The course provides a solid foundational understanding of intelligence and a comprehensive overview of the research field

What made you choose the course Intelligence and IQ?

I chose the course partly due to personal interest: the subject can be controversial in some circles, and my personal experience is that it is often met with many prejudices. For me, it's important to know more in order to provide a nuanced view of what it entails and how the research field looks when discussing it in various forums.

Another reason is related to my future career choice as a researcher in cognitive science, and my current career as a PhD student: understanding intelligence, its research field, and the IQ metric is crucial for me to understand human cognition, but also to understand how my research on working memory is influenced by it. Performance in working memory correlates with intelligence and IQ.

What is the best thing about the course?

It's incredibly informative with a lot of content. I felt like I got a fairly good and broad picture of the research field in a short amount of time. However, the course requires a lot of personal responsibility as there is a lot of reading outside of the seminars. The oral exam was very good because the format allowed for more reflection on the content and the opportunity to discuss with the examiner who in this case was one of the teachers. The fact that the course is offered online was also very advantageous as I study/work in Stockholm.

What do you want to work with in the future?

I hope to continue in academia after my dissertation, and I also hope to work more with intelligence-related research.

What opportunities do you see this course providing you in the workplace?

For me as a PhD student and potentially future researcher in cognitive science/psychology, I believe this course has given me valuable insight into how intelligence affects and can affect performance in different types of research. That is good to understand when researching performance-based data. This insight allows for more conscious control over it, leading to more rigorous and credible research.

What would you say to someone considering taking the course?

That they should definitely take the course! It provides a good foundational understanding of intelligence and a broad presentation of the research field. If you're studying psychology in any form, you'll find it very useful for understanding how human cognition works and how people's performance can affect research results. If you work with people, the course contributes to a better understanding of human abilities; how they can differ, why, and how the differences can manifest. If you simply want to know more to form a nuanced view of a (sometimes) controversial subject, then you should definitely take the course to gain a better understanding overall.