ABSTRACT
I am interested in people and always have been, or to put it another way, I am fundamentally nosey. When I was 16, I started working at a large British high street bank in the customer services department. This initially started as a holiday job for the summer after I had completed my GCSE exams but soon became a regular holiday job for the next five years whilst I was finishing my education. I loved working there. It was a very busy branch with lots happening all the time, and there was a group of fantastic staff that socially gelled together very well, providing lots of post-work socializing. However, in the work environment, it fascinated me that for the most part, morale was very low, people didn’t work together that effectively, a large proportion of the staff was stressed, and performance was often not very high (unsurprisingly, you might say). This stark contrast between how people were outside of work and within the working environment really fueled my interest in learning more about how people operate and the influence of the environment and culture. Combine this with the influence of my family background in that a number of my family worked within helping professions, and it seemed to lead me naturally into completing a psychology degree.
