Please see the faculty listings to learn more about specific research labs in the department.

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 and/or you can receive course credit via independent research courses.

The Benefits of Getting Involved in Research:

• 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
• Learn what is behind the experiments that you read about in your courses. This puts you in a better position to understand and critique those articles
• Enrich your classroom knowledge with an in-depth and detailed understanding of a particular topic in psychology
• Find out what kinds of problems arise in research and how to go about solving these problems
• Acquire a variety of skills that are useful for approaching any issue systematically
• These skills will help you figure out how to ask the right kind of questions as well as find the right place to look for the answers
• Get acquainted with your professor better than you could within the context of a course setting
• The research experience you obtain places you in a position to do further work in psychology
• Helps you get the job you want. It looks great on a résumé because employers want to hire people who have the skills that are developed in doing research

Students Are Encouraged to Engage in Research Areas Such As:

• Applied and evaluative psychology
• Social, cognitive, and developmental psychology
• Biopsychology and comparative psychology

Facilities

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, Rockefeller University, the New York University Medical Center, and the New York University Center for Neural Science.

Remember, 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 this ahead of time with your research sponsor. Typical questions are: 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. In that way, you will know whether you have the background and interests 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.