<p>Which school has a better psychology department?</p>
<p>I’m a graduate student at Columbia’s psychology department but both of my advisors were formerly in NYU’s psychology department (one taught there and the other got his PhD there), and I work with NYU psychology students sometimes, and I’ve taken classes down there, so here’s my take.</p>
<p>I’m obviously biased because I’m here, but IMO NYU and Columbia are good for different things. NYU, as my professors tell it, has a very segmented department; the different subfields hang out within themselves and not with each other. Columbia instead takes an integrated approach to psychology education; we believe that social, cognition, and neuroscience bleed into each other and aren’t separate, and most of our (grad) students blend research of two or more subfields together in some way and work with more than one lab.</p>
<p>We don’t pay our undergraduate research assistants in my lab but they can take research credit. I think some labs do have work-study positions for RAs, and you can TA as an upper-level undergraduate here if you do well in a class (we have positions set aside for undergrad TAs). Upper-level undergrads can also take mixed upper-level classes with grad students at the 4000 level. If you want to get involved in research here you can; all of the professors are very approachable and they’re all so nice and seem to genuinely care about their students’ progress, although as an undergrad here at Columbia you may interact far more with the graduate students than the professor (my advisor rarely comes down into the lab - partially because he’s on sabbatical this year, but it’s mostly his lab manager, two post-docs, his five grad students (including me), a grad student from NYU who’s here all the time and the bevy of RAs we’ve got).</p>
<p>I think our science of psychology and statistics classes tend to be pretty big, and some of the more popular classes (like intro to cultural psych) have a lot of students (last year it was capped at 105, and I think they got close). But there are also small seminars, and quite frankly that’s also the case at NYU - their undergrad department is even bigger.</p>
<p>Our graduate program is currently ranked at #17 whereas theirs is at #29, but that’s not necessarily relevant for the undergrad psychology department. I can’t say one is qualitatively better than the other one, but I like the environment here better.</p>