Alumni Spotlight: PuiYii Goh
PuiYii Goh (she/her)
- Major: PSY BS (Fall 2019), AuD (Spring 2025)
- Position: Research Audiologist
- Employer: University of Minnesota Auditory Perception and Cognition Laboratory (APC Lab)
What is your work like? What are your duties?
At the APC Lab, we study auditory perception to figure out why people struggle to hear speech in noise (also known as the cocktail party problem). I work on three different behavioral and physiological studies, and with a range of younger and older adult participants. I am responsible for recruiting, running the experiments and collecting participant data, and some data analysis. We do a lot of EEG data collection, so I set up EEG caps and electrodes for our participants. In behavioral studies, participants sit in a sound-treated room and listen to sounds over headphones and make judgments about the sounds heard. We also use pupillometry and EEG measures while participants listen to competing audiobooks to investigate listening effort and whether neural signatures of speech processing could provide a better objective measure that parallels such subjective deficits. My schedule looks different each day because it depends on how many participants we work with and what type of experiment I am running.
How would you say your psychology degree has helped you with your current job?
The psychology research methods (PSY3001W) course taught me how to properly do research and abide by ethical guidelines. The capstone and directed research courses (PSY3901W & PSY4/5993) both taught me hands-on experience in conducting research and writing research papers. During that time, I signed up for the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), which provided me an opportunity to present my research. The measurement and data analysis class (PSY3801) taught me how to perform analysis and understand statistics, which is important in research to understand if something has a significant effect on another. When I was an undergrad, I took a MATLAB coding for psychology class, and that was helpful because the MATLAB language is very useful in research.
How did you find your current position?
As an undergrad, I had to do a senior thesis as part of my BS requirement. I emailed some research labs, and eventually, the APC lab replied and informed me that they had a position available. I completed my thesis with the APC lab, and decided to stick around to see through my project to its completion. I continued working with them into graduate school, as I was pursuing my Doctorate in Audiology.
What advice do you have for our current psych students and recent grads?
Participate in all available opportunities. These are great networking tools, too. There are also some great psychology of hearing and speech language hearing sciences (SLHS) classes you can take if you’re interested in how we hear or in audiology!
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