<p>Hi there, I was reading this thread and came across your response that you’re attending UCSD, I’m guessing as a Neuroscience or Cog Sci major? I’m going to be attending UCSD this September as an undergraduate student majoring in Cognitive Science, and I was wondering, if you are a cog sci major, could you give me an idea of what the classes are like, and what kind of career you are pursuing in that major? Thanks.</p>
<p>For an undergraduate, no doubt I’d be looking JHU and Brown for anything brain related.</p>
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<p>The FSP has several advantages. It is up-to-date and detailed in its departmental break-downs. It is based on objective metrics. However, the site only displays the top 10 departments per field.</p>
<p>The NRC rankings are old (1995). For better or worse (IMHO, for worse) they are based on peer assessments not objective data. However, if you average over several departments of interest, it should become less likely that the composite rank is completely outdated. Here is a composite ranking of 19 schools that had NRC-ranked departments in Linguistics, Psychology, and Neuroscience:</p>
<p>School (Neuroscience rank, Psychology rank, Linguistics rank, with bold indicating a current top-10 FSP ranking, sorted by the arithmetic mean of the 3 NRC department rankings)</p>
<p>Stanford (5,1,2)
UCLA (15,4,3)
Berkeley (9,9,7), Cal San Diego (1,10,14), UPenn (10,8,5)
Harvard (3,6,21)
Yale (2,3,30)
University of Washington (12,12,17)
Chicago (22,18,6)
Cornell (24,14,9)
Michigan (18,2,31)
Illinois (40,5,18)
Wisconsin (25,15,32)
University of Texas (47,16,11)
Ohio State (53,21,8)
Brown (52,37,20)
University of Pittsburgh (39,48,23)
NYU (54,34,36)
Georgetown (48,126,19)</p>
<p>n.b. this is a ranking of graduate department quality for 3 fields, not necessarily the best ordering of undergraduate quality even for someone interested in these fields. But it does show a range of schools that have offered programs in all three disciplines. It includes schools with a significant range of selectivity and cost.</p>
<p>Some good schools that have been mentioned on this thread are not on this list because one of the 3 departments was not NRC-ranked. Hopkins, for example, did not have a ranked Linguistics department. It apparently does not have an undergraduate Linguistics major. It does, however, have an undergraduate Cognitive Science program, which includes a Linguistics minor. Other schools with interesting programs in Cognitive Science include Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Wash U. St. Louis.</p>
<p>everytime i click the FSP link its dead. Any idea where to find the current one?</p>
<p>Which career field might a cognitive science major go into?</p>
<p>It depends on what part of cog sci you’re interested in. Some programs are neuroscience oriented, like JHU’s, some focus on linguistics/humanities issues, and some are more computational (like CMU)</p>
<p>As a current CogSci major at CMU I can say the department is fantastic. It could be said that modern cognitive science begun at CMU and MIT.</p>
<p>Herb Simon was on the faculty here for years ([Herbert</a> Simon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Simon]Herbert”>Herbert Simon - Wikipedia))</p>
<p>Relevant links:
[Psychology</a> Department ~ Carnegie Mellon](<a href=“Department of Psychology - Department of Psychology - Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences - Carnegie Mellon University”>Department of Psychology - Department of Psychology - Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences - Carnegie Mellon University)
[url=<a href=“http://www.hcii.cmu.edu/]Welcome”>http://www.hcii.cmu.edu/]Welcome</a> | Human-Computer Interaction Institute<a href=“human%20computer%20interaction%20institute.%20my%20second%20major.”>/url</a></p>
<p>Wow CogSci. What a cool major.
I hear UCSD has a great cognitive science department as well. I’m sure the other suggestions by other posters are great in the department… just do some research on these schools.</p>
<p>Hows the berkeley cogsci program?</p>
<p>im bumping this thread again…
cogsci at berkeley?</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/917214-unc-uva-college-park-help.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/917214-unc-uva-college-park-help.html</a></p>
<p>PLEASE HELP ME!!!>!>!>!>>!</p>
<p>Hey I want to pursue a PhD in Cognitive Science, but my GRE score is 1290 only. I am aware that MIT GRE scores are quite high, but could I get an idea of how well one needs to perform in Verbal for that??</p>
<p>I am a senior in high school and am in the process of applying to some colleges. I really want to pursue the cognitive science major because I am interested in neuroscience but not so much the biology component. I would like to know of some colleges around the east coast that have good cognitive science programs. The colleges that I already plan to apply to are University of Richmond, John Hopkins, University of Delaware, UMBC, and then West Virginia university as a back up college. My SAT scores aren’t that high(610 in math, 480 in critical reading and 530 in writing) but I am a well rounded student and have a high GPA. A bonus for me would be if I could study abroad in Japan in this field of study.</p>
<p>Is the San Diego program as good as people say it is?</p>
<p>I graduated with a B.S. in Cognitive Science (part of the second ever graduating class in Cog Sci in the world a loooong time ago). Remember UCSD had the very first Cognitive Science department in the world; that multi-discipline major started there. That said, there are more reputable schools such as Harvard and Stanford with CogSci degrees, but UCSD is still ranked highly, both in reputation as well as in research and education. </p>
<p>You can’t go wrong with a UCSD CogSci degree as it is still well-known in the CogSci arenas. It is not ranked as top dog, but in my opinion based on what you get for the cost, it is one of the best (next to UCLA and Cal).</p>
<p>hi </p>
<p>i want to do phd in cognitiva and computational neuroscience . can you please tell me which university is best option fos this area .</p>
I have been bopping around the net for the last week searching for that same answer. UCSD (as a total program) is hard to beat. MIT is always strong, but the programs at UCSD have more variety and a longer history.
I would echo the earlier note that Carnegie Mellon is one of the best. It’s #2 according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here’s another attempt at a link to that:
http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity/page.php?year=2007&primary=9&secondary=74&bycat=Go
The thing is that cognitive science is so interdisciplinary that when it’s classified under neuroscience it might go one way, under psychology another way, under linguistics another way, and under computer science another way. The good thing about Carnegie Mellon is that it is good in all directions. But it is especially good from the AI / computer science side and the neuroscience side. Note that there are various flavors of linguistics that won’t talk with each other, but which can all be done from a cognitive science perspective. Stanford handles the variety, whereas the other top ones all lean in one direction or the other.
If I had to do rankings, I’d go something like this:
Stanford
Carnegie Mellon, MIT, & Berkeley (equally good but taking different approaches to linguistics)
UCSD, UPenn
Rochester, Brown, Harvard, UIUC, U of Colorado Boulder, Rensselaer.