September 9, 2024
I want to use this page to cover some questions that I've been asked about various advising issues.
1) Can I receive credit for my concentration for a UTRA experience in the CPSY department.
Answer: No. One cannot receive course credit for just a paid experience. However, there are some cases in which you can also take CLPS1980 or another form of independent study if you are on a UTRA. This is something that you have to work out with an individual faculty member.
Please note a few things. First, if your UTRA sponsor is not in the CLPS department, then that faculty member must understand what is necessary for providing course credit. They should contact the DUS of the department (for CPSY, that's me) for these guidelines.
Second, if you intend to participate in the honors program in Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, or Cognitive Science, the expectation is that you take CLPS1980 in your last two semesters. And those are required without exception. Because you can only apply two semesters of 1970 or 1980 (Combined) to your concentration, if you are going honors, you probably want to wait for the last two semesters to register for these classes. You can be supported by it during the summer or previous to the last two semesters as well. But you will not also receive course credit for that participation. Because there are no independent studies over the summer, you can never receive course credit (or concentration credit) for a UTRA over the summer in the CPSY department.
2) Should I triple major at Brown.
Answer: OK, this is my opinion. No. (Scroll down for the tl;dr)
Here's a story:
If you have read a large chunk of this blog, you'll know that I went to Swarthmore College my undergrad. Swarthmore had a pretty similar curriculum as Brown's (in fact, my final decision for undergrad was between Swarthmore and Brown because of the curricular flexibility).
But I want to tell you about my graduation. Swarthmore has this beautiful outdoor amphitheater, which is where graduation used to be held. It's idyllic, and my sitting in there at various points of time during my college career remains a fond memory.
So, in this setting, I want to talk about our three graduation speakers. The first was Bill Cosby. It was 1995. He told a story about a bear, and told that 10, 20, even 50 years later, we would all remember the story about the bear. No one I went to college with remembers anything about the story about the bear, but everyone very shamefully remembers that Bill Cosby was our graduation speaker.
The second was Seamus Heaney. If you have never heard of him, look him up. He was amazing.
But it's the third speaker that I want to write about. I don't remember his name. What I do remember was that he was a triple major at Swarthmore in Engineering, Physics, and Biology, who achieved highest honors (no one from my class remembers his name, but they remember that). When we heard that, the entire senior class applauded. No one had ever heard of that.
(For the record, I chose Swarthmore over Brown because of the structure of the honors program. Brown did have a Cognitive Science department - the department I now teach in - but Swarthmore was prettier and that was the tie-breaker).
Part of the reason why this was so impressive was that no one in my class was allowed to triple major. Swarthmore had been preventing students from triple majoring for a few years. It was actually feasible (for example, I double majored in Psychology and Computer Science, and was about 3 classes sign of a third major in Linguistics), but the college wouldn't allow it. And I agree with this.
Basically, it's against the philosophy of a Liberal Arts education. A liberal arts education is supposed to be broad, and supposed to be exploratory, and supposed to exposure you to a large set of ideas from multiple disciplines. Triple majoring really prevents that - it basically says that you will just get exposed to a much smaller set of ideas.
There are classes as an undergraduate outside of my majors, I do not at all regret taking (I took three classes in English/Comp Lit and two in the Philosophy department, and I enjoyed all of them). There are some I feel neutral about (I took a number theory class - it was fun, but linear algebra would have been MUCH more useful for me in the long run. And honestly, the linguistics classes I took were a little repetitive). There's only one that I would have liked to change (Latin - I took it all through high school, and I took a semester of Latin my junior year. It was a complete waste of my time - this still sticks in my craw - it's weird the things you regret, but I suppose 31 out of 32 is a pretty good batting average).
So, when I think back to my graduation, I think about this speaker, and how impressed we all were by his accomplishments. But I also think that he probably should not have gone to Swarthmore. He would have done the same at MIT or a larger university, where he could have taken a depth-only approach to his education. Brown offers a particular opportunity to explore a curriculum - these broad fields of study. No one has the time to master all of them, but it is important to be exposed to some of them.
In my own field right now, there's a movement towards "depth-only" education. That is, people who study cognitive neuroscience (for example), want to only know about the very small field they are studying and the methods they use. They don't care what development or social or clinical psychologists are doing. It's just a different field to them. But this has always struck me as the wrong way to train at either a graduate or undergraduate level, and the curriculum doesn't really support for such an approach. Knowing a little bit about a lot of fields isn't a bad thing.
OK, the tl;dr version: You went to Brown, which has the fewest curricular requirements on purpose so that you can explore. Don't waste that by not exploring.
3. Why is statistics important to the study of Psychology?
So, this applies not just to psychology, but to all four of the concentrations in the CPSY department. Simply put, we are a probabilistic science. As a mathematical field, Statistics and Probability are highly related to one another. Statistics is a way of making probabilistic inferences over data, which is the basis of the experimental side of our science. In order to read and make judgments and inferences about academic research in psychology and related disciplines, you need to know the underlying mathematics of how we (a) design experiments, (b) analyze experiments, and (c) offer conclusions - which are really more like updated beliefs based on rational inference. The CLPS0900 and 1900/01 (remember these two are interchangeable) courses teach this! That's why they are required for all of our concentrations.
Can you piecemeal this together from others courses? Yes. Kind of. Sort of. Maybe. But we really want you to take the two classes that we teach because of this.
This is why we so strongly recommend that you don't take CLPS0900 (or ANY stats course) until your sophomore year and, if you concentrate in the department, CLPS1900/01, until your junior year. The best thing to do is to take CLPS900 as a sophmore and CLPS1900/01 as a junior.
Right now, we have been accepting SOC1100, APMA1660, and PHP1501 as suitable replacements for CLPS0900, but we really think that 900 is the best experience for students in Cognitive and Psychological Sciences.
APMA0650 and APMA1650 do not teach the relevant information, so cannot be used in lieu of the CLPS0900 requirement for the concentration (1650 used to, but now it does not). So, these are not normally accepted. They might be accepted as prerequisites for classes, but that's different.
OK. That's all for now. If other advising questions come up this semester that I want to write about, I'll do it in this space.