<p>Brown University has been my absolute dream school after I visited it in March this year, deeply touched by the spectacular campus and the amazingly open curriculum. However, a student who wants to study most likely psychology in college, I’m not really sure if Brown has one of the best psychology department of all. I’ve looked it up on the internet, but I found several different rankings for Brown’s psychology major (which is not the best one but can be good). What’s worse is that I find the information of Brown kind of ambiguous on the Brown site: it does not tell you what majors are actually good in Brown(or I just made a mistake not looking too into it…apologies if so). So besides the campus and the curriculum and the fact that it’s an ivy school, I got nothing. Can anybody please tell me if Brown has a good psychology department, or what Brown stands out for among other schools? Will appreciate your help. Thanks :)</p>
<p>I think we do have a good psychology department, but where Brown has an unusually strong focus is actually cognitive sciences, which is more about what the brain reveals about the person than what the person reveals about himself, in a way. It’s about consciousness, learning, perception, etc. </p>
<p>All this aside, I know a number of psychology majors who all are very pleased with the psychology classes at Brown.</p>
<p>i was actually thinking of being a psych major after getting “psych student of the year” at my high school or whatever. idk about higher-level classes, but i shopped a couple lower-level ones (but not psych0100, or the very very intro to psych course) and they weren’t quite what i wanted or expected from a psych class. i’m more interested in theory and practice, whereas the ones i saw were more “here is 75 experiments and who did them. memorize for the test.” :\ sorta lackluster. but maybe someone else with more perspective should have a say.</p>
<p>What kind of psychology are you interested in?</p>
<p>I’m not that sure yet…i’m kinda into social psychology type of thing. how’s that in Brown?</p>
<p>it’s good but it’s more statistical/sciencey than social sciencey</p>
<p>Lower level psych courses typically cover a lot of background studies, etc. Higher level are usually more topic based/theoretical. I’m not sure of Brown’s psych program, but this is typical.</p>
<p>One advantage at least on paper is the opportunity to do research at Brown which is critical for getting in to grad school.</p>
<p>I don’t know much about the psych curriculum here, but I am familiar with the department as a whole, and I know that much of the research has a heavy statistical basis, a focus that probably affects many of the courses in the department.</p>
<p>For instance, all psych/cogsci/cogneuro majors must take a course in quantitative statistics, which lays a framework for many subsequent classes. (It’s a good class!)</p>