Katie Joyce knew she wanted to come to Keene State – it was the only school she applied to – and she knew she wanted to study psychology. What she didn’t know was that she’d end up being hooked on research.
“I came into college leaning toward clinical psychology, but then I took different classes and found that research and experimental psychology was really what I wanted to do,” says Joyce, who graduated with honors, received the 2013 Homer Stavely Psychology Award, and was president of Psi Chi, the psychology honors society.
She points to the department’s variety of course offerings – enough to allow majors to explore the many aspects of the field. “I’m just really thankful for the opportunities that the Psychology Department offered me,” she says. “It was a really nice community to be involved in. Everyone there was so helpful. There were professors with all different backgrounds and experiences, so it’s not like you wanted to just stick with one person – you wanted to talk to everyone and see what they thought about things, and get involved with them in different ways. It was a really great opportunity for me.”
One opportunity she especially appreciates was the chance to do research, both with faculty members and as part of the department’s honors program. Her honors project, “The Effects of Emotional and Neutral Stimuli on Change Detection and Electrodermal Response in Iconic Memory,” looked at the ways words that are emotionally charged, like “guillotine” or “infatuation,” can create an unconscious physiological response in people, as compared with neutral words like “door” or “windmill.” Joyce recruited student subjects, applied for and received a grant to compensate the subjects (four $50 gift cards that were raffled), then used a meter that measures skin changes to test for a response while she quickly showed them the emotional and neutral words.
Joyce plans to go on to grad school, but first she’s spending a year working for Keene State’s Aspire program as tutor program assistant, a position funded by AmeriCorp VISTA. The job is a continuation of work she did as a student, as a supplemental instructor for psychology courses and as a tutor through Aspire, which offers academic support services. She likes the counseling aspects of the tutoring work, and she likes helping people. As tutor program assistant, she is doing tutoring and aiding in the coordination the peer tutoring program. She’s also developing a mentoring program that may be incorporated into the tutoring program, so that tutors will be able to help first-year students with course work but also by giving them other kinds of assistance and advice. The idea is to help them “make the most out of their experience here,” she says.
It’s a job she should succeed at, having made the most of her own time as a student at Keene State. Her advice to students? “My suggestion would be to start small, and then keep building off of that. Get involved in some way; work with a professor or help your fellow classmates. Do more than just go to class every day.”