{"id":3366,"date":"2019-11-21T09:59:03","date_gmt":"2019-11-21T09:59:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/psychology\/?p=3366"},"modified":"2020-01-17T10:43:22","modified_gmt":"2020-01-17T10:43:22","slug":"psychology-qa-series-tom-prosser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/psychology\/psychology-qa-series-tom-prosser\/","title":{"rendered":"Psychology Q&A Series: Tom Prosser – PhD student and Instructor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tom Prosser<\/a> is a Ph.D. candidate in Health Psychology. He received a bachelor\u2019s degree in psychology from Canterbury Christ Church University. He is now going into his fifth year of a part-time Ph.D. and is a University Instructor within the <\/em>psychology department<\/em><\/a>. His research focuses on university student drinking and how E-intervention (electronic based interventions – Apps and Websites) can help students moderate their drinking behaviour.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Hey Tom,\nwould you mind telling us a little bit about yourself?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I grew up\nin Reigate, Surrey, but I now live in Chartham, a small village just outside of\nCanterbury. I moved to Canterbury in 2012 to start my undergraduate degree at\nCanterbury Christ Church University (CCCU) and I’ve been here ever since.\nCanterbury is a lovely place to live and since moving here I’ve bought my first\nhome and got married this year, so the area really feels like home now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well\ncongratulations! You’ve been here a while now, what attracted you to the\npart-time PhD\/ Part-time instructor role? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has\nalways been a dream of mine to work towards achieving a doctorate. I was never\nvery academic at school, often underachieving in exams due to my dyslexia.\nHowever, I had some very supportive teachers and lecturers pushed me on to\nachieve a 2:1 in my undergraduate degree. I was due to start a master\u2019s by\nresearch at CCCU, when my supervisor told be about a job advert for a part-time\nPhD\/part-time university instructor post. The benefit was that compared to\nother PhD students, who often either are scholarship students or self-fund,\nthis would be fully funded, and because I would be teaching, I get paid a\nsalary as well. While I was told not to get my hopes up as it isn\u2019t common to\njump straight from undergraduate to PhD candidate, I applied and was surprised\nto be offered. My advice to any students wondering what to do after their\ndegree, is that even if you think that you’ll never get a job, it is always\nworth applying, as you might be surprised by the result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s great\nadvice, so what are your research interests?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m\nfascinated by the idea of utilising technology to help treat risky health behaviours.\nI started my PhD with the idea of looking at how interventions might help\ncommon student mental health issues such as depression, anxiety and stress.\nHowever, I after doing some primarily research, I discovered that it was\nalready being quite heavily researched. So I changed my focus over to student\ndrinking, as it is quite challenging to ask students to change a behaviour that\nis still strongly ingrained in the university experience. I hope that with new\ngenerations of students, who are knowledgeable and more reliant on technology,\ncoming into universities that Apps and Websites will be increasingly useful to\nhelping change risky drinking behaviour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are there\nany exciting projects are you working on? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started\noff my PhD by carrying out a meta-analysis into how effective E-interventions\nwere at reducing student drinking, and I was very pleased with it being\npublished in the Journal of American college health (here<\/a>). I was also able to take the\nresults of the meta-analysis to a conference in 2018 (ESRII 2018 Dublin<\/a>). The results showed that\nE-interventions were effective at helping university students reduce their\ndrinking. However, the effectiveness of the intervention was quite small, often\ndisappearing after six months. Furthermore, often only a small number of\nstudents used the intervention. This raises the question on how to increase the\neffectiveness and the uptake of these alcohol interventions? The next studies\nin my thesis focus around understanding students views of alcohol\ninterventions, and ways that we can increase student\u2019s uptake of alcohol\ninterventions. I have also worked alongside the student union as a advisory\nresearcher as they have worked towards achieving a Alcohol Impact award. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What has\nbeen your best experience at Canterbury Christ Church University?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s\ndifficult to pick just one, as an instructor I particularly enjoy working with\nthe final year project students, helping them develop their reports. It\u2019s\nalways refreshing to see students with a passion for what they\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a PhD\nstudent, it probably winning the departmental three-minute thesis competition.\nIt\u2019s tricky to reduce everything you do down to three minutes and still include\nenough detail to get the complexity of your project across.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How would\nyou describe the faculty at Canterbury Christ Church University?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I always\nsay that we are very fortunate to have such friendly and supportive faculty at\nCCCU. I have enjoyed going from a student to a colleague, although for the\nfirst few months I felt like an impostor, pretending to know what I was doing.\nAll of the staff in the department are really supportive of the PhD as well,\noften asking how it is going, and providing really useful advice from when they\nwere working towards their PhD. I have always enjoyed how this supportive\nenvironment isn’t reserved for a handful of lucky students, the lecturers here\nreally want to see all their students succeed and develop. This makes it a\nreally nice environment to develop both as a researcher and as a lecturer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do\nyou do in your free time? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Haha!\nWhat free time?! Just kidding! Although in all fairness, when the marking comes\nin, you’ll see me staring off into the distance with my seventh cup of\ncoffee. During the quieter times I try and keep a good work-life-PhD balance. I\ntry and keep in shape, mainly because a lot of my working week is spent behind\na desk for long hours. If the weather is good, you’ll find me out running along\nthe Great Stour way, and if I can get away for longer, you’ll find my half-way\nup a mountain in the lake district or Snowdon national park. Apart from that my\nfree time is spent the usual way: TV, reading, walking around Canterbury and\nspending time with my wife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When are\nyou due to submit and what are your plans afterwards?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I plan to\nsubmit my thesis around April 2020, so I am currently in the process of running\nmy last few studies and writing my thesis up. Once I am the other side of the\nPhD, I would like to stay in academia and become a lecturer. I have loved\nlearning how to deliver seminars and lectures and I find the whole process very\nrewarding, staying in academia will also allow me to keep developing my\nresearch skills and exploring the factors around student drinking. I’m excited\nto see where life takes me!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is there someone you want to see on our Psychology Q&A series? Leave a comment at the bottom of the page and we will see what we can do! <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Prosser is a Ph.D. candidate in Health Psychology. He received a bachelor\u2019s degree in psychology from Canterbury Christ Church University. He is now going into his fifth year of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6054,"featured_media":3373,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,17,65,73,734,730,1],"tags":[333,738,746,741,742],"class_list":["post-3366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-about-us","category-academia","category-greetings","category-health-and-wellbeing","category-instructors","category-qa","category-uncategorised","tag-health-and-wellbeing","tag-instructors","tag-phd","tag-qa","tag-staff"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"authorName":"Richard Weatherall","featuredImage":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/psychology\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/562\/2019\/11\/Tom.png","postExcerpt":"Tom Prosser is a Ph.D. candidate in Health Psychology. He received a bachelor\u2019s degree in psychology from Canterbury Christ Church University. He is now going into his fifth year of […]","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6054"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3366"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3445,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3366\/revisions\/3445"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}