A sixth form student with a passion for psychology, Jevan joined the Mohn Centre this summer for a work experience placement. During his time, he was able to gain a better understanding of the research cycle by working with the Study of Cognition, Adolescents and Mobile Phones (SCAMP) research team. Jevan was able to meet and learn with SCAMP Research Challenge students taking part in the study at a data analysis workshop held by the team. The workshop taught these young people how to use R software for statistical analysis. He also worked on a news article which transformed a recently published research paper into digestible information for the general public. You can find his piece, ‘How Air Pollution and Traffic Noise are Silently Damaging Teenage Development’, on our News page. We also tasked him with writing about his experience with us, this is what he had to say…
During my time at the Mohn Centre with the SCAMP study (Study of Cognition, Adolescents and Mobile Phones), I was introduced to many skills that would be essential to have in any workplace, especially one concerning psychology. On my first morning, as part of the SCAMP study’s part in being a community-based research centre, I took part in an informative data analysis class with three other teenagers from participating schools in the study. We were taught the crucial skill of how to plan out and then present analysis of data collected through a clear crash course in the software R. We were then shown how to compare different data types and we were given examples on how to conduct a literature review, providing good experience into how research papers are written.
As mentioned, research papers are extremely important to psychology, and any academic field, and through my work experience at the SCAMP study, I became comfortable and familiar with them. I learned how research papers are laid out and how to quickly summarise their most important parts, a critical skill in finding where there are gaps in knowledge and what new research should be aimed at finding.
As well as being able to read research papers, I also learnt how to summarise and simplify papers into a blog post; this allows anyone from the general public to read and understand research fully. This is a crucial skill that enables research to become widely known outside of academia, shown by the blog that I was able to write which was put onto the SCAMP website.
Overall, my time spent at the SCAMP study has allowed me to understand what it is like to be in a workplace, improving my knowledge on how academic research is presented and then how to simplify it. I was able to see how the psychological research is created and my time at the SCAMP study will hopefully lead to further interaction with them and continuing to increase my knowledge in psychology.