Profile
Birsu Kandemirci
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About Me:
Hi, I’m Birsu (pronounced Beer-Sue if we ever meet in person!). I live in Manchester with my partner -and no, I don’t like rainy weather, so I’m not sure what we are doing here! I love travelling, hiking, cooking, and playing board games!
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I’m a researcher in developmental psychology and also a lecturer at the university. I’m specifically interested in young children’s creativity, their language abilities, and their social skills. I recently started reading and researching about how children understand humour, and I think it’s fascinating!
I enjoy discovering new places (although I get lost quite easily, so every journey is an adventure!), camping when the weather is nice, and walking near a river or in the woods. I sometimes go for a run too, but if I’m completely honest, I don’t really enjoy it. I only do it because it’s healthy 🙂
I love teaching at the university, especially when I can see that students are interested in a topic and they ask questions. It feels like I am making a change in others’ lives, or at least make them curious about a psychology topic which is quite exciting. I also enjoy doing research because it allows me to find some answers (or find even more questions) about some questions that I am curious about. Staying curious is what motivates me as a researcher, and I want my students to experience that too 🙂
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My pronouns are:
she/her
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My Work:
I am a developmental psychology researcher and a lecturer
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My research focuses on young children’s abilities. During my career, I focused on many different areas. I am very interested in children’s creative skills (for example when they make up a story), their social skills (for example, how they understand that other people might think or feel differently from themselves), their language skills (for example how children who use different languages might have similar or different skills) among others. Before I became a lecturer at the university, I was a full-time researcher and my role involved doing fun experiments with children in the lab or at their schools. When working with children, it is quite important to keep the experiments interesting, fun, and game-like, because otherwise children might get bored or tired. It means that, by making the experiments fun for them, I end up having lots of fun with them too!
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My Typical Day:
I wake up at around 7.30 and have breakfast. I get ready and go to the university. If I am teaching that day, I prepare my teaching materials, go find my classroom, and deliver my lecture. If it is not a teaching day, then I read and answer to many emails, work on my research projects, and sometimes go for a coffee with my colleagues. I leave work at around 5.30.
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One of the interesting things about being a lecturer is that your days can be quite different from one another. Some days I have three lectures back to back, which can be quite tiring, but some days I don’t have any, and I have lots of other things to do. Some of the things I do include reading and marking student essays, creating research projects for them, researching and preparing my lectures (I try to make them fun too by adding fun photos, videos, or short quizzes), checking if my students are attending their lectures and are happy with their course, and having meetings with them about academic or personal topics.
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What I'd do with the prize money:
I love talking to young students about what it is like to be a psychologist. In the past, I delivered sessions at primary schools and explained to them what psychology means, but I would love to have the opportunity to “show” them how to be a psychologist too. If I win the prize money, I would buy some materials that we often use in developmental psychology research (it may sound like laboratory equipment, but mostly we use puppets, picture books, and colourful boxes with toys in them!), take those to schools with me and demonstrate how to create an experiment, and get students to come up with their own ideas and set up experiments!
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Education:
I am from Turkey and I lived there until I was 24, so the names of my schools might sound a bit different 🙂
Primary school: Batı Anadolu Çimento İlköğretim Okulu
High school: Karşıyaka Anadolu Lisesi
Undergraduate (psychology): Mersin University
MSc (developmental psychology): Lancaster University
PhD: The University of Sheffield
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Qualifications:
In Turkey we didn’t have the equivalents of GCSEs or A levels. Instead we took an exam once we finished high school, and based on our score we got into a university. I have a BSc (hons), an MSc, and a PhD.
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Work History:
My first job was working as a drama teacher at a high school. I then did lots of translation work (I did both simultaneous interpretation and written translation) between Turkish and English. I worked at a pub as an improv theatre actor (we were a team of 4 actors and we were acting at the corner of the bar on a make-shift stage). I worked as a research assistant with medical doctors and psychologists for one year. My first job in the UK was working as a post-doctoral researcher at Lancaster University. After that I had a job as a lecturer at Kingston University, London.
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Current Job:
Lecturer at University of Manchester
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Employer:
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
(research + learn + teach) x er
What did you want to be after you left school?
An astronomer
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Once I wore odd knee-high socks to school (they were bright and stripy, one was red and one was blue). My teacher sent me back home to change them
If you weren't doing this job, what would you choose instead?
I would love to be paid to travel around the world, maybe a TV show presenter about travelling!
Who is your favourite singer or band?
It keeps changing as I like discovering new music, but recently I've been enjoying Paolo Nutini's music
What's your favourite food?
meze or tapas style food with lots of options
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
1) I wish I could sing, 2) I wish I could see my family and friends back in Turkey more often, 3) I wish my hair wasn't going grey
Tell us a joke.
Have you heard the joke about the giraffe’s neck? It’s a long one.
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