<p>OP, congratulations on having these kinds of skills and having worked hard in high school. I looked at both these schools for my D, who also has interests in neuroscience and other things. Our search was particularly geared toward the science with a great deal of skepticism about the “traditional psychology” element of this new field. In simple terms, I was tasked with finding departments in which the natural sciences were more important than the psychology.</p>
<p>Tufts’ biopsychology and neuroscience are excellent, broad, and deep. One of the stars of the Tufts faculty is a researcher named Maryanne Wolf who doesn’t even reside in the neuroscience department. Her ground-breaking work on reading and the brain has fired the imaginations of people in many other disciplines, including mine. Since 1999 she has published 33 articles on reading and the brain, but she’s famous for a popular-ish book called Proust and the Squid: the Story and the Science of the Reading Brain. She’s also head of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts. Prof. Wolf actually resides in the Child Development department at Tufts, just to give you some idea of how deep the neuroscience work at Tufts goes. And any researcher who allows herself to be photographed reading the manuscript poems of Emily Dickinson gets extra points from me:</p>
<p><a href=“http://ase.tufts.edu/crlr/”>http://ase.tufts.edu/crlr/</a></p>
<p>There are over thirty members of the neuroscience faculty at Tufts reflective of the interdisciplinary nature of biopsychology: geneticists, biochemists, endocrinologists, cell and molecular biologists, zoologists, neuroscientists, pharmacologists, etc. There also the department’s connection with the graduate school program and Tufts hospital. The opportunities seem endless when you also consider that you’re in Boston’s metro area, with all its resources for study, research, and internships.</p>
<p>However, biopsychology itself, the undergraduate major, is less impressive. You are required to take 5 courses each in biology and psychology, which sounds more like a curriculum designed to satisfy interdepartmental politics than educate majors. There are however a half dozen biology profs interested in behavior, neurobiology, and endocrinology, and the psychology department offers even more investment in biopsychology, with perhaps a dozen professors whose primary interest appears to be cognitive science.</p>
<p>One element missing from the undergrad biopsychology education is, it appears, any requirements in chemistry, evolutionary biology, calculus, and physics. Students without such preparation might have a hard time meeting the expectations of grad neuroscience programs. A second element missing from this undergraduate program is much interest in related fields such as artificial intelligence, computers, linguistics, and philosophy. It has a makeshift character, at least on paper. Conclusion: Tufts is a great place to get a grad degree in this field, and its undergrad has a kind of slapped together appearance that is not uncommon in undergrad cognitive science. However, there are so many researchers, particularly in psychology (and neuroscience, child development, etc.), that you can probably get a pretty darn good education just by showing a modicum of initiative outside the classroom.</p>
<p>Pomona is a small liberal arts college offering an u/g degree in neuroscience but pulling on the resources of four other colleges and a grad school to get the job done. The course requirements for a neuroscience major at Pomona are significantly more sophisticated and extensive than those at Tufts. There are 48 credit hours required at Pomona and only 30 at Tufts. Important to this difference in credit hours are the requirements in chemistry, evolutionary biology, calculus, and physics that Tufts doesn’t have. This credit load may be a problem for those who want to double-major at Pomona, of course, and a god-send for those at Tufts. However, if one is interested in something other than a “neuroscience lite” major, the choice is obvious: Pomona. Having figured this out, I then called up the faculty in neuroscience at Pomona and asked what the publication activity of its faculty was like, how many grants they were pulling down, what the equipment of their labs was like, even if service contracts allowed for the prompt repair of equipment. Yeah, I was pushing the limits of parental information gathering, perhaps, but what I found were a couple of really helpful faculty members who, during their summers, were willing to provide me with lists of faculty publications, student internships and publications, numbers of students in PhD programs, as well as detailed descriptions of laboratory size and equipment. I was surprised by their generosity and thought it a good sign of how much they care about their students’ education. The neuro majors were getting as much local and national research opps and internships as they could wish for. The facilities reported at the Keck Science Center Pomona shares with the consortium are impressive. </p>
<p>If I were more interested in the science end of brain studies, based on what I researched I would definitely choose pomona over tufts. Having said this, I also didn’t see at Pomona the departmental intersection with philosophy, linguistics, AI, and compsci. I didn’t look any further for it because with 48 cr. hours in science and math, it’s perhaps too much to ask for the dept to also field interdepartmental courses. However, it is possible perhaps to find such courses elsewhere at Pomona or in the consortium. Claremont McKenna and the consortium’s Keck Science Dept. also has neuroscience, and its curriculum includes compsci and philosophy courses as electives. Hope this helps.</p>