<p>Does anyone know about the strengths of the cognitive science major at UVA?</p>
<p>[site:talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-virginia</a> cognitive science - Google Search](<a href=“site:talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-virginia cognitive science]site:talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-virginia - Google Search”>http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Atalk.collegeconfidential.com%2Funiversity-virginia+cognitive+science)</p>
<p>i remember there not being any great responses though :</p>
<p>Yes - I used the search feature first and I didn’t find much. That’s why I posted now.</p>
<p>Actually right now I only know about the strengths of the individual courses – I don’t know about the holistic “put-together” aspect yet, cuz I haven’t declared. </p>
<p>But the neuro-related courses at UVA are impressive (though 2 out of the 3 lecturers in BIOL 317 are superb researchers that happen to be slightly poorer lecturers), and you still have the pure neuroscience track. You could always switch to that should you decide to alter your career plans slightly, of course. </p>
<p>I haven’t technically taken anything in the PSYC track of cogsci yet; I think the LNGS department could be bigger and better coordinated with related fields (though Prof Bonvillian is associated with the LNGS and PSYC departments). By itself, the linguistics department is quite enlightening on cognitive processes (if you ever want to take LNGS 325); I’m trying to get into PSYC 555 and PSYC 411 at some point (psycholinguistics and developmental psycholinguistics), but apparently they prefer declared majors and fourth-years. Damn.</p>
<p>UVA has its share of soft psych and hard psych faculty. Luckily for right-thinking people, I think the hard psych type at UVA are substantially more visible academically, if you ignore the popular courses that first-years tend to go after. There’s a Whorfian (Prof Danziger) acting as temporary head of the linguistics department at the moment; I’m not really too happy with that (though I’ve never met her) but in any case the cognitive component of linguistics at UVA is pretty strong; Prof Elson does a good job of leading into this in his LNGS 325 course, which is a definite plus.</p>