by Liza Ivanova (MRes graduate)
Like most final year undergraduate psychology students, I was juggling assignments, my wellbeing, and the all-important dissertation, while also being told to think about our futures; including postgraduate degrees. I’d taken such a wide spread of modules across my degree, covering everything from clinical to cognitive to social psychology, so picking a single postgrad course felt genuinely overwhelming. How do you narrow down a whole discipline into one course when you’ve spent three years loving all of it? Then I mentioned to my supervisor that I’d happily just do my project forever to which he said, “Well, a psychology research master’s might be something you’d be really interested in.” I hadn’t even considered one existed. I had no idea that you could spend a whole extra degree chasing the feeling of a research project coming together. Turns out a lot of universities called my bluff and, after some searching, I applied for NTU’s MSc in Psychological Research Methods and a few months later I had a spot secured for whatever came next…
The start wasn’t easy. I graduated and, the week after, was sitting in induction. It was a strange feeling, going from the relief of finishing one degree straight into the nerves of starting another, with barely a week to catch your breath in between. Our course leaders didn’t sugar-coat how demanding the course would be, and I panicked that maybe I couldn’t do this. Once I calmed down, I reminded myself why I was there: to actually deepen my love of research.
First semester was rough. Moving back home, starting a new course, and picking up a part-time job all at once was a lot at once. But looking back, I can point to exactly what came out of it: qualitative research skills, a grounding in psychometrics (the theory, technique, and development of psychological measurement, testing, and assessment), and R, a statistics programme that took a long time to click. There were points where I sat staring at lines of code that refused to run and wondered if I’d made the right choice. Watching staff who were visibly passionate about these methods helped and slowly, module by module, things that had looked impossible in October started making sense by January.
Things shifted once I came back from the break between semesters. My project gave me full autonomy in designing it and through it I connected with lecturers both inside and outside the university. Support was never far off: one-to-one supervision meetings kept things on track and staff were happy to answer questions about the project or the modules, whether that was over email or after a lecture. I also took two modules I was so excited about, including SEM (structural equation modelling, a way of testing how different variables relate to and predict each other) which pushed my statistics abilities further than I thought I was capable of. If semester one gave me the foundations, semester two is where things came together. Once in-person teaching ended, the final stretch went entirely into the project, from building my own intervention to recruiting participants by word of mouth the project was a labour of love. I’m still to this day proud of what I made.
Looking back, the degree was challenging and at points uncomfortable, but that discomfort came from real growth rather than from things going wrong. I can barely recognise the person I was at the start of it, in a good way. The version of me who panicked in that first induction session couldn’t have written code, run an SEM model or designed her own intervention from scratch and by the end of the year, that was exactly what I’d done. It gave me the foundation for the next step: a funded PhD at NTU.
If you’re on the fence, you don’t need to know your specialism going in. I didn’t. I picked the degree wanting a wide range of modules but once the research project started, I realised I wanted to spend most of my time on it. The way I had with my undergraduate dissertation. So, I switched from the MSc to the MRes, which weights the project more heavily and lets you build your second-semester modules around it. The switch itself was smooth and well supported by the course leaders, who talked me through exactly what changing pathways would mean for my timetable and my final project before I committed to anything.
If what you loved about your dissertation was the research itself, the asking of your own question and following it through, this Masters is worth a look. It won’t be easy and there will be weeks where you wonder what you’ve signed yourself up for. But this degree gave me exactly what I was looking for: the opportunity to keep doing the work I loved most.
- If you enjoyed your undergraduate research project and would love to take your interest in research further, why not explore our MRes Psychological Research Methods and see what opportunities it could open up?
