An Overview of the Department

The Department of Psychology has vibrant undergraduate and graduate programs. With approximately 1,000 undergraduate majors and a very selective honors program, we prepare students for graduate study in a wide variety of disciplines including, but not limited to, psychology.  We encourage undergraduates to participate in the faculty research activities. Please see the information below regarding graduate training to get a sense of the research areas that are available. See the undergraduate pages for more detail on the major and on the honors program.

On the graduate level, we only accept students intending to earn the Ph.D. Many of our programs also require students to earn a Master of Arts or Master of Sciences. The Department is comprised of several specialty areas representing the breadth of the discipline. These specialty areas include Clinical, Cognitive, Counseling, Developmental, Industrial/Organizational, Integrative Neuroscience, SensoriNeural and Perceptual Processes, and Social.

All of the specialty areas share common goals of:

• contributing knowledge in psychology through high quality research and scholarship, and
• educating graduate students to become excellent researchers, scholars, teachers, and professionals.

Although the subunits of the Department are methodologically and conceptually diverse, they mutually support each other and combine educationally and administratively to create a unified department.

While all the specialty areas share the goal of training graduate students in research competence, at least two of the areas (Clinical and Counseling) also acknowledge the importance of training graduate students for professional careers in human service delivery. These areas subscribe to the scientist-practitioner training model. This type of training prepares psychologists to directly serve the public, and also to meet increasingly diverse research and professional needs in academic and nonacademic settings.

The Department of Psychology offers only a full-time (day) program. Students are required to attend classes, take part in research and teach as graduate assistants. We consider each of these assignments to be a critical part of our graduate program. It is not possible to obtain this type of education on a part-time basis. Thus, we do not permit our students to hold off-campus jobs unless they are directly related to the progress of the student and have been approved by the program.