First Year Project

The Department requires that first-year students participate in a research project. The requirements of the project, as set forth by the Committee on Higher Degrees, are as follows.

Faculty Mentor. Each first-year graduate student will be expected to choose a faculty mentor, who will supervise the first-year research. This person may or may not be the student's advisor. It is required that the mentor be a Department faculty member.

Research Project. The first-year project is intended to involve the student in research. The project is intended to allow the student to acquire a) research methodology, and b) the conceptional background (i.e., familiarity with previous findings, issues, and alternative theories) necessary to conduct original research. In some cases, an empirical study will be completed, whereas in others the issues to be studied will be delineated by a thorough literature review and preliminary preparation of materials and collection of pilot data. Depending on the area of interest, first-year projects may vary widely in form and content. For example, acceptable first-year projects might focus on:

• Designing and administering interviews of mothers of disturbed children.
• Acquiring the methodology to use PET scanning to examine the brain areas responsible for movement control.
• Designing and partially implementing a computer simulation of priming effects, to be used to predict outcomes of experiments.
• Asking pilot subjects to keep a diary in which they record the circumstances in which they used "politeness terms," which is then analyzed to develop hypotheses about the use of politeness as a social lubricant.
• Surveying the literature on frontal lobe abnormalities in manic depressives and examining one or two patients with an eye towards such behavioral signs.
• Carrying out an experiment investigating learned helplessness in rats.

The topic of the first-year project typically will be assigned by the faculty mentor, but in many cases the project will be initiated by the student and developed jointly with the mentor.

Project Plan. A short (no more than two page) description of the proposed project must be turned into the Graduate Office before Christmas in the Fall term of the first year. This Plan will outline the project and name the mentor, and will be countersigned by the mentor (indicating his or her approval).

Research Reports. A written report of the first-year project is required. This report will describe in detail the student's progress in acquiring research skills and the conceptual background necessary to conduct research. A typical report will constitute a prospectus for further work, with initial pilot data being marshalled to support the proposed approach. In many cases, although not necessarily, this report will serve to launch the student into the second-year project. The paper should be of length suitable to give the mentor a good understanding of the skills learned and work accomplished. The project report will be due to the mentor in May (the date will be announced by the CHD), and the mentor will provide an assessment of the student's work and report to the CHD.

Relation of first- and second-year projects. The second-year project is more formal than the first-year project. Whereas the first-year project often will take the form of collecting pilot data and reporting speculations about their import, the second-year project will lead to a report in the form of a journal article. Students will write this report in accordance with the guidelines in the APA Style Manual.

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