BSc Neuroscience & Psychology at King's – Welcome to our new students for 2024

Congratulations – you’re in! We hope you are looking forward to starting with us at King’s. This webpage includes information, guidance, and advice to help you get started on your BSc Neuroscience and Psychology degree. The information below focuses on what you need to know before you arrive and on what you will do in the first few days and weeks of your degree. The first session of the BSc Neuroscience and Psychology degree will be an on-campus induction session on Tuesday 17 September 2024. However, there are several things that you should do before then, as well as other activities that you can opt into.

Download the Welcome to King's App

The Welcome to King’s App includes the Welcome Calendar for new students at King’s. This will show you what’s happening for the whole period of Welcome to King’s and allow you to book into events – both during the online week (9-13 September) and the on-campus week (16-20 September). You can download the Welcome to King’s App for free from an Appstore (Google or Apple) – though please check carefully when doing so because there are other Apps available with very similar names.

Introductory work for the Term 1 psychology modules

During open-offer events, many of you asked how you can prepare for your degree - now is a great time to start! We have identified some reading and other activities that will introduce you to some of your Term 1 modules. There are details of this material below. This will take less than a day (e.g., done over a few evenings); please complete this work by Monday, 23 September.

Check your King's email account regularly

Email is one of the main ways that we will contact you with important information about your studies. Once you are a member of King’s College London, the University will no longer use the email account that you used in your communication with King’s during the application and pre-admission process. Therefore, it is very important that you get into a regular habit of checking your King's email account – ideally, every working day – because otherwise you may miss out on important information. There may only be a few emails in the weeks leading up to the start of term, but once term has started, there will be a great deal of information coming to you via your King's email account.

Improve your Digital Skills

Your King's IT Account will give you access to an enormous range of online resources and will open up many opportunities for learning. To help you make the most of these resources and opportunities, King’s has designed a Key Digital Skills programme. You can self-register for this online course as soon as you have the K-number and password for your King's IT Account. We recommend that you make a start on this course as soon as you can.

These activities are designed to give you the skills and information that you need to get started on your Neuroscience and Psychology degree. Some activities will be at a specific time and others you can choose when you do them.

The induction will start with an introductory information session to give you an overview of your first term on the Neuroscience and Psychology degree. This information session will be on Tuesday 17 September (from 10.00 to about 11.00). At 13.00, we will host a welcome buffet lunch for all new and returning students.  At 14.00, you will go on a semi-guided tour of the Denmark Hill Campus. This will give you the opportunity to familiarise yourself with your new learning environment and meet some of the lecturers and teaching staff.

On Wednesday 18 September, there will be a short induction to the virtual learning environment, digital resources, and online learning systems in use at King's (from 10.00-10.30, Gainsford Lecture Hall, Weston Education Centre). Immediately following this induction, you will hear from Career Services and representatives from the Sports and Wellness Team at King's to introduce you to some of the extracurricular opportunities available.

During the week of 9-13 September, you will also receive an invitation to meet with your Personal Tutor in a group session held at Denmark Hill campus, likely sometime between the 16 and 20 of September. Therefore, please keep some space clear in your diary on those days for your degree induction activities.

For the remainder of King’s Welcome Fortnight, there are no compulsory induction events for the BSc Neuroscience and Psychology course. However, there will be many events at King’s that you can get involved in. For example, the Informational Fair between Monday 16 and Thursday 19 September or the Cultural Fair on 19 September at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (the part of King’s that you are now a member of). There will also be events online. So do keep an eye out for anything that interests you.

Compulsory BSc Psychology Term 1 Modules:

• The Making of a Brain
• Psychology and the Brain
• Psychology and Society
• Research Methods and Statistics with R 1

You will hear more about these modules during the information session on Tuesday 17 September.

We also recommend that you take a look at this guide that has been put together for students who are about to start university. It is called Know Before You Go and will help prepare you for many of the practical and personal challenges associated with entering higher education.

• Schacter, D., Gilbert, D., & Wegner, D. with Hood, B. M. Psychology (European Edition). Published by Worth Publishers / Palgrave.
• Carlson, N. R., & Birkett, M. Foundations of Behavioral Neuroscience. Published by Pearson.
• Reisberg, D. Cognition: Exploring the science of the mind. Published by W. W. Norton & Co.
• Sutton, R., & Douglas, K. Social psychology. Published by Palgrave Macmillan.
• Leman, P., Bremner, A., Parke, R. D., & Gauvin, M. Developmental psychology. Published by McGraw-Hill.
• Maltby, J. Day, L. & Macaskill, A. Personality, individual differences and intelligence. Published by Pearson.
• Haselgrove, M. Learning: A very short introduction. Published by Oxford University Press.
• Stanovich, K. E. How to think straight about psychology. Published by Pearson.
• Howell, D. C. Fundamental statistics for the behavioral sciences. Published by Cengage Learning.
• Gravetter, F. J., Forzano, L. B. & Rakow, T. Research methods for the behavioural sciences. Published by Cengage Learning.

Where relevant, we will explain how you access your copies individual of these textbooks in the Induction sessions on 19-20 September.

Meet some of the team

Dr Yannis Paloyelis - meet the team

Director BSc Neuroscience and Psychology,

Dr Andrew Isaac Meso

Deputy Senior Tutor, Module Lead Research Methods and Statistics with R 1 & 2

Dr Marina Yasvoina

E-learning lead; Module co-ordinator for Making of a Brain

Dr Katja Brodmann

Senior Tutor, Psychology coordinator and Module coordinator for Psychology and the Brain

Dr Andrew H. Bell

Admissions Tutor, Module lead Research Methods and Statistics with R 3 & The Cognitive Brain

Dr Maria Elena Stefanou

Module coordinator for Psychology and Development and Distorted Worlds

Dr Yi-Jhong (Denny) Han

EEG Lab Manager

Dr Antony Trotter

Module coordinator for Psychology and Society, co-lead in Research Methods & Statistics

Dr Frantisek Vasa

Module lead for Computational Neuroscience and Machine Learning in Neuroscience

In your Psychology and Society module, you will be learning about the interaction between the individual and the social world: how the social environment shapes individuals, and how individuals shape the social environment. This module acts as an introduction to the discipline of social psychology.

Your first activity for this module is to write an answer the following questions:

1. ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What makes me a good person?’ Each should be answered in a single sentence. There are no right or wrong answers to these questions, so don’t overthink your responses. "

2. Your second activity is to read a research paper (Cohen et al., 2017). You do not need to learn or memorise the content of this article, but you may find it useful to read the paper using the questions posed in this handout you will complete in small groups in your first seminar (in the week beginning 26 September)."

3. Before you arrive at King’s College London to study on the BSc Neuroscience and Psychology degree, you will find it beneficial to work through some material related to biological psychology and neuroscience, because this is the focus of your Psychology and the Brain module. A good place to start is a publication by the British Neuroscience Association (BNA), which is free to download from the BNA. The sections most relevant to your study in the first few weeks are those at the beginning of the publication. Therefore, your activity is to read through Sections 1-3, but you may also want to look over the material on the developing nervous system and brain imaging. You could also look at this neuroscience and psychology blog which links to some interesting articles.

Each module requires 150 hours of work – making a total of 1200 hours across the year for the 8 modules. That’s a lot of work to fit into 36 weeks (28 weeks of term time plus two 4-week periods between the University terms) – but the effort is well worth it! Most of this time will be spent in some form of independent study. Therefore, for much of the year it will be up to you to organise your time in the way that helps you to get the most from the course. To give you an idea of what this means, you might choose to work 40 hours per week every week during term and do the same for two of the eight weeks that fall outside of term time. Alternatively, it might suit you better to do 35 hours every week during term and outside of term time, taking a week off at Christmas / New Year and half a week off in the period between Terms 2 and 3.