Hi! I was wondering if anyone had any insight on colleges that have a strong program in both Art and Psychology.
I am interested in both fields - possibly looking to double major. I’m interested in the Dual Degree Program at RISD/Brown, but considering how selective it is, I was curious if there were other options out there.
Is this combination possible? I’m not necessarily looking to do an “Art Therapy” major, as I don’t think the art involved would be as “in depth” as I would like it to be. If anyone has any information about Art Therapy in general as well, please let me know!
Well, undergraduate colleges aren’t really ranked as to the strength of their psychology departments. Pretty much any good/decent college will have a good/decent psychology department. So if you are serious about art, you may want to look for schools that have strong art programs but also allow you to double-major in psychology.
With that said, you have to decide what kind of art you’re looking for. Lots of colleges have art majors, but there are some places - like RISD, or CalArts, or SUNY-Purchase’s school of arts - that are known for focusing specifically on art and have mostly art students there. Do you want to go to to an art school where you can explore the liberal arts, or do you want to go to a “regular” university that has an excellent art program, or do you want a great “regular” university that just has a good/satisfactory art progrm?
If you’re interested in art therapy as a career, I would highly recommend majoring in art therapy, as it will prepare you better, and many employers will require it. Art therapy isn’t just about psychology - it’s about biology, medicine, etc. You won’t get all the training you need from just art and psych.
As someone who looked into music therapy, I found that the music class requirements were still pretty in-depth. Even if they weren’t enough for me, it was still permissible to double major in music therapy and music performance. I presume this is the same with art.
There seems to be some misunderstanding on this thread. The terminal degree in art therapy is the MA. To gain entry into a MA program in art therapy you need to have a background in both art and psychology. The psychology requirements tend to include developmental and abnormal psychology. It does not make a lot of sense to major in art therapy at an undergrad level because that would be too narrow and you’d still need the MA. There is a lot of information about art and music therapy on the internet. Also, psychology departments are ranked. The rankings are often based on the reputation of that department compared to other psych departments. The rankings are as relevant to college as they are to graduate school.
I agree with @lostaccount here. Art therapy is very narrow for an undergrad, and you have the internet to explore art therapy. My current art teacher wanted to go into it, and was 2 classes away from a Psych major, before deciding to be a teacher.
If you really want to aim crazy high, Yale’s art department is number 1 (although I feel it’s only up there because of their acceptance/matriculation rate) and has a top notch cognitive science department.
No, they’re not. The rankings of graduate programs in psychology take into account things that are important for graduate programs in psychology - things like faculty research productivity, graduate program placement, grants awarded, diversity of the graduate program staff, etc. Some of those things are indirectly related to the undergraduate student education and some of them are not relevant at all. As a matter of fact, at some places that aren’t appropriately monitored, they can actually be inversely related - the professors who spend a lot of time churning out good research and mentoring doctoral students may not spend much time teaching or training undergraduates.
Furthermore, those lists never include top liberal arts colleges. But most top-ranked liberal arts colleges (like Amherst, Pomona, Kenyon, Gettysburg) are probably better places to study psychology for some undergrads than some mid- or low-ranked psychology departments with PhD programs. At these colleges, professors are explicitly hired because of their interest and passion for working with talented undergraduates, and at the best ones they have low teaching loads and are expected to develop a research agenda that can incorporate undergrads.
Also, at these smaller schools, the grants won are usually funnelled back into undergraduate education, which is why total grant dollars isn’t as important as the grants themselves. For example, there’s a difference between a $2.5 million grant won to use fMRI to do something that undergrads are never going to touch, because the professor doesn’t teach undergrad classes and rarely takes undergrads into his lab, and a $100,000 grant that a professor won to start a research writing and ethics curriculum in the department for undergrads or to fund a summer research program for undergrads at the college.