Research Opportunities

All qualified students are welcome to participate in research project opportunities within the Department of Psychology. Students may volunteer to work in a lab, register for supervised individual research (UN3950 Supervised Individual Research), or participate in the department’s two-year Honors Program. Information on faculty research is available on the departmental website. Students are advised to read about research laboratories on faculty lab sites and visit the professor’s office hours to discuss opportunities. At the beginning of the fall term, the department also hosts a Lab Preview event for students to learn about research opportunities for the upcoming semester.

Participating in research is an important part of your undergraduate experience, and critical if you are thinking of applying to graduate school in Psychology, Neuroscience, or related fields. By joining a lab, you will see how research projects are conducted. Depending on the lab, you may also see how projects are developed, how data is analyzed, and how presentations are put together for conferences and publication. If you are involved in a lab for the long term, you may even contribute to a project that enables you to be a published researcher yourself. For more information, please see the Psychology Department's Lab Preview Handout.

 

 

Ways to get involved in research

Many students volunteer in research labs. Some labs require that students volunteer for a period of time before becoming more “official” members of the lab. 

Many students register for supervised research. You may register for up to 4 points of supervised research per term. In general, you should figure that you will be working in a lab for approximately 3 hours per week per credit. This is not set in stone and must be negotiated with the specific lab that you will be working in. Different labs have slightly different requirements. As part of your supervised research, you will be expected to do some independent academic work related to the lab work you are doing. This may be a paper or an oral presentation, depending on the lab.

Sometimes labs will hire undergraduates as work-study students to work in their labs. Occasionally non-work study positions are available for students with very special skills that are needed (e.g., programming). This must be arranged with a particular lab on an individual basis.

Find out about participating for payment or for credit here.