Am trying to help my nephew with his personal statement for uni. He is applying to ready 'Psychology'. Can anybody tell me if this should be capitalised, or not?
Yes, if it's the course's name, or that of a department he's applying to, then it's Psychology.The college could have, say, a Department of Law, or a Department of Medicine and a Professor of Psychology not a department of law or a Department of law etc. The applicants apply to read Law, Psychology etc. And as yogasun says too, using the capital letter marks the word out.It's the key word in the text.
technically, of course, all the advice is here is wrong, including mine; maths, psychology, media studies etc don't deserve capitals at all (though the names of languages are capitalised) - it's purely a tactical measure to please those who are going to read the statement! So go ahead with the upper case.
Subjects are capitalised, that's how we distinguish between them as proper nouns and just nouns.This is a very important distinction if you think of history for example - if you used it in a sentence it would be, 'The history of the bridge is unknown', whereas you would say, 'I studied History at university'