Senior Project
Senior Project is a requirement for graduation in the Department of Psychology. It is your opportunity to demonstrate your skills learned in your course work to design, implement, analyze, and present data from a research project. The final product, the research report, is considered the capstone project for Psychology majors and must be passed with a C or better. Each year I take on a limited number of senior project students. I have some guidelines for students requesting to work with me on their senior project.
My requirements: (note these are my personal requirements not departmental requirements, requirements vary by faculty member)
You must have taken and passed research methods, scientific writing, and the required psychology stats courses. This is critical as these are the skills you need to demonstrate knowledge of to successfully complete your project.
You must take both Senior Project I and Senior Project II with me.
Students who are seniors and expecting to graduate in the Spring must start in the Fall quarter. This is to ensure adequate time for completing the project before you graduate. I am happy to work with juniors who meet the class requirements stated above.
Students who work with me will be required to present a poster at the quarterly Department senior project poster session at the end of Senior Project II.
My preferences:
I prefer students with project ideas that are inline with my general research interests (see my homepage and my vitae). This allows me to maximally mentor your project because these are my areas of expertise.
Students who have voluteered to work with me as a research assistant or have been students in my classes will have preference over those who have not worked with me before.
Students with realistic project ideas are preferred over students with no-ideas or unrealistic ideas. Note that you don't need to have your project fully planned before you start but you should have some specific ideas. Also be prepared to have your project change from your initial idea when we start working on your project. Research design is a fluid process and your ideas need to fit into the scope of a senior project.
If you plan to incorporate a psychophysiological measure into your project you should have ideally taken the Psychophysiology course from me before starting your project.