PSY 700 NSO Reflection

Reflection of NSO PSY 700 activities:

The PSY 700 activities that took place on day two of NSO were all valuable in helping me to put the scope of media psychology into perspective. The presentations from the media faculty (Jean-Pierre, Karen, and Jason) were all exciting and touched on areas that I am personally and professionally passionate about, and each part of day two confirmed my decision to enroll in the media psychology program. The presentations covered theories, methodology, arguments/research questions, and scholarly writing; and all helped me to further think about what I wanted to focus on within my dissertation. Although I had previously attended a New Student Orientation at FGU, the activities were still beneficial and the focus of day two really distinguished the clinical and media programs for me.

Media Boot Camp was an exciting learning experience. I had the opportunity of taking PSY 767 with Jason over the summer, and that gave me a chance to learn to incorporate images, narrative, and music in a short film project before attending NSO. However, the film festival portion of the day provided a lot of insight about different ways of approaching film productions. I learned a lot from both the faculty and my classmates. The range of different angles was great and I look forward to seeing more work from the other group members as we take courses together, and I am also looking forward to working with classmates on creative and expressive projects. I would have never thought to use the type of (narrative) rhythm and humor some of the other members used in their short films. I learned how to be more creative in movie making. The media production activity also taught me about using image and audio files, the significance of file sizes, and the balance needed to produce movies with high quality images and sound. I plan to apply the things learned during the boot camp activities to upcoming program assignments as well as to personal projects. I felt somewhat limited with the software I was working with (MovieMaker), and as I said at NSO, I am looking forward to using new software with broader capabilities. One of the main things I wanted to change about my mini production was the transition effects. There may be ways to better utilize MovieMaker that I am not yet aware of, but I think better/different software would really allow me to bring my ideas to life.

There are many aspects of media psychology I’d love to research and apply. In order to really capture the details of each area, I realized I had to narrow my focus as I looked at different areas. Before NSO, I wanted my dissertation to include “everything” about interactions with media. I wanted to ask questions about every type of media, art, and entertainment possible, but I left NSO with a narrower scope for my dissertation (which was very good). Karen Dill’s presentation on content analysis and Jonny White’s FOR was very helpful in my thinking about media research and helpful in forming a research question for my dissertation. Overall, I think my interest areas and research plans are more supported in the media program, and while I love FGU’s school of psychology in general, day two helped me to see that I was really where I needed to be (in the media program) in terms of personal and professional interest areas and plans.