Psychology Club
Founded last spring, Psychology Club is a relatively new club on campus. Every week, students who are interested in psychology gather to discuss how the brain works and why we think the way we do.
Both co-heads of the club, upper Wendi Yan and senior Jessica Zhao, have studied psychology on their own. They decided to found the club to share their personal interest in psychology with all Exonians. Yan said that one of the main motives for founding the club was to conduct experiments with others who were interested. “Since the only psychology course is a senior lottery course, both of us wished we could study psychology and even do some experiments alongside the normal academic workload, so we thought having a Psychology Club would be a great idea to just have buddies to learn psychology with,” Yan said. Zhao hopes that Psychology Club can provide students with a platform to learn more about and discuss psychology. “I think it’s important for everyone to explore something, and psychology is one of the things they can explore,” she said. “That’s what I value the most—if you want to explore something, you should have the opportunity to do that.”
During the weekly club meetings, students get to discuss a specific topic in psychology that they have researched. “I really like that everyone in our club has very different interests and views of psychology,” Zhao said. “For every meeting we try to do something different.” Last week, they talked about the psychology of why people find cute certain things cute—for example, why our brains perceive puppies as adorable. Senior Richard Chen, one of the club members who joined the discussion, found the topic very intriguing, saying that, “It was a really interesting discussion and is something worthwhile to attend.” Two weeks ago, the club talked about the psychology of death. The discussion turned to how people think about death, especially people who have witnessed a death. After college acceptances, the club discussed how stress affects students’ mental health. “A lot of times we tailor the meetings to the events or holidays in that week,” Yan said. After the presidential election in last November, the club watched TED talks on moral psychology and discussed how psychology could affect the result of the election. “Psychology club is a great place to get together with fellow Exonians and discuss issues fundamental to human nature, ranging from the reason why we enjoy winning games to the thought of facing our own mortalities,” club member and upper Keyu Cao said. “The coheads do a good job engaging members in conversations.”
Apart from the regular club meetings, the club also organised a field trip to the neuroscience lab at Brandeis University at the beginning of this year and hosted a mental health forum last term. In the mental health forum, students, faculty and members of the administration came together to discuss the mental health climate on campus and envision what Exeter could do to improve. “There had been heated discussions online about mental health, but the topic was never brought to an offline, more formal conversation.” Yan said. “We saw the need to do so and that was how the idea of hosting the forum came about.” They invited Principal Lisa MacFarlane, Dean of Student Health and Wellness Gordon Coole, Jeanne Stern and Szu-Hui Lee from the health center, Science Instructor Townley Chisholm, English Instructor Barbara Desmond, Modern Languages Instructor Ellen Glassner, seniors Carissa Chen and Kesi Wilson to join the panel. “The forum became a giant Harkness discussion on the topic of mental health,” Yan said. “It was really great to hear so many wonderful ideas and voices from the different parts of the community!” Lower Dylan Yin who went to the forum last term agreed it was very necessary to have dialogues among students and faculty members on students’ mental health issues. “The discussion was much needed especially for students because it allowed for them to understand the teacher’s or faculty’s perspective on different mental health issues present on campus,” Yin said, “I really liked that it was an open conversation and safe space, because that made people [feel] comfortable to voice their concerns.”
Currently, the club is trying to contact alumni to get internships for students in the field of psychology. They are also trying to work on a project to open more psychology courses available for lowerclassmen and open more courses on psychology. “At Andover, we saw that they had more subjects on psychology open to the students, so we want that at Exeter as well,” Zhao said. Despite the failure of past psychology experiments they tried to conduct on campus, the club decide to modify their experiments and look forward to putting more feasible ones on campus this year. “We had several social experiment ideas at the beginning of the school year, but they didn’t get passed for various reasons,” Yan said. “Looking back on them, I also felt like they were too ambitious and too hard to carry out. I definitely want to do some feasible experiments with the club next year.”
No prior knowledge of psychology is required to join the club. “A lot of people come here with no understanding of psychology at all, which is totally fine,” Zhao said. “Most of our members don’t have a lot of background with it, so by learning more about psychology we are able to do more complicated things, like conduct research.”