Psych Slam 2020 .A Student's Reflection

What is PsychSlam?

A Shared Experience - Psych Slam 2020

What is PsychSlam?

Psych Slam is a competition for Transition Year students organised by the School of Applied Science where students are asked to research a topic in Psychology and present their findings in a 6 minute Power point Presentation. This year's team from Sacred Heart included Kate Whelton, Hannah Cunningham, Claire Murphy, Pricilla Boahen, Chloe Holland and Áine Moloney. The topic we were given to research was ‘How does your Neighbourhood affect your Physical and Mental health.’ We undertook this challenge under the guidance of Ms Harte.

As part of the preparation for this competition we completed a training day in December . Following this we spent a lot of  time researching our topic and discussing what material should be included in the presentation.This was very challenging as the presentation had to follow a Japanese style called PechaKucha (Japanese: ぺちゃくちゃ [petɕa kɯ̥tɕa]) .This is a storytelling format where a presenter shows 20 slides for 20 seconds of commentary each (6 minutes and 40 seconds total).

The competition took place on the 28th of February in the Western Gate Building in U.C.C. Twenty eight teams from school around Munster congregated in a lecture hall where they were divided into groups of 6 and presented to each other.Out of each group, two were selected to go forward to the final .There was one audience choice winner from each group also. In the afternoon the organisers of the event announced the finalists. Despite Sacred Heart not being chosen at this point we enjoyed watching other groups perform and were very proud of the presentation we made.After all groups performed, Joe Pennycook and Simon Spichak, who were the Winner of the Cork Famelab Heats 2020 gave an inspirational performance to all students.

All participants found it to be a very interesting experience It gave us an insight into the world of psychology in everyday lives. We gained experience in teamwork, building and describing knowledge and enjoyed  talking about psychology with other students, researchers and psychologists.We worked closely with students we may not have otherwise had the opportunity to work with .We had many frustrating moments , in particular with the timing of the presentation, many differences of opinions but most importantly we had lots of fun .

Submitted by Aine Moloney on behalf of the Psych Slam group 2020.