11 November 2019
Ms Lydia Tow, 25. studied psychological science at the Singapore campus of James Cook University. The insights she gleaned into human behaviour during her bachelor’s degree programme would later prove useful in her job as a creative copywriter and content developer at the creative agency Mills Design.
Ms Tow says: “I’ve always been naturally curious and interested in the why — why people perceive, think and act a certain way — so when I got the idea in my head that I wanted to study psych, it was going to happen, one way or another. Psychology is about perception, persuasion and cognition, among many other things.”
The 2018 graduate says that being able to understand the motivations of her clients’ target audiences allows her to broadly predict how they are likely to react to certain ideas.
She says: “As to exactly why I chose to pursue a career as a creative, I suppose this harks back to my love of books, creative storytelling and Disney films. So somewhere during the course of my undergraduate studies, I got lured by this siren call of wanting to create something just as engaging and capable of moving people.”
As a psychology student at JCU, she even wrote a thematic analysis on Disney princesses. Going beyond the romantic storyline, she examined the media’s influence on the formation of gender identity in children, as well as the changing role of women as seen through the lens of the Disney princesses, both classic and contemporary.