SUNY Old Westbury

The psychology department and its psychology club set up 5 lectures, 1 community outreach event at the Alzheimer’s Disease Foundation of Long Island, 5 student raffle prizes for participating in any event/lecture, 7 student brain game challenges, and 1 vendor live student research demonstration activity. The objectives of our Brain Awareness Week were to make neuroscience and neuropsychology known to our student population. We also advertised through this event a new neuropsychology minor which we are expecting to institute Spring 2017. We had many students interested in this program through lectures during the Brain Awareness Week on themes in our new minor. Students found the event to be highly entertaining and attractive. We had vendors/supporters donate many bags, flash drives, coffee mugs, text books, gift cards, cotton candy, pipcorn, drinks, and small foods. We had a wonderful spnosor from I-Motions who sent technical staff from Boston to set up an experimental demonstration and taught students the technology and utility of eye tracking, facial emotional analyses, and galvanic sweat responses as they relate to psychological experiments (i.e., Stroop, Mental Rotation, and Implicit Attitudes Test). Our students were blown away at this demonstration and we were very fortunate to have this occur. In addition, we have set up great faculty lectures on hot topics in neuroscience/neuropsychology to educate our students beyond the classroom. We had students compete daily for prizes using psychological mock experiments and had our psychology club students and volunteers manually take down data as an additional hands on-real time learning experience. For our first time doing this event it was a blast!

The BAW participation has greatly enhanced student interest in neuroscience and neuropsychology. Our students have asked other departments within the college to sponsor similar events as the BAW. As such students are now trying to actively begin organizing ideas for next years events and asked it would be done each semester. We have had nearly 70 students interested in our new minor as a result of BAW.

Try to contact as many local and community based vendors for sponsor based supports, donations, etc. We were very successful in approaching vendors and local community businesses to get this event off the ground.