On the turning away of the Tertre campus, Claire and Manuel, two students in 2nd and 1st year in Social Psychology Master, Labor and Organizations, met to talk about their studies. They discuss about their backgrounds, their research, their experiences, their interest in psychology and their aspirations for the future. We notice, in particular, that beyond the psychology of work, it is their passion for social psychology that animates them.
[Unfortunately, the podcast could not be posted. So, here is the script of the conversation]
My name is Claire and I am in the 2nd year of the Master of Social Psychology, Work and Organizations at the University of Nantes. As part of the English teaching I will interview Manuel, a freshman in the same Master as me. We will address different questions to make a picture of his state of mind at his admission of this Master, like questions about his background, his aspirations, his projects for his internship and his Master’s thesis.
C: Hello Manuel, how are you?
M: Fine Thanks you. I’m glad to meet you and to accomplish this work with you. What would you like to know?
C:So my first question is: what is your university path? What did you do before?
M: I decided to study psychology four years ago, after a latin America trip in which i had to went out of my comfort zone, in which i had to face a plenty of unknown situations and in which i had to confront with myself, my limits and my strength.
I began to study with distance classes in an university of Seine-Saint-Denis. Distance learning was a good compromise to keep the possibility to travel, to work and to study at same time. It had also bad sides. At third bachelor year, i was fed up with learning alone, reading and writing, without interaction with other students or teachers. I also worked a lot as a nursing aide during this year. Finally, i didn’t validate the bachelor. I was close to give up but the wind led me to a student city : Nantes.
I signed up at Nantes’s faculty of Psychology, found what i was missing (human interactions), regained motivation and here i am.
C: Why did you choose to apply in this master? What are your motivations?
M: Since the begin of my psychology studies, i focus on social psychology. I always was particularly interested in authors like Milgram and his famous experiment on obedience to authority, bias like the fundamental attribution error, Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance…
I was surprised when I discovered how strong situational factors can affect our cognitions, emotions and behavior, when our intuition screams that we are what we are because of intraindividual factors like personality.
C: On what subject would you like to write your Master’s thesis?
M: I would like to write my Master’s thesis on what is determining environmental friendly behavior : i want to study the links between attitudes, self reported behavior, objective behavior and non-religious spirituality.
It is a project i began to work on last year, as part of an internship in the university’s psychology lab. It should be a comparative study between Germany and France.
C:It must be interesting to have an internship in the psychology lab! What did you do there?
M:I did this internship with a classmate. We first met the lab director who made us a general presentation about the general functioning of the psychology lab. We focused on the social psychology projects and more specifically and the social and environmental projects. The director gave us an overview on the studies they conduct there, on the partner they work with (interdisciplinary projects, on a national or international scale) on how they are funded. Because of the important stakes of climate change, researches about environmental psychology tend to be more and more funded. We could assist a meeting, we met a phd student. The major part of our internship was the work on the study about the determinants of ecological behaviour.
C:What is the subject that you like most until now? Why?
M:I mostly like the diversity in the subjects teached to us and the diversity in the way they are teached. I think that social psychology is the subject i like the most and that the different subjects which compose it are part of an unity. I like different methodology, from anthropological participating observation to statistical treatment with quantitative measures, notions from France’s social representations to studies about stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination. I am impatient to begin the classes about organisational psychology.
C:What type of internship are you looking for?
M:On one hand, I would like to go to a german psychology lab, in the continuity of the theme i would like to write my Master’s thesis on. On the other hand, i would like to discover the work of a labor psychologist in an firm, in recruitment, counselling or training.
Or maybe i could participate in a study about Quality of working Life in the medical area.
C:You want to do a lot of things! What are your expectations for this year?
M:I hope i will meet plenty of new persons, i will have a lot of fun and i will discover interesting counterintuitive stuff.
C:I hope that it will be the case! Thank you Manuel for this interview.
M:Thank you Claire. I would also like to ask you some questions if you’re ok with that.
C: Of course!
M: Which concept or experiment in psychology is the most remarkable for you? Can you explain why?
C: I will lack originality but I would say the experiment of milgram. Beyond its very spectacular aspect, it shows very clearly the importance of context on human behaviors. It shows that we can’t explain the behavior of individuals by relying only on their personality, on individual factors … In some contexts we can do things that seems hard to believe. Which sane person could imagine being able to inflict a deadly electric shock on someone?
M:I wont imagine I would be able to do that! But studies are unequivocal : the power of external factors on us is incredible, what seems incongruent with what we think about ourselves. How was your experience as a student? What was the most difficult you had to face until now?
C:I loved being a student. Studies allow me to satisfy my curiosity. I think my favorite thing was to do my Master’s thesis: ask myself questions, build a reflection and try to answer them. I didn’t have any real difficulties in studies. But it’s sometimes difficult to stay focused in studies when you have to manage at the same time the hazards of life, others obligations.
M: In which social psych area would you like to specialize?
C:The areas that interest me the most are, on the one hand, discrimination, stereotypes and prejudices and on the other hand social representations and beliefs.
M: Ok. Where did you do your master 1 internship? How was the team? What did they charge you to do?
C:I did my internship in a recruiting firm called “AdPotentiel”. In the team there was a company director who was also a labor psychologist, an executive assistant and another labor psychologist who works in Reims. And there was also one of my classmates who was doing her internship at the same time. The internship allowed me to see how this type of firm worked, the present issues of the labor market and to understand the role of the psychologist in all that. I was able to familiarize myself with several tests used by the firm, attend interviews and search interesting online profiles. I also did with the other trainee a review of the literature on how to attract candidates.
M: Do you have some wise advices for the future students?
C:If I had an advice I think it would be to pay attention to what our internship supervisor have to teach us, not to stress too much and also to have a critical mind. Critical mind, questioning is very important for a psychologist I think.
M: Wise advice. What is your Master’s thesis theme?
C:The subject of my Master’s thesis is about the use of homeopathy and the beliefs that surround this alternative medicine. The goal is to understand how the Naturalness Preference, modern health whories and non-religious spirituality can help explain these beliefs and the use of homeopathy. By the way, I will put an abstract of my thesis on the blog.
M: Why did you choose this topic?
C: The subject may seem a little boring or surprising for some but I really loved working on this subject. I chose this topic for two main reasons. First of all because I think that social psychology has some interesting things to bring in the medical field: the way people perceive diseases, the patient-doctor relationship, the use of drugs, ableism … Secondly, when we search for information on homeopathy, we understand very quickly that it’s not its effectiveness that leads people to use it … I think we have a lot to say about it in term of social representation. This is a good illustration, it’s a case study. I think that as a psychologist, we sometimes have the temptation to explain the use of homeopathy in a very individual way by saying, for example, that people use it because it’s a placebo and they have the feeling that it works. But it’s a very simplistic explanation of things. There are others social and cognitive elements at stake. That’s what interests me in my thesis.
M: To finish…What are your career plans?
C:I hesitate between doing research or working in a recruiting and consulting firm. But whatever happens, for me it’s important to keep a psychologist’s attitude and keep yourself informed on research in social psychology.
M: Thank you Claire. To discuss this themes with you is very enriching for me. I wish you the best, stay passionate and have a beautiful day.
C: You too!