On Jan. 29, I, as well as the rest of my classmates taking AP Psychology, had the pleasure of attending Brenau University’s “Intense Look into Psychology for High School Students.” I was extremely excited to see what they had in store for us.
Brenau opened its historic campus in Gainesville, Ga. to over 500 students for a special viewing of the award-winning 2015 film “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” and provided several psychology-themed stations and simulations for us to enjoy after the viewing.
The first part of the day began with a welcoming into the university’s Pearce Auditorium, where students would enjoy the film for around two hours. The film was based on the real-life research and unethical experimentation of Dr. Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist and professor at Stanford University. For years, psychologists and researchers have debated the integrity of Zimbardo’s experiment, and it was great to finally experience why.
The movie, paced like a drama but with the intensity of a thriller, allowed us to visualize the historical and highly relevant details of this 40-year-old experiment. Although the content of the film may have been naturally intense for most, I was thrilled to finally see what I had been studying in the classroom dramatized—which gave me a better perspective of the subject as a whole.
After the movie, students were separated from their original classes into smaller groups that were intermixed with students from other schools. These were the groups with which we traveled to different stations. Faculty members from the university’s psychology department guided students through exercises and experiments replicating auditory hallucinations, aging simulations, and other activities using different pieces of equipment. It was an enlightening experience for me to be able to see the psychology we had been learning in a more applied setting.
It was an enriching trip for me to say the least, and I’m extremely grateful to Brenau University for opening up their campus to us and several other students. I plan on studying psychology in some way in college, and I’m glad I have a new view of psychology in the world. I got a hands-on preview of things I could be learning in the future.
