<p>My son will be graduating with a major in psych and a minor or major in comp sci and will be looking for a graduate program in quantitative psychology/mathematical psychology or computational neuroscience. Any suggestions? </p>
<p>Yay! Quantitative psychology is awesome. (My background is in social/health but I do quant psych related research now.)</p>
<p>I have lots of suggestions for quantitative psychology (not so many for computational neuroscience)</p>
<ol>
<li>Penn State (Human Development and Family Studies program - Penn State has the Methodology Center with lots of quant psychs working on development of novel statistical methods, and you have the option to earn an MA in applied statistics along with the PhD.)</li>
<li>UNC-Chapel Hill (quantitative psychology; also has a behavioral neuroscience concentration and quant psych students there are encouraged to work with faculty in a substantive area)</li>
<li>UCLA (quantitative psychology - they also have behavioral neuroscience, and you can select neuroscience as your major field and quant as your minor, or vice versa )</li>
<li>Arizona State (quantitative psychology)</li>
<li>University of Southern California (quantitative psychology)</li>
<li>NYU (has a minor in quantitative psychology, but some of the top quant psychs are there and you can get good training. Your PhD could be in cognition and perception, and they have a brain imaging center and a center for neuroeconomics there).</li>
<li>Vanderbilt (PhD in quantitative methods; it’s technically housed in the school of education, but works more closely with the psychology programs. They also have a neuroscience concentration there).</li>
<li>Ohio State (quant psych)</li>
<li>UIUC (quant psych. This is a top-ranked psychology department; they also have behavioral and cognitive neuroscience concentrations so you can work with faculty in those areas even if you major in quant psych).</li>
</ol>
<p>The APA [has</a> a more extensive list](<a href=“http://www.apa.org/research/tools/quantitative/]has”>http://www.apa.org/research/tools/quantitative/), there aren’t very many quantitative psychology programs actually, but I think that the field is little-known and competition is pretty low.</p>
<p>I think UIUC’s program has some mathematical psychology leanings with more computational stuff; Indiana University has a mathematical psychology concentration. I think Purdue has one, too. That APA website also has a short list of some mathematical psych programs (there aren’t very many).</p>
<p>Another thing he can do is look for neuroscience departments that appeal to him, and then look up the statistics department and see if they offer the opportunity to earn an MA in statistics (or a graduate certificate) while he earns a PhD in the other field. A lot of graduate schools offer this option; they don’t make it explicitly clear, but if you hunt for the information you can find it. For instance, I happen to know that Yale (which has a neuroscience concentration in psychology) [offers</a> an MA in statistics that you can earn en route to the PhD in another field](<a href=“http://statistics.yale.edu/academics/ma-en-route]offers”>Yale Statistics MA en route | Department of Statistics and Data Science). (I wish that my grad school had had this option.)</p>
<p>So much great information - thanks!! He’s still not completely sure about his path yet. He has to talk to his advisor a little more extensively about it. He originally started as a comp sci major and realized last year that it wasn’t really his passion, but that psychology really interested him. So he declared as a psych major with a cs minor, which he’s now considering making a second major since he’s so close, and it will make him more marketable. He would have to figure out how to combine the two into one thesis, however. He’s currently a junior and will be spending the next 2 years as his advisor’s research assistant. She specializes in memory and perception in music. </p>
<p>I was curious about CMU as well. It doesn’t appear on the list of schools, but it seems like it may have some of what he’s looking for. Do you know anything about it? They are very interdepartmental there, and they have a cognitive neuroscience center there (or something like that) that is specifically for mixing various scientific, mathematical, and technological departments. Last year, they had a summer program as well, so I’m hoping they’re doing it again this year.</p>
<p>Because of his cs background, he seems to have a very unique view on psychology. He often relates the human brain to a computer and uses what he knows about each interchangeably to explore the other. His idea right now is to create a computer program that uses memory to identify music the way his test subjects do in the experiments he’s conducting. And last year, he wrote a paper that compared the human brain to a computer to explain a memory experiment carried out by a psychologist.</p>
<p>For space, I left out one thing that was on my mind, but it’s related to what you asked: You don’t have to go to a formal quantitative psychology program in order to study the relationships between math, computer science, and neuroscience/psychology. In fact, some of the most accomplished quant psychs don’t have a PhD in it because it didn’t exist when they were training. One of the most accomplished actually has his PhD in developmental psychology. I mean, it’s a really formal way to learn the skills necessary, but PhDs are highly flexible and a lot of students do a lot of tailoring as long as the resources are there.</p>
<p>So that’s why I didn’t suggest Carnegie Mellon off the top of my head, because they don’t have a formal quant psych program and that’s what I was thinking of at the time (I am not familiar with cognitive neuroscience). But CMU is probably a great place to go do this kind of work, because of their strengths in data science and quantitative methods, in computer modeling, and in neuroscience. But I know that CMU’s psychology department is quite strong and some of the famous people in my subfield, social/health are there (Sheldon Cohen, the Creswells). There’s also a famous cognitive neuroscientist that even I have heard about - David Plaut, he’s pretty huge in the field. Actually, now I’m browsing their faculty list and there are quite a few faculty who I have heard about and read even though I am not in their field/area (Thiessen, Stiegler, Klatzky, Koedinger - I was in a heavily cognitive neuroscience department so a lot of my classmates did that kind of work, so probably where I’ve heard these names). A lot of the faculty seem involved in computer science (some are jointly appointed in computer science or HCI) and computational modeling, so it seems like an excellent fit for your son. And doesn’t CMU have a pretty celebrated music school, too? That might not be at all relevant, lol, but the potential is there.</p>
<p>I’m so glad to hear that CMU has a strong Psychology department. The ironic thing is that he turned CMU down for undergrad when he was accepted to the Dietrich School but waitlisted for the Computer Science school. It was one of his top picks, so it would be great if he ended up there for graduate school. It really seems to offer a lot of what he’s looking for. I don’t think that he would be happy at most of the colleges on the quant. pscyh list, so we will most likely be looking for something that would accomplish the same goal without the specific program. </p>
<p>CMU does have a top Fine Arts school, which I never knew until he applied there. </p>
<p>I ended up where I really wanted to be for undergrad in grad school, lol.</p>
<p>I’m not sure why you think he won’t be happy, but some thoughts on that:</p>
<p>1) If it’s because of the location, PhD programs are just 5-6 years and then you move on. Obviously I would never advocate going somewhere you would be miserable, but going to a non-favored city is ok - you’re not making a lifelong commitment, just 5-6 years. It’s worth it for the increased flexibility on the back end - a better-reputed department probably has better placement and can send you to a more favorable location (as opposed to choosing a lesser department in a better location). Of course, the best option would be a great department in an awesome location, lol.</p>
<p>Besides, he may be surprised by what he likes and doesn’t like. I thought I would love going to graduate school in New York, but I quickly grew tired of, and overwhelmed by, being in an enormous city and the cost of living made it difficult to enjoy life as much as I thought I would. By the time I was in year 4 I just wanted to get out, lol. By contrast, I thought that living in State College would be very boring and that I would just keep my head down and push out papers. I actually really love living in a small college town for so many reasons, and it’s not that far from a bunch of major cities if I ever want to take a weekend trip or go to a concert or something. (FWIW though, Pittsburgh was one of the cities I considered for my postdoc and I heard nothing but good things, and the cost of living is pretty cheap despite the urbanicity.)</p>
<p>2) If it’s because of the universities themselves, I would just remind him that grad rankings of universities are very different from undergrad rankings and/or general prestige. Arizona State, for example, is a pretty nondescript place for undergrad but really well known in quantitative psychology as one of the top places to be. Not that I blame him for not wanting to go there, though, lol. Some of the schools mentioned - NYU, UCLA, USC, Ohio State, Vanderbilt - are in relatively large urban areas, and Chapel Hill is pretty close to Raleigh.</p>
<p>Picking a PhD program is really different from selecting an undergrad school in that way; you pay less (but still some) attention to the creature comforts and activities around and more attention to the advisor, the quality of the department, and the research and resources available.</p>
<p>He’s kind of a homebody, so I’m not sure he’d go as far as CA or AZ. But I’m leaving it up to him to decide what he wants to do. I did a lot of research for him when he was looking at undergrad schools, but he’s really got to do it himself this time. He’s very picky about where he goes to school, and I don’t think that’ll change, so he will probably limit himself. Anywhere he ends up will be totally different than where he is now because he’s in a small liberal arts college. </p>
<p>When you look at the schools, do you do the whole tour thing, or do you just contact someone in the department you’re interested in? I know the tours are usually geared for undergrads. Did you bother visiting the campus before applying, or did you visit after you were accepted?</p>
<p>I’m totally new to the grad school game. My husband attended but I never did, so I’m not sure where to go from here.</p>
<p>In psychology, most schools have two stages of admissions: the first (in which they review your grades, test scores, statements, and letters) and then interviews. Not all departments do them, but generally speaking for interviews they invite you to campus for 2-3 days to meet with your prospective advisor, be interviewed by the faculty, meet current graduate students and see the campus and surrounding area. The costs are usually covered by the department - sometimes they put you up in a shared hotel room and other times you stay with a graduate student in the department.</p>
<p>If you do that, you get a free visit at a time in which you have decent odds of getting admitted (I think most programs probably invite at most twice as many as they plan to admit).</p>
<p>If your son’s programs don’t do interviews, though, I personally would wait until after admission to visit. I think there’s not much point in paying a lot of money to visit a department into which he might not be admitted. Instead he can contact professors whose research interests him.</p>
<p>I visited one school before I was admitted, but that’s because I lived in the city and it was a short drive. The school I ended up at, I visited after I was admitted. I asked my home department at my LAC to sponsor my airfare, and I asked the school if there were any people I could stay with. Several people volunteered :)</p>