My daughter will be a psych major. So the only math she’ll have is statistics, and then some psych classes that use it. What kind of calculator will she need? A Ti-84, or is that more than necessary?
Way more than necessary, and in fact will probably be banned. I used to TA for psych statistics classes and we didn’t allow graphing calculators on exams because they can easily do the calculations we required students do by hand.
A regular four-function calculator will likely be enough. If you want to get really fancy, a scientific calculator will probably work. You might want to wait until she takes the statistics class, though, because her professor might have specific requirements/lists of calculators that are allowed. (One of my jobs as a TA was putting together a list of acceptable calculators and checking to ensure that the calculators students had were acceptable for the exams.)
But these days most statistics is performed in statistical software packages. She’ll probably have to do the calculations by hand for her first class, but after that, she’ll be using a package like SPSS (provided by the college, on college computers. The package is expensive.)
And although the only math she will be required to take is intro statistics, she might want to consider taking some more math. Psychology can be a surprisingly math-heavy field on the graduate level. More importantly, analytical/statistical skills make students more employable in the social sciences. The more she can do statistically, the better her job prospects will be. At the least she might want to poke around the math department and see if there are some statistics classes she can take, or see if there’s an advanced non-calculus-based stats class in political science or economics. If she wants to get fancy or really likes math, she might consider taking 2-3 semesters of calculus and linear algebra + 2 semester of statistics, or minoring in math or statistics.