I had the opportunity to do my first internship with Erasmus+ as a Research Assistant at Goldsmiths University of London InfantLab in the UK. This internship was with my supervisor Dr. Caspar Addyman and also with a friendly, helpful and successful group of colleagues. My supervisor had another intern like me, Marena from Boston University (with EUSA), Maisha and Angel from Summer School (A Level Psychology students) and with three PhD students Nataşa, Zehra, Giulia (post-doc) and I had a chance to work with them in the InfantLab. All these three students need to work with babies to prove their theories and write their doctoral dissertations.

Betul in the Infantlab with one of our participants

Nataşa’s studies includes Voice Matching and Sounding Shapes, Zehra’s study Music in Infancy and Giulia’s study includes EEG in infants. And my supervisor has his own study called Happy Talk. During these studies, I helped them in the process of arranging the cameras in the room to be observed, preparing the certificates given to the participants, transferring the collected data to Excel, and after the studies on the basis of the reliability of the studies I did video coding and I had the opportunity to make observations during the study. I also learned thanks to my supervisor’s training the introduction to programming called R Studio, which is similar to SPSS but done by coding. As a result of this programming, I learned how to create and interpret tables in Excel.

The InfantLab is not only a place where I do my internship, it is a working environment that helps me to exchange a lot of ideas with my colleagues and to make new friendships, to learn new information about psychology and to improve my language. After an efficient and enjoyable two-month internship, I received my Erasmus+ certificate and said goodbye to the InfantLab.

Betül Aygün is studying Psychology at Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University in Turkey. She was an Erasmus+ student at Goldsmiths University of London InfantLab between 1^st of July and 4^th of September in 2019.