by Virginia Harmon

When the average person hears the word psychology, words like one’s mindset, the brain, the head, and thinking, almost immediately come to mind. But I’m learning that psychology is about so much more than just those topics. The study of psychology is about everything we take in, everything we incorporate into our daily walks of life.

Last semester, our psychology professor Dr. Shyam, thought it would be neat to start a psychology club. We got together, voted in officers, and just like that, our psychology club was up and running. If you’re interested, meetings are every Monday at at 2 PM in Room 257 of the SPC Downtown Campus. The first thing we did as a club was a trip to the Dali Museum. Anyone who’s familiar with Dali’s work knows what a treat this is. No matter how many times you look at and study it, his mesmerizing works just seems to draw you in more. Next, we did a little community service by helping out at The Metropolitan Ministries in Tampa.

We also got to help and interact with the new psychology students, answering questions, giving suggestions and feedback concerning their papers, and most of all, giving them encouragement. This club has really been rocking since its inception. In my opinion, our “Psychology Fair’” was the most awesome thing we’ve done so far. We didn’t have a huge turnout, but it drew a decent crowd.

Dr. Shyam stated from the beginning that we wanted our club to not only be educational but fun too. And boy do we have fun. Sometimes we have pizza and watch a movie (we do discuss the psychological aspects of the movie), and much of the time we just talk. Our talks are not always about conditioned or unconditioned reality, Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, or Robert Sternberg’s triarchic theory of intelligence, but about almost everything under the sun.

This past Saturday, we took a trip to the Holocaust Museum. It was a guided tour and we were taken around and had things explained to us by Dr. Dave Barris, whose mother was a survivor of the Holocaust. The museum has one of the actual boxcars that were used to transport refugees to and from various concentration camps. Looking at that boxcar and the numerous pictures had a profound effect on me. One of the questions put to us by Dr. Shyam before the trip was, “How could one man, (meaning Adolph Hitler) be able to influence and convince so many people that his ideals were just what the world needed?” It’s a question I’ve asked myself countless times. He didn’t even have “blonde hair and blue eyes” which is what his ideal person would have in this new world order he worked so hard at attaining. If ever there was a person that needed psychological profiling, it would be Adolph Hitler. Not to get into too many details about him, but he was, in my eyes and in the eyes of many others, a monster.

This was an interesting trip which elicited many questions and I state this to bring home my point that joining the psychology club is a great way to learn things about human nature, to try to get to the the bottom of what makes people tick, and to come up with feasible answers. I think it’s logical to say that one will not always come to a solid conclusion about certain things psychologically. But with what I’ve learned from psychology, I know there will forever be individuals who cannot be understood, psychologically or any other way. Why some people do the things they do will remain a mystery to most of us.

Psychology can be fun. It can be sad too. Going to the Holocaust Museum is a testament to this. Believe me becoming a member of our club will enrich your life. We’ve already had two trips to the Dali Museum and, if at all possible, we’re hopeful that we’ll get the chance to go to Washington for the big annual psychological conference. Think about joining. You’ll be glad you did.