Training Goals
Our primary training goal is to prepare students for a research career in academic or non-academic settings. To achieve this goal, we involve students in ongoing research from the beginning of their graduate career and help them to develop their own research programs as their training proceeds. To expose students to a broad range of approaches and methodologies, we expect all students to work with different faculty over the course of their training. To the extent it meets their interests, we also encourage students to conduct some of their work with researchers outside of the core social psychology program. The formal course requirements are relatively limited to provide sufficient time for research and to allow students to tailor their training to their specific interests.
Because academic, and many non-academic, careers involve a commitment to teaching and mentoring, a secondary goal is to help students in the development of teaching and mentoring skills. We therefore expect students to acquire teaching experience during their training by serving as a Graduate Student Instructor, usually for three or four semesters. Workshops at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching offer relevant training in teaching skills. In addition, students acquire mentoring skills by directing the work of undergraduate research assistants, who provide support for graduate students' own ongoing research.
A successful research career further requires a variety of additional professional skills, including the presentation of research results at conferences and authoring of articles and chapters. We help students develop these skills through regular presentations at the social psychology brown bag, participation in conferences, and publications.
The training program can be completed in 4 years, although 5 years is the typical time to graduation.
Coursework and Research Experience
The course requirements ensure a good grounding in psychological theorizing and methodology as well as cognate fields. In addition to meeting departmental requirements, social psychology students are expected to gain substantial conceptual and empirical knowledge within social psychology by electing two of three core courses designed to cover the field. Advanced seminars in both social psychology and other areas of psychology, and a sequence of methods courses, are also required.
Students must complete an independent research project as a requirement for candidacy and a master’s degree. Students begin their Psychology 619 research project during the first term and complete it during their second year. This project should demonstrate the student's independent research competence in methodology, data analyses, and scholarly interpretation. Students register for 4 credits of PSYCH 619 with their advisor during the first and second years of graduate study, but grades are deferred until the project is completed. Before the beginning of the third year, and advancement to candidacy, students must present a research paper describing their research for approval to their research mentor and one other Social faculty member.
Before the beginning of the fourth year, students present a portfolio of their research papers to the committee that they select to supervise their doctoral research. The committee reviews this work and discusses their review with the student. The dissertation completes the training sequence and typically builds on the strengths of the student's research portfolio.
