psychology undergrad schools

juillet
Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:50:30 +0000

Most rankings guides don’t rank undergraduate schools by major. It’s a rather impractical system, because you spend less than half of your time taking classes in your major field. Beyond that, “psychology” is actually a lot more abstract than people think it is. Most people, when thinking of psychology, think of clinical psychology, but I never took a single class on abnormal psych when I was a psych undergrad.

Really, any solid school will have a solid psychology undergrad program. All of the schools on your list have solid psychology programs. Where the difference will come is research experiences. My small LAC had a number of research experiences to get into, but the variety was small and the professors were of course more interested in teaching than research. My current graduate school has a myriad of research labs and things that undergrads can get into (paid!) – so many opportunities! If you’re interested in research I would keep that in mind. UIUC, Penn State, IU-Bloomington, UNC all have good psychology programs, and Michigan and UW-Madison are some of the TOP psychology graduate programs in the country with surely a lot of research opportunities. (of course, top grad program does NOT mean top undergrad program!) However, they’re good schools for psychological RESEARCH.

Also, Alexandre: That’s patently untrue. At large universities like Michigan and Wisconsin, they most certainly do allow advanced graduate TAs to teach entire classes on their own. I am at Columbia, one of the top psych programs in the country, and there are several classes (especially over the summer, and especially intro classes) in which graduate TAs are the primary instructors in the class, not the professor. Usually the professor is the main teacher, but not always. And not all adjuncts have PhDs. Many adjunct professors here are ABD researchers who are completing their dissertation work.

In addition, although the main lecturer may be a professor, often the lecture section is so huge that the majority of useful information comes from a TA. For example, my epidemiology class is easily 500-600 students large. But our seminars are led by advanced epi students. They’re good teachers, though, so I wouldn’t worry.

bclintock: I went to a school “further down the list” (#63, actually) and I’m in a top psych program. My colleagues went to undergraduate schools I’ve never heard of and aren’t ranked, and I have friends from my school and our unranked brother school at Chicago, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Michigan, etc. Where you go doesn’t so much matter as what you do there.