I’m sitting at my desk in the Social Science Center, sad because it’s my last day of work! With all my actual work mostly taken care of, I thought it would be cool to blog about what it’s been like to work as a research assistant (RA) at the LRCN Lab in the Department of Psychology at Western!
The LRCN Lab @ Western!
Last summer, I was thinking about grad school in psychology (aka doing my Master’s). I was talking to my favouritest psychology prof at Brescia, Dr. Jennifer Sutton, and she told me that it would be very important to get some research experience for grad school. Luckily, she knew that the LRCN Lab was looking for a new research assistant! She suggested I go meet with Dr. Marc Joanisse, who heads up the Language, Reading, and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Western. At first I was confused by the term “lab”, which can mean many things. In this case, it basically means a group of people under the direction of a major researcher who are loosely interested in doing the same kind of research. In Dr. Joanisse’s lab, researchers are interested in learning more about how we learn language, how reading develops, and how the processes involved in reading might go awry.
It’s pretty interesting stuff, especially since researchers use techniques like ERP (where you wear a special electricity-sensing cap) and fMRI (where they scan your brain)!
It’s been a really fun and informative year. I’ve been lucky to attend lab meetings, go to brown bags (which are free research talks by people in our “Language and Concepts Research Group”) and read a bunch of papers. I got to help with running the lab, like managing our research funding and helping with the process of getting ethics approval for our studies. And, of course, I got to help with research: designing it, conducting it, analyzing data…the whole thing! It was hard work (and involved a surprising amount of math!) but it was very rewarding.
Perhaps most importantly, I met some awesome people who taught me so much about psychology and really helped me with my fourth year and the process of applying to grad school.
Even though I know I’m going to miss this lab, I know I’ll take everything I’ve learned with me to grad school next year. :) Thanks guys!!
Kate