<p>I graduate in May with a BS in psychology. I ultimately want a career in research/academia, and my primary interest is evolutionary psychology. I have a 4.0 GPA, but no real research experience (just lots of methods and stat classes, no projects) and I know that PhD programs are out of the question next year, so I've been looking at MA and MS programs.</p>
<p>While there are several psychology programs that look good for getting research experience, I've been looking more into Master's in Anthropology due to my research interests in evolution. Generally, could I get accepted into a good anthropology program with a psychology degree? More importantly, do you think an MA in Anthropology (say, biological anthropology) coupled with my psych BS be more useful to me in pursuing strictly evolutionary psych doctoral programs than a master's in general psychology? </p>
<p>(For the record, I did take a couple lower level anthropology classes years ago and loved them. So I'm not completely new to the area, but I don't know if that's enough to get me into a good anthropology program.)</p>
<p>First of all, if you want a PhD in psychology you don’t need a master’s at all. With a 4.0 GPA, your academic prowess is not in question - your research experience is what’s lacking, so you need that. But in psychology you can get research experience without a master’s, and most PhD students in psychology programs don’t have master’s degrees. Frankly I don’t think the MA is advantageous - most psychology PhD programs won’t grant you more than a semester of credit from the MA, if even that. They are also rarely funded, but you can get the research experience without paying for an MA.</p>
<p>If you really want a PhD in evolutionary psychology then the MA is unnecessary; what you should do instead is look for opportunities to work in a research lab/setting for 2-3 years. There are paid lab manager positions and paid research associate positions at university psych labs, academic medical complexes, think tanks, government agencies, NGOs, and nonprofit organizations at which you can get that experience.</p>
<p>Anthropology is not my field so I’m not as sure about the MA - I think a lot of anthro PhD students have MAs, and given that your background is in psychology I think an MA in anthropology would be necessary before you got into a good anthro PhD program.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, I think that pursuing either master’s is an unnecessary expense of money. But if you absolutely had to get a master’s, then no, I don’t think it would be more useful. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be useful at all, I just don’t think it’s necessarily <em>more</em> useful than an MA in psychology. It depends entirely on where you go and who you work with, although I think in most cases the psych MA would be more useful. PhD programs build upon prior knowledge, and you are training for specialization in a discipline. Psychology and anthropology are very different disciplines with different approaches. If you know for sure that you want to be an evolutionary psychologist, you need to train using the approaches and methods of psychologists. However, if your goal is to use a more interdisciplinary approach to studying evolution - and you want to marry the approaches of anthropologists and psychologists together - then the MA might be more useful to you in that context.</p>
<p>Evolutionary anthropologists study the interface between biology and culture. Psychologists study the mind, brain, and behavior. An evolutionary psychologist would be concerned with how facets of our behaviors and cognitions evolved (like social roles and interaction, perception, social cognition, neural connections - but all focused on their evolution and the antecedents and outcomes of that). I’m not entirely sure about anthropologists, but they seem to approach things from a more macro level - interested in how biologically diverse species knit into homo sapiens, for example, or how ancient cultures were shaped by evolutionary processes. There’s a lot of overlap in the questions they answer, but the methods will be different.</p>