<p>I'm a math major with fairly good stats, and I want to go to a cog. sci or cog psy. or cognitive neuroscience program, but lack any official background in these areas (save for one letter of recommendation from a cog sci/philosophy of mind prof).</p>
<p>I've gone ahead and signed up for the psych subject test after doing well on the current practice test.</p>
<p>My questions is whether anyone here can give me any feedback about the degree to which a high score on the Psych GRE could boost my credentials (how is the test viewed in the psych community, for instance?). I ask only because I noticed that, for instance, NYU's psychology dept. explicitly does not encourage applicants to take the test, so I feel that I should get some perspective on this.</p>
<p>In case it might be relevant, I've assembled a list of interesting institutions that I plan on applying to/have started the application process for:</p>
<p>UCSD (Cog Sci)
Indiana U (Cog sci)
Johns Hopkins (Cog Sci)
Brown (Cog sci)
Boston U (computational neuroscience, formerly their cog sci program)
CNBC (Carnegie Mellon & U Pitt)
USC (Neuroscience)
NYU (CNS or psychology, not sure which would be more suitable; I want to do neuroeconomics and study dopaminergic hebbian learning, TD reinforcement models of choice behavior etc.)</p>
<p>Since you do not have much of a background in psychology, your performance on the psychology GRE will be an indicator of how much basic knowledge you do or do not have. Doing poorly on it might suggest a need to take some more basic courses. If you do really well, the fact that you did not major or minor in psychology will matter much less.</p>
<p>The psychology GRE doesn’t mean much to most people if you have a degree in psychology. Most of the programs I looked at did not even mention it, and only one out of ~25 I looked at said they required it of everyone. So although you might get the impression the psychology GRE doesn’t mean much, that is not necessarily true of those with little or no background in psychology.</p>
<p>My professor suggested finding a good, solid introductory textbook for psychology and studying that. He gave me one by Gleitman (apparently he didn’t think much of the textbook my college actually used for intro).</p>
<p>Thanks for the reply! That makes quite a bit of sense (and this was my logic in signing up for this rather than re-taking the math gre, which I may have actually done fairly well on; fingers crossed). I’ve been going through the first volume of the Handbook of Psychology (Millon; Lerner; Weiner) for some further historical grounding and looking at some primers I’ve found online to review.</p>
<p>I’ll check out the Gleitman book. What do you think of the Princeton review book “cracking the gre”?</p>
<p>I had about 75%ile on the practice test ETS provides, taking it cold. I’ve been preparing for about a week now and am hoping to really crush it. My areas of strength are definitely clustered more in the experimental subscore, although I’m broadly familiar with some more modern views of social psychology. My biggest weaknesses are probably the clinical and developmental sub-sections.</p>
<p>I actually never ended up taking any of the GREs. I had started studying for the general test using the Princeton and Kaplan books, but in the past few months I’ve started considering a graduate program in marketing and the GMAT is the preferred test for business schools. (This was a huge relief because I find the GMAT’s verbal section to be considerably easier). </p>
<p>I never planned to take the Psychology GRE because no school I was considering required it, or even mentioned that they would consider it in the admissions process. I had a 3.89 GPA in my major, so it was pretty clear that I knew the basics.</p>
<p>A good intro book will cover most of what you should know for clinical and developmental. Have you ever taken intro to psychology, or have a psychology professor you could chat with about other possible study sources? My professor had also given me books edited by Gazzaniga, Weiten, and Schacter (yes, he literally left 4 full-length textbooks in his mailbox for me to pick up. I don’t know when I would have had the time to go through them all. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I decided not to take the subject test).</p>
<p>The Psych GRE prep books seem to do well enough since they do provide a survey run-through of all the things you’ll be tested on. Textbooks do a good job mixing breadth with a tiny bit of depth, but the subject GRE is all about breadth.</p>
<p>I know something about the CNBC at CMU and Pitt since my daughter is in that program, with her focus in neuroscience. You definitely do not need to take the psychology GRE for the CNBC. In fact, if you apply via the Pitt math or CMU computer science department, you aren’t expected to know much, if anything, about psychology. Even pure neuroscience graduate students at Pitt may have taken little or no psychology. Of course, if you approach cognitive science from the psychology angle, then you’d need a lot more than the psychology GRE since you’d also have to be prepared in research and course work to gain admission.</p>
<p>In my opinion, taking the psychology GRE is a waste of time and money in your case.</p>
<p>It sounds like you’re generalizing from one example (though perhaps you have more first person experience with cognitive science programs than you’ve mentioned) and are imposing a “computation vs. Psychology” dichotomy here; a lot of cog sci programs blend psychology and computation, and a core knowledge of psychology seems relevant, at least; even if it isn’t the overarching focus of the program. I don’t see how demonstrating basic knowledge for a interdisciplinary cog sci program (like UCSD, for instance) wouldn’t provide some additional value to an applicant. Do you have additional experience indicating the contrary? </p>
<p>Your point is taken about CNBC, and the situation is probably the same for Boston and USC; so I’ll just send them my math subject scores. However; Brown, Johns Hopkins and UCSD (maybe NYU, even if it isn’t totally relevant to the CNS program) seemed like they might find a psych score to be relevant for someone with little to no official background in the subject.</p>
<p>Also, the “waste of time and money line” seems a bit gratuitous given that I had already announced that I’m signed up and it’s pointless to cancel at this time. Besides; at the very least, I plan to pick up some psych classes over the next year should I not receive any good offers from the programs I listed, and studying for/taking the psych GRE would (even if my score isn’t totally fantastic this time around) be good practice and possibly give me some bit of leverage for gaining access to research experience over the next six months.</p>
<p>I do agree…not only is it an over-generalization, but she is not the one in the program and is only receiving second-hand feedback, or perhaps brief info from the website or a tour.</p>
<p>An understanding of statistics and research methods is what will give you good leverage for research experience. I worked with my social psych professor for a bit and I knew absolutely nothing about his area of interest when I started - even with my tiny background in psych at the time (basically intro to psych and a neuroscience course, which was highly irrelevant for social psych). But I had a strong background in research methods and stats and so I had no problem jumping into unknown territory and learning as I went along. I do believe this is covered on the psych GRE though, under some methodology section? I may be wrong. </p>
<p>As a math major, did you take stats courses or did you focus on something else? (My knowledge of college math courses and the major is limited, so I don’t know what kinds of courses or specialization you can take). This may put you in a good position for helping with analyses, which is probably the most interesting part anyway. Of course, you’ll likely be contributing at least some data to the analyses as well.</p>
<p>I’m presently taking a calculus based stats course and plan to take another in the spring, so it certainly hasn’t been my focus. I’ve been self-studying additional statistics because of my interest in machine learning (so there is an emphasis in Bayesian methodology in what I’ve been working on). </p>
<p>I’ve taken a very wide array of math courses (about 26 or so in total), but my focus has been decidedly on more formal coursework (it was only about a year ago that I decided that I did not wish to pursue a career as a pure mathematician), with a tendency towards logic and theoretical computer science (I’ve had about 5 graduate courses geared towards those sorts of topics, and a few independent studies on algebra and applications of algebra and algebraic geometry).</p>
<p>While I’ve read a good deal on methodology and experimental logic, I’m afraid that my technical prowess in that area is still probably lacking and in any event my credentials certainly are.</p>