The General/Experimental Program

Minimum Course Requirements

Specialty Courses

For students in the Biobehavioral and Human Behavioral Psychopharmacology areas, the biobehavioral specialty course taught each semester is required seven out of the eight semesters over four years.

In Spring semesters, four required courses are offered in a rotating manner:

Learning Theory
The Neurobiology of Learning and Memory
Emotion
Neuropsychopharmacology

In Fall semesters, a more variable set of courses are offered according to faculty and student interests. Over the last four years, the Fall courses were:

Neurobehavioral Genetics
Addiction
Animal Minds
Cognitive Neuroscience

For students in the Developmental and Social areas, the specialty courses offered are strongly recommended.

Letter-Graded Course Work

All graduate students, including those who transfer credits from other graduate programs, must have at least 15 credits of letter-graded course work prior to the completion of both their masters and the doctoral degrees.

Preliminary Project Policy (for students admitted prior to Fall 2010)

Preliminary Exam Policy (for students admitted Fall 2010 and after)

Teaching Requirement

Each student is required to obtain faculty-approved experience teaching in psychology. The minimum way to meet this requirement is through two weeks of guest lecturing, with faculty feedback on each lecture and development of exam questions or assignments related to the lectures. Please note that this is the minimal amount of teaching experience necessary to make it through the Ph.D. program. We strongly encourage you to seek out more opportunities to get even more experience. If you have questions about whether a particular teaching experience fulfills the requirement, please contact the General/Experimental director.