Grad Program Adventure

Many of you are in your sophomore and junior years, and it would be useful to consider how cognitive science skills tie into your future interests. Let's call this topic "meta-methods." :-) One direction which we will discuss in lecture this week is the "academic path" -- pursuing an advanced degree in a research lab. These are often in the form of master's or Ph.D. programs. This week, you'll peruse cognitive science and other graduate programs and write a very brief description of what you'd like to do for graduate school (under the purest hypothetical scenarios, if you wish), and how it ties into cognitive science methods.

(Note: We realize many of you may not be considering graduate programs after your degree here; however, for the sake of this exercise and your own personal exploration, just imagine what you would do if you were to indeed consider graduate school. Feel free to treat this as a hypothetical, and investigate possibilities that might jive with you.)

Step 1. Take a look at the following list of cognitive science Ph.D. programs. Just pick a couple that pique your curiosity. Seek out information about their faculty, requirements, and funding:

http://cognitivesciencesociety.org/study_programs.html
This is a list of graduate programs in cognitive science officially listed by the Cognitive Science Society (the Society the conference of which UC Merced COGS is organizing this year!)

Look over a few of the programs and get a sense of what the program entails.

Step 2. Think over your interests, and seek out a program using Google that jives with those interests. Do you have clinical interests, educational psychology, cognitive neuropsyhology, philosophy and cognitive science Ph.D. programs, etc.? Find TWO programs that fit with your interests by searching (or, you may choose among the ones listed in Step 1). If you need help searching, just as your TA. Chat with your neighbors. Think big.

Step 3. Write up a (minimum) 200-word narrative about your thinking. Include answers to the following questions: (i) What are your future career or advanced-degree interests?, (ii) What TWO programs did you find that seem promising?, and (iii) What aspects of methods would help beef up your knowledge in these domains, to help you be more knowledgeable and competitive? Have we covered these methods already? If not, which are the methods you'd find useful?

That's it! Please submit your narrative based on these 3 questions on CROPS.