Information for Prospective Graduate Students
To a great extent, graduate training is a matter of one-to-one teaching and learning in an advanced, and often highly specialized area of research and scholarship. Thus, in choosing a graduate school, the student is strongly advised to make a careful evaluation of the faculty and to apply to institutions at which the scholarly interests of the faculty match those of the student. Listed above are the area faculty and their current areas of research and scholarship.
See the area faculty page for faculty who may admit and train psychology graduate students in this area of the UW Psychology Department. Contact faculty in which you are interested, prior to application, to determine their specific plans about admitting graduate students in the coming year.
Please visit the Application Information page for admissions statistics for this area.
Please visit the UW Psychology Graduate Programs page for more information.
Our goal is to help you become an outstanding researcher of human social behavior and inter- and intra-personal experience. We seek to understand how the social and the intra-individual processes interact to generate behavior of importance both to society and individuals. That is the single unifying goal that underlies all of our diverse research and teaching activities.
Specifically, our training program aims to provide students with the skills and knowledge necessary for (1) identifying research questions that are both important, and amenable to scientific investigation, (2) research design and methods that allow you to get at the core of a question, (3) a grounding in the existing body of knowledge, so you can position your research to benefit from, and advance, the state of our knowledge, and (4) effectively communicate your work to maximize your contribution to the field and society. For that purpose, students take courses and seminars that efficiently provide the foundations of conducting research. Most importantly, being a graduate student in our program means you become a part of a vigorous research community with a cooperative spirit. From the moment you begin, you are encouraged to develop a program of collaborative research with members of the faculty. As you develop your competence and experience through a training program that you and your advisor(s) develop, you will assume an increasingly large role in the research project and you will become a full collaborator. Our goal is to help you become an independent researcher, ready to start your own life-long program of research when you graduate from our program with a Ph.D.
We seek collaborative working relationship between faculty and students. While we make sure each student has a primary mentor, we encourage each student to work with more than one faculty. Students are also encouraged to take advantage of the strong clinical, cognitive, developmental, neuroscience, and quantitative programs offered by the department to broaden their training. We admit only a small number of students to our program to ensure you are able to work closely with faculty and other graduate students in research and teaching.
Throughout the year, you will have opportunities to attend brown bags, the departmental proseminar, and our department's colloquium series that brings internationally renowned researchers from other departments and schools at the University, as well as universities from around the world, to present their work and meet with graduate students and faculty. You will be exposed to a wide range of psychological research and current developments in the field.
If you are considering applying to our doctoral program, you can learn more about it and our faculty's research interests by reading our individual faculty interest pages and by e-mailing us. Also, you are encouraged to contact our graduate students for their perspective on our program.