<p>Hello everyone,</p>
<p>So I'm an aspiring graduate student currently enrolled in a psychology major and cognitive neuroscience minor program. For graduate school I want to study the the neural basis of language. ( I won't get anymore specific for the sake of the post length ) After this spring semester, the following academic year (fall2014 - spring 2015) will be my last at my university. I've done my own research on this but I'd like the input of others. </p>
<p>So I'd like to know who/where/what programs are considered to be the "best" in the field of study I have specified. I don't necessarily care about the prestige of the school but rather the program and its faculty of researchers. </p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>This is research you’ll need to do yourself. You’ll need to look specifically for who is doing research in your very specific area of interest - just the “neural basis of language” isn’t specific enough. Furthermore, this is a harder thing to look for because you’re going to be looking across program fields - so you may find your perfect program in a psychology department, a linguistics department, a neuroscience department, or a cognitive science department - although of course how competitive you are depends on your coursework and research experience.</p>
<p>Here are some suggestions to get you started:</p>
<p>-By now you should have done a literature review and read some new and new-ish literature in your area. What are the scientific articles that have really excited you lately that came out in the last 3-5 years? Who wrote them? Look at the authors, and then find out where they teach/do research.</p>
<p>-Look at the NRC rankings for those different fields (<a href=“NRC Rankings Overview: Psychology”>http://chronicle.com/article/NRC-Rankings-Overview-/124708/</a> <- this one is psychology, but by clicking the fields at the top you can also look at neuroscience and linguistics. Cognitive science programs are subsumed under psych or neuroscience.) Now, you can’t pay attention to the absolute ranking in this list because all of the different subfields of psych are thrown together, so rankings for clinical and social and developmental are all mixed up with neuroscience and cognition. But, you can look at general groups (top 20, top 50, etc.) to get an idea for programs’ general reputation. Then you can browse these departments’ websites to see if there are professors there who do research that interests you.</p>
<p>-Ask your professors. If you are working with someone in a lab right now, ask him or her for some recommendations of programs. If you have other professors who do related research, ask them for some recommendations.</p>
<p>You should use a combination of these approaches to try to pick a list of PhD programs.</p>
<p>One last thing - since your research spans areas, you should select where you decide to get your PhD carefully depending on what you want to do afterwards. For example, if you want to teach and do research as a professor at a university, getting a psychology or neuroscience PhD may give you more options than a linguistics or cognitive science PhD because those first two majors are offered in more places than linguistics or cognitive science. Furthermore, psychology PhDs often teach in departments of cognitive science or neuroscience if they have the right background and research, but cog sci PhDs don’t often teach in psychology departments. Neuroscientists do sometimes get hired in psychology departments.</p>
<p>Hi Juillet,</p>
<p>Thanks for the great post! I’ve done some of the things you’ve mentioned but, I was just about naive to NRC rankings. I’ll definitely search there as well.</p>
<p>(Some extra information I though I’d share.) </p>
<p>I’m currently conducting research at one of the labs at my university (this lab studies the neurobiology of language, particularly reading). As for particulars and specifics, something I’m quiet interested in is the neuronal representations of how people extract meaning (semantic and phonological access) from letter strings(words). Especially bilinguals who are at the “heritage language learner” level within both languages. But yea, enough with the superfluous information lol. Thanks again 
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