Employability

As part of our dedication to providing meaningful experiences, we integrate key employability strategies within our curriculum and extracurricular provision.

Paid research internship scheme

We are dedicated to providing meaningful opportunities for our students, and as testimony to this, we have provided opportunities for our students to take part in a Paid Research Internship Scheme. This is a competitive scheme in which our second year undergraduates and first year Masters Conversion students can apply to work as a research assistant on live projects in our department.

As well as our students gaining important research methods and other graduate level skills from this scheme, we also have an impressive track record of having our student’s work published in academic journals.

Take a look at our research papers published by our students!

Examples projects include:

The Sensing Brain

Looking for Cancer: Eye Movements in Medical Image Perception
The effect of feedback on mood and motivation in different ambient light conditions
Impact of self and other’s body shadows on sensory processing
The response of auditory and visual neural activity to arousing stimuli
Pupil dilation and sensory processing mechanisms
Feeling voices and sensing emotions: Subtypes of Alexithymia
Response to uncertainty and Authoritarian personality traits
Effect of emotive stimuli on attention
The role of working memory in attentional tasks
How to tingle: Reliable elicitors of the Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR)
Perceptions of Autistic and Non-Autistic Voices During Special Interest Conversations

Substance Use and Appetite

Are Beer Goggles real?
Bar Lab Research
Testing the validity of alcohol placebo methods

Social Cognition and Communication

Are emoji emotional?
The potential impact of extra-legal factors on jury decision making
The implicit association between fonts and expressive qualities
A community-based approach to making behaviour more sustainable: uncovering implicit attitudes to climate change and assessing their significance for climate action

The Ageing Brain

Memory and spatial navigation: How does prior knowledge help new learning in memory in middle age and elderly populations?
Memory and spatial navigation: Using Minecraft to assess the effect of prior knowledge on new learning and memory

Find out about our internship schemes

Email Dr Lee Hulbert-Williams

Tom Leatherbarrow, winner of EHU Student Employee of the Year 2016, as a result of his work on our Internship

Student participation

We encourage student participation in departmental research. This approach is designed to allow students to experience the importance of research (and the associated processes) in the subject of psychology.

There are two ways in which you can participate in our research:

Undergraduate students are encouraged to take part in studies for course credit as part of module learning activities

Everyone else (including non-Psychology students, Psychology students not taking part for credit, academic staff, members of the general public) can participate in research for a small payment.

All studies are ethically approved and you will receive information about each prior to signing up. The data collected in each study is kept confidential and anonymous and only used for research purposes.

Study opportunities

Psychology Placement Module– our students can elect to do a Psychology Work Placement in their final year, to aid their critical reflections of psychological theory in workplace practice.

Enterprise and Innovations in Psychology module – our students can select to do this module, which encourages them to consider the broader nature of psychology in practice. The module encourages our students to develop an innovative initiative or product for how psychology can be applied to solve a real-world problem or issue. Within this, our students develop a commercially-viable initiative or product, presenting it at the end of the module to a panel of outside experts in a Dragons’ Den format. The module develops employability and entrepreneurship skills.

From the quality of the presentations and confidence of the students, I would say that their job prospects are extremely good.

Additionally, Manus Mynne, a TV producer and director who also judges at the event, added:

I was very impressed by the high standards of the initiatives presented by the students. Not only were the presentations confident and well thought out, the skills developed at the University clearly informed pitches that had real commercial worth.

Careers in psychology

We aim to deliver a psychology degree that will afford students the skills necessary to give them the competitive edge in their chosen career paths. We therefore provide students with degrees that are accredited by the British Psychological Society (BPS). This provides GBC (Graduate Basis for Chartered Membership), which is an essential qualification for those wishing to enter into professional post-graduate training programmes in areas such as Clinical Psychology, Forensic Psychology, and Educational Psychology.

Many psychology graduates also go on to pursue careers in a range of disciplines. Our graduates will have the useful skills needed for careers and further training in many fields and often go on to work in disciplines such as:

Research and Development
Health and Social Care
Marketing and PR
Management and Human Resources
Education
Public sector work

Many jobs are open to graduates of any degree discipline (although sometimes further study is required), such as research, management, media, teaching, finance, law, marketing and management consultancy. In these jobs personal qualities and transferable skills are the most significant factors, rather than the specific subject studied at degree level. There are also a number of graduate training schemes available, where a degree in psychology puts graduates in a very good position.

A degree in Psychology will stand our students in good stead for a range of other careers. For example there are a number of companies that offer Graduate Training Schemes where a Psychology degree would be useful. Additionally, psychology graduates are very well suited to roles involving behavioural science, or public health interventions.

Whatever your interest, we offer the support and excellent advice needed to set you on the right path through our dedicated careers service team.