Ooi Yee Von

Ooi Yee Von is fascinated by the inner workings of the human mind. “We interact with people every day,” she says, “but we take these interactions for granted. We presume that people are supposed to think a certain way, but we don’t often ask why they think the way they do.”

Yee Von travelled to Dunedin to finish her honours degree in Psychology after beginning her studies in Malaysia. Now she is venturing off again, this time to London, to do her master’s degree at University College London.

She was attracted to the University of Otago because of its strong international reputation, she says. “I wanted to go to a university that pays attention to the quality of its students and courses.” And she believes she made the right decision. “I think the Psychology programme we have at Otago is great,” she says. “There is a lot of high quality research going on here. Even third-year students are given the opportunity to design their own research projects and carry them out.”

Yee Von’s own research has been looking at the effects of billboards on driving performance and has established the existence of dangers associated with the roadside distractions. The relationship between human cognition and technology is a theme she hopes to explore further with her postgraduate studies in London, which will be focused on the ergonomics of human/computer interaction. 

She is quick to dispel the myth that psychology is only concerned with why people become mentally unwell. “There are so many more interesting things we look at,” she says, “from how the environment affects our behaviour, to the way different parts of our brain are involved in processing different kinds of emotion.”

Yee Von credits the Otago Department of Psychology with encouraging a high level of critical thinking from its students. “One of the important things we were taught was not to believe everything we read,” she says. “We were told to always carefully evaluate the conclusions other psychologists had come to.” This is a skill that she believes will be of great value to her as her academic career continues to progress.