Hello, I am currently a Junior in philosophy at the University of Florida. While I am a philosophy major (and love it), I am very interested in pursuing graduate study in psychology. My question is this: what are the core classes one should take as prerequisites to be seen as generally competitive for entering psychology graduate schools without having a psychology major. I have already taken General Psychology, Developmental, Personality, and Statistics and am already signed up for Abnormal next semester with plans to use my remaining electives on Physiological Psych, Research methods, and Cognitive. Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
That’s a good core! I always recommend general psychology, statistics, and research methods plus at least 2-3 other electives. So you’re on the right track. Hopefully some of those electives are “laboratory research” courses that allow you to apply what you learned in research methods to a course, but that matters less.
It’s also a good idea to take an elective in an area of interest. For example, if you are interested in studying social psychology, it’s good to take social psych as an undergrad. But you’re getting good exposure to a range of areas! If there’s an advanced statistics course or a course in the theory of psychometric instruments, those are good courses to take as well.
Thank you for your reply! That’s uplifting to hear. Would it be a little redundant to take two courses (personality and abnormal) from the same cluster? My main interests are self concepts and selfhood, if that can help narrow down what would be best to take. I’ve just noticed that there are usually 4-5 clusters with the recommendation being that one should take at least 1 class in each cluster. Personality and Abnormal typically fall in the same one. I really just want to make each elective count. Thanks again.
Hm, that doesn’t matter so much, especially if you already know what you want to study. I never took any classes in biological/physiological psychology or too many classes in cognitive, and I was a psychology major. If you know that your interests are in a particular area, it’s fine to take extra courses in that area and fewer in other areas.