finish all my reports for internship #1 + hand them in to my supervisor

request my second supervisor for my bachelor thesis

write my report on internship #1 for the university + hand it in

go to the examination office and get my list of participant hours approved

give a presentation on internship #2 (may 18th)

write up my paper on the experiments we did in second year + hand that in

register + write my bachelor thesis + hand it in

I'm so so close now and I can't wait to be done with it all!!!

04/15

~ a few hours later ~

I am done working through the lectures, ahhh this feels so good! It means I am officially ahead of schedule. I never am ahead of schedule, I feel so accomplished right now :)

I worked through all the slides on anxiety disorders, attachment disorders and borderline personality disorder today. It was a lot and I feel exhausted now, but I had fun and I didn’t panic once! I even had some personal epiphanies about the nature of my own anxiety. And I got a lot of inspiration for my bachelor thesis on BPD.

Another good thing is that this particular lecturer is a psychodynamic therapist. I really enjoy learning more about psychodynamic therapy (our curriculum is very CBT-centric otherwise) and I am pretty sure that’s what I am going to specialise in. I just think it’s so much more interesting than CBT. I’m pretty sure doing the same interventions over and over again would get very boring for me.

04/15

I am studying for my last written exam (clinical psychology III) and I’m trying not to panic too much :’) Recently, the German system for the approbation of psychotherapists changed profoundly and it’s so hard to get into the clinical psychology master now. It’s the only master I’m interested in, so I have been suffering through terrible pressure to achieve and panic attacks. But I try to tell myself that I will get there.

Let’s just say he is infamous in our institute for being a bit of a conspiracy theorist and also just for being a divisive, weird man. True to form he gave me a ~20 minute lecture about tech literacy and the decline in cognitive capability in younger generations (not anything scientifically proven, just the decline specifically noticed by him personally). I just sat and smiled and listened and offered the occasional therapeutic “hmmm” and by the end he was super impressed by me and shook my hand, even though I had said basically nothing the entire time haha

When I left, another student was waiting outside his office. The door had been slightly ajar and he had obviously been listening to our conversation because he had THE BIGGEST GRIN on his face. When I saw him, I could barely keep myself from bursting out laughing and we shared a millisecond of pain before he went in and I went on my merry way

Hellooo ~

I went and took my personality psych exam on Wednesday! It wasn't a particularly fair exam, so I didn't really know how to feel afterwards, but in the end got a grade 1.7 (80%), I'm still two marks above the average and honestly, I'm fine with that. I'm actually quite happy with what I got out of it for the amount of work that I put in, everyone in my year knows that this particular professor words his questions weirdly and there were points deducted for wrong answers, so it could have gone a lot worse than it did (and no amount of studying could have protected me from it).

Look at the beautiful golden hour light and the little ducks on the canal yesterday evening :)

Last day of studying for personality psychology! My exam is tomorrow. Do I feel like I know everything for sure? Definitely not. Will this have to do? Yes. I think there isn't much more room in my head for anything else related to personality... I can barely keep all the different theoretical perspectives I have now memorised (seven in total) from merging into a big unhelpful blob. Is forcing people to memorise 150 pages of lecture notes the best strategy for teaching future psychologists? Why would you even ask? :')

Anyway, I got through all the lecture question blocks except for two that are not that important, so I will start today by working through the mock exam questions and return to those two blocks later. I will also print the rest of my lecture notes... because we have to memorise so unbelievably much for our exams, I usually try to use my long and short term memory as much as I possibly can. Which means that I will get up very early tomorrow, go to my uni campus and then read through all my lecture notes one more time. This will help with filling out some gaps as well as keeping all the different theoretical perspectives separated in my head. I will also memorise the formulas I need to know tomorrow morning by re-writing them a couple of times. (Don't get me started on the futility of memorising formulas...)

This part of exam preparation is my least favourite because it's the most stressful and my test anxiety will be in full force the entire morning, but sadly, that's the strategy that works for my brain and I do need the best grades to get into clinical psychology for my master's programme.