Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology - Behavioral Neuroscience

Northeastern University

The PhD program in the Department of Psychology covers a wide spectrum of contemporary behavioral science within a close-knit community of faculty and students. The program offers four overlapping areas of experimental emphasis: behavioral neuroscience, cognition, perception, and social/personality. The program does not offer training in clinical or counseling psychology. The objective of the PhD program is to prepare students to become experts in research and teaching in psychology. To accomplish this goal, the department takes a mentoring approach whereby the graduate students are apprentices in faculty laboratories, working closely with their faculty mentors throughout their time in the program. The basic apprenticeship relationship is supplemented by other activities, such as required courses (concentrated in the first and second years), advanced seminars and/or course work in this as well as other departments or universities, a colloquium series, assignments as teaching assistants, the master’s project, and the dissertation and its oral defense. After the first year, the structure of the doctoral program, including course work, is flexible and assumes that the process of learning and scientific discovery must be individualized. Graduate students also have an opportunity to develop their teaching and research skills through close mentoring of undergraduate research assistants. The PhD program is a five-year, twelve-months-per-year program. The department admits a small group of students to its doctoral program each year in order to maintain its apprenticeship model, with students admitted to work with a particular faculty mentor. In the laboratory, responsibility for collaboration in research gradually shifts from the faculty mentor to the student, culminating in the student’s doctoral dissertation. The program is five years in length, with students earning a Master’s degree at the end of their second year, in the course of working towards their PhD. Some students enter with a Master’s degree in an appropriate field they are not required to earn another one.