New beginnings!

Welcome to My Postgraduate journey through the weird and wonderful world of research psychology!

So they say that life is full of new beginnings and as one chapter ends another begins. Well as a mother of three, I have found that life is a lot more like browser windows, when a new one opens, it takes its place alongside the others, as you know that you will just need to bounce back and forth between them either chucking credit onto one child's school dinner account or ordering new school tights off of Amazon for another...... and yes I know there's most likely an app for that, but when it comes to internal storage my technology is much like my brain in that, it is somewhat limited in capacity. So, welcome to the new browser window that is a Master of Research Psychology postgraduate degree.

Week 1. Update your browser, you're about to learn how to code.

Rstudio

Make that "Arrrgh" studio. Things seem to have come a long way since the days of the 1990s when I had to programme my Texas calculator to allow it to perform the functions for A 'level maths. For a start, my tutor provided me with a well-thought-out A4 photocopy in which he had done all the hard work for me so I could just follow all the steps needed and skip ahead to merrily play with it to create infinite numbers of pretty little graphs that had absolutely nothing to do with what I was supposed to be studying, whilst gazing out of the window, wondering how much Brown Ale I could afford when I went out on Friday night if I saved my dinner money and brought crisps in from home for my lunch. Sadly, things have moved on since then, it appears, and now I find myself staring in disbelief at a laptop screen full of letters and numbers searching for ticks that aren't tick-shaped and carrots that are carets and typing stars that everyone else declares to be Asterix (or is that an asterisk?), to place alongside words and phrases to make them appear in italic,(bejeezus it looks like I learned something!) surely there a short cut in "word" for that?? As I stared at my screen muttering a stream of expletives, it occurred to me that the world of psychology has moved on from the safe and cosy world of SPSS errors and excel spreadsheets of my undergraduate days. Maybe it's time I upgraded my brain and moved from browsers to running on apps. And if that makes any sense to you, perhaps you'd like to help me with coding.

Lesson learned.....

Check out the week's course material before you sit down in class, it pays to know your ticks from your caret before you start looking for Asterix and screaming at Arrrgh!