My first day went well. First impressions:
Neuropsychology: Professor was all over the place. So it's kinda hard to get a feel for the material at all. If I didn't know this guy already and that he will not always be so all over the place I'd be very worried right now. But since I do I'm just going to stay with knowing it'll be a hard class that will take a lot of studying. Prob going to actually read the book, too. Which I normally don't do because I get a lot more out of lectures. They are also teleconferencing to another campus and because of this he cannot write on the board (because they can't see it) which is usually the main thing he does. So that's going to be really challenging. Hopefully he makes more detailed powerpoints or actually lets us have them or something. Because it's going to be hard as fuck to write notes without any written visual. He spits out info rapid fire.
Psych and the Law: Will be easy. Have heard a lot of this stuff already, having taken the same prof for Clinical, Abnormal, and Police Psychology. However, it's only a midterm and final so I have to score well on both. Same prof as neuro.
Honors Crit Questions: This will be very time consuming, but I think is something perfect to have on a resume for grad school when trying to get into a forensic program. It will be a good 3-5 hours of reading per week. I'm doing two presentations and we drew numbers to pick what we wanted. I got two very early in the semester, 1/26 is on Forensics and Informants (the material I'm drawing from will be the book Convicting the Innocent. Was not one I really wanted but this was a high number pick. My early number pick is a chapter in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined which is titled "Anarchy to Agriculture" which is, I assume, about the effect of agriculture (which began circa 10k years ago) on violence rates. This is also when human settlements started becoming larger. This presentation is two weeks after the first one. So, after 02/09, all I'll have for the rest of the semester is reading the rest of the books (and we need to participate in discussion and come up with a discussion question for each class based on that day's reading) and a research paper. We are reading these books really fast, so it's kinda hard coming up with a presentation unless I read way in advance, which I guess is what I'll be doing. Three people from my honors seminar class (two of whom I like, lol) are in this class so that's nice. Professor seems cool.
Personality Test and Measurement: This will be an easy class. The professor is oddly brilliant, he's very tangential and sort of takes up strange lines of questioning, but there is something profound about some of the things he says. He seems to very much be on the side of lessening human suffering and learning from your experiences which is nice. He is definitely straight up afraid of what will go on in this country with Trump although he didn't out and out say it that way. I am looking forward to hearing him speak more.
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