Information for prospective PhD students:
Thank you for your interest in joining the lab! I am planning to take on a new advisee for next Fall. Deadline to apply is January 4th. Information can be found here https://rady.ucsd.edu/programs/phd/index.html
What the lab looks for in potential advisees:
1) Have interests in morality, culture, violence, and their evolution. Feel a drive toward social justice and a curiosity about the social structures that lead to injustice. Students can expect to read very widely, drawing on scholarship across the full breadth of social sciences from cognitive science to cultural anthropology
2) Have interest in learning and using multiple, mixed methods (e.g., interviewing, in-lab and online experiments; dyadic/group interaction studies, psychophysiological measurements; experience sampling methods, archival analyses, and more). Stats training, computational skills, etc are all a plus but not required
3) Eagerness to engage in fieldwork! Moving forward, many of our projects will move beyond the lab to study morality "in the wild" across a variety of organizational and cultural settings
4) Diverse backgrounds and life experiences. Academically, I welcome students from non-psychological fields that can complement my expertise (e.g. sociology, economics, etc.). I am also happy to discuss the differences between pursuing a PhD at Rady vs. a more traditional subdiscipline
In your statement of purpose, you are encouraged to:
(1) State a general research question or area that you’re most interested in pursuing, and why you are passionate about the topic
(2) Give a general sense of the reading that you’ve done, (beyond what has been written by Prof Rai) that has inspired you
(3) Communicate your research skill set, and describe some of your key experiences relevant to conducting Ph.D. research in the lab and in the field
(4) Give a sense of the type of questions or projects that you can envision working on with Prof. Rai, and why your skills and interests would make for a great fit. One strategy is to identify a paper written by Prof. Rai that connects well with your interests, and say why (e.g., maybe the topic/research questions align with your interests; maybe the methods would be useful for examining a different research question; maybe the findings spark ideas for pursuing different questions)
(5) Identify 1-2 other Rady faculty (or even UCSD faculty in other departments) who you might also work with—our Ph.D. students are encouraged to work with multiple faculty
Contact
For more information, you can email Professor Rai at trai@ucsd.edu