I’m in an interdisciplinary program and set to graduate very soon, but have to come up with a title for what I’ve studied. These classes span five or six different departments at the University where I study. I’m applying to graduate school in December, and would like to know what impression you get of me from just this list of classes.
The names of my classes are:
The politics of religious authenticity
Lifespan human development
Intro to psychology
seminar political science
medical ethics
elementary statistical methods
social psychology
developmental psychology
abnormal psychology
general experimental psychology
psychology of motivation
Political communication and persuasion
Intro to cognitive psychology
Independent research (a behavioral experiment I’m conducting now)
social inequality
myth, ritual, and magic (anthropology)
senior seminar
physiological psychology
race and ethnic relations
The tentative title I’ve come up with is “Social Cognition.” What do you think? Let’s say you were given a copy of this transcript, and asked to make a judgment of what the candidate is interested in. What are your first rough thoughts?
I know this is a bit self-indulgent, but this is an enormous help in crafting my graduate school applications.
Psychology seems the obvious answer, but I’m guessing you’ve finished a lot of your core classes in your major if you’re about to go to grad school. I’m going to guess cultural anthropology with an emphasis in cross-cultural psychology.
ETA: Yeah, just noticed Intro to Psych was one of your classes for this semester. If you were a psych major you’d certainly have taken that already, while all your anthro classes look to be junior or senior level.
:smack: For some reason I thought this was a list of your classes over the last year, not a list of all your relevant classes. I’ll retract and say social psychology also.
“Interdisciplinary Social Sciences” would probably get the point across well (I assume you want a title that will make it easy for future employers or schools to know what your degree was about).
I don’t like “social cognition.” It doesn’t give me any real understanding of what you studied, and it sounds like on of those super BS postmodern majors like “history of consciousness” or “community theory.” It makes me think you spent a lot of time reading obscure theoretical texts with no real-world applications.
I like “cultural psychology.”
What is it that you want to do with your degree? Unless you have a real focused career path, it might be best to keep your major more broad than narrow.
Not far at all. I’m actually only one class short of a psych major, but I prefer to have an interdisciplinary degree. I’m something like five or six extra classes past the requirement to graduate with this degree.
If I were on an admissions committee and saw something like this, my first impression would be that you’re a psych major who’s trying very hard to pretend to be not just another psych major. I doubt I’m the only one who thinks like that.