Psychology Honors Program Creates "Mini-Graduate Students"

Psychology honors student Ines Jurcevic presented her research findings at the 2010 Honors Poster Session

Each spring quarter, psychology professor Miriam Bassok can be found beaming with pride as she heralds the accomplishments of her "mini-graduate students."  The setting is the annual Undergraduate Honors Poster Session.  The audience is made up of faculty, staff, and undergraduate and graduate students.  The "mini-graduate students"... they are seniors in the Psychology Department Honors Program on hand to present the results of their research projects.

The Psychology Honors Program offers highly motivated undergraduates the opportunity to try on the kind of experiences that they will encounter as first-year Ph.D. students.  The two-year program places students in a lab with a psychology faculty mentor where they will spend their junior year as an integral member of the lab team.  Following the submission of their own research proposal at the end of this first year, students embark on their own work, under the direction of their faculty mentor.  Their work culminates in the submission of a senior honors thesis and presentation at the Honors Poster Session.  Along the way, many of the students have the opportunity to co-author papers with fellow lab members, attend and sometimes even present their work at national conferences.

The Honors Program cohort has nearly doubled in size over the past few years, growing from 12 students in 2007-08 to 22 this past year.  Again this year, 22 bright and dedicated students are already working on their research projects in the areas of cognition and perception, animal behavior, adult and child clinical, social and personality, child development, and behavioral neuroscience.  Watch for them to do great things this year, and beyond!