Department of Psychology undergraduate programs aim to offer students a balanced curriculum in psychological science, including research methods, perception, cognition, neuroscience, developmental, social, personality, and clinical areas.
The curriculum prepares majors for graduate education in these fields and provides a relevant background for medicine, law, business, social work, and education. The department offers an honors program for outstanding students and encourages all majors to participate in advanced seminars and supervised research.
Psychology course offerings are designed to meet the needs and interests of a wide variety of students, from those wishing to explore a few topics in psychology or to fulfill the science requirement, to those interested in majoring in psychology or in neuroscience and behavior. Our Program Goals start with the development of a solid knowledge base in psychological science. Consistent with the value psychology places on empirical evidence, courses at every level of the curriculum nurture the development of skills in research methods, quantitative literacy, and critical thinking, and foster respect for the ethical values that undergird the science of psychology.
Most of these Program Goals are introduced in The Science of Psychology (UN1001), which is the recommended first psychology course, is required for all majors, and satisfies the prerequisite for most 2000-level courses. These goals are extended and reinforced in our statistics (1600-level) and research methods (1400-level) laboratory courses, as well as in the 2000-level lecture courses and 3000- and 4000-level seminars. Each of the lecture courses at the 2000 level provides students with the opportunity to study systematically, and in greater depth, one of the content areas introduced in UN1001. These lecture courses are the principal means by which psychology majors satisfy the distribution requirements, insuring not only depth but also breadth of coverage across three central areas of psychology: (1) perception and cognition, (2) psychobiology and neuroscience, and (3) social, personality, and abnormal. To complete the major, students take one or more advanced seminars and are encouraged to participate in supervised research courses, where they have the opportunity to explore research questions in depth and further develop their written and oral communication skills.
All qualified students are welcome to participate in research opportunities within the Department of Psychology. Students may volunteer to work in a laboratory, register for Supervised Individual Research (UN3950), or participate in the Department's two-year Honors Program. You are invited to read about the research laboratories on faculty web pages and go to the professor's office hours to discuss potential research 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 year.
There is now a Psi Chi Honor Society, for details or to become a memeber click here.