Hello, I am currently a sophomore at CUNY Hunter College. I am a psychology major and im interested in pursuing marketing/consumer psychology in grad school. Im having a hard time finding reputable graduate programs for this specific field in psychology. Id like to know if anyone knows of good programs and their prerequisites, gpa and gre scores. Im looking mostly for the prereqs because unfortunately Hunter College doesn’t offer marketing but does offer stats and Econ, so im hoping taking electives in those classes will meet most graduate programs requirements along with my psych major. If anyone could give me some advice or recommend programs it would help a lot. Thank you!
There really aren’t programs in ‘consumer psychology.’ What you’d want to look for would be programs in marketing, and perhaps programs in behavioral economics (but you’d want to take more economics coursework to be better prepared for that). The academic study of marketing (either an MS in marketing, as opposed to an MBA, or a PhD) is grounded firmly in psychology, economics, and the social/behavioral sciences.
You don’t need to take marketing classes before pursuing a marketing academic graduate degree, but if you can cross-register at other CUNY colleges for a few marketing classes, that could be a nice bonus. Baruch has a pretty robust program in marketing, including classes on market research, consumer behavior, and customer decision-making (https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/confluence/display/undergraduatebulletin/Department+of+Marketing+and+International+Business#DepartmentofMarketingandInternationalBusiness-mktmgt).
Most PhD and MS programs won’t post any minimums for GPA or GRE scores. However, you should generally try to shoot for a 3.5+ GPA (major and cumulative), and at least a 155-160 on each section of the GRE (quantitative is slightly more important for marketing, and much more important for behavioral economics, but both will be important). If you are leaning more towards behavioral economics than marketing, you will also do well to take some advanced math classes. Some (most?) PhD and MS programs in marketing will also take the GMAT, but almost all programs will take the GRE, so once you put together a list of programs then you should figure out which test you should take. That will be a ways down the line.
At the doctoral level, you choose a program by the research that you want to do. So before you can make a list of ‘good programs,’ you need to figure out what your research and academic interests are. You can do that by assisting a professor in their research as a research assistant at your current school (or another school in the city - you could go to Columbia, or NYU, or Fordham, or Baruch if you wanted to. At Columbia we had students from many schools do research with our professors).