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Research Opportunities
See the faculty listings to learn more about specific research labs in the psychology department.
For information on special undergraduate research programs (The COR Program, Field Placement Program, Honors Program, and Neuroscience Concentration), click here.
Getting Involved in Research with Hunter Psychology Faculty
Hunter Psychology Department faculty are actively involved in research involving human participants and a wide variety of animal species. Whether you are a graduate student or an undergraduate, being involved in original research with a faculty member and other students is one of the most interesting and valuable experiences you can have. You can volunteer to work on faculty research. You can also receive course credit via independent research courses.
Here are some of the benefits of getting involved in research.
- You get hands-on experience in thinking like a psychologist: developing and testing hypotheses, testing and observing research participants (whether animal or human), refining methods, analyzing data, and understanding the implications of the data.
- You learn what is behind the experiments that you read about in your courses, putting you in a better position to understand and critique those articles.
- You enrich your classroom knowledge by in-depth and detailed understanding of a particular topic in psychology.
- You learn what kinds of problems arise in research and how to go about solving those problems.
- You acquire a variety of skills that are useful for approaching any issue systematically. Those skills help you figure out what kinds of questions to ask and where to look for answers.
- You get to know a professor better than you can within the context of a course, and that professor gets to know you better.
- Your research experience helps you do further work in psychology and helps you find jobs. Employers want to hire people who have the skills that research develops.
Students are encouraged to engage in research under faculty supervision in areas such as (1) applied and evaluative psychology; (2) social, cognitive, and developmental psychology; (3) biopsychology and comparative psychology. Facilities include specialized equipment for studies on human and animal physiology, speech analysis, human and animal learning, and developmental and social psychology. Students have access to the department's microcomputers and the college's academic computing services. In addition to conducting research in their laboratories at the college, many faculty members have affiliations with other institutions, including the American Museum of Natural History, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Rehabilitation Research Institute of the International Center for the Disabled, the New York State Psychiatric Institute, the Rockefeller University, the New York University Medical Center, and the New York University Center for Neural Science.
Research is work! Depending on whose research project you join, you will be expected to spend anywhere from 9-15 hours a week working on the project and doing background reading for the project. It's important to establish ahead of time, with your research sponsor, how many hours per week you will be committing to the project, what work you will do, and what final product you will produce.
Be sure to read each faculty member's description of his or her project carefully. That way you will know whether you have the background and interests that are appropriate for the project; you will also find out what your responsibilities would be and what you would learn from being part of the research project.
