Lawson whom I had for "The Human Brain" or Craig Nevins who taught "Society and the Individual". Beth Roth was my instructor for two difficult reserch classes and she often believed in our abilities more than we did. I took an independent study with Kathie Minaert and I think I would have enjoyed having another class with her as well.

The classes that intrigued me but never had the opportunity to take are numerous. There are many art classes offered but only one was needed for my course requirements. There are also English, humanities, psychology, health care and behavioral science classes that I just didn't have room for. Social science classes and sociology classes covered a broad range of interests, and regrettably, I was able to sample just a handful of these.

I hope your journey towards your degree from Granite State College is as rewarding, enjoyable and interesting as mine was. Take that first step, even if your educational goals seem too distant. The process of "getting there" was half the fun!

I find Netflix' recommendations for movies you might like, based on your previous choices of movies you've rented, a very interesting - but also kind of scary - idea, especially from the standpoint of social psychology.  And other DVD businesses such as Blockbuster have similar techniques to recommend further movies based on your interests.

In social psychology (you can take a course in it online at Granite State College!), we examine what influences people to make the choices they make.  Just think of all the things involved in your feelings about whether Netflix might be making good recommendations for you:  
1.  You chose to enroll in Netflix.
2.  You're paying to use it.
3.  They make an effort to appeal to you with user-friendly statements like this:
I have more questions about watching instantly on my PC. Where can I get answers?

So you end up feeling as though they really want to help you and somehow "know" you.  And you know what?  You're right about them knowing you!  They do know you.

But they're not really your "friend," of course.  (That can be the subject of another blog...whether "friends" on Facebook really are, well, friends.)  They're basing their information on carefully calibrated software that tracks your choices.

Lots of people are getting leery about having software seem to know them.  Once you take a course in social psychology (and you can do it entirely online.  Here's a link to Granite State College's behavioral science courses:  http://www.granite.edu/academics/degrees/bachelor-degrees/behavioral-sciences.aspx), you may be surprised at how much more you feel YOU know about what people are thinking, what you can know about other people, and even what advertising uses to influence your choices, from selecting DVDs to buying cell phones!

There are plenty of "Psychology Courses You'll " at Granite State College.