

Please choose the appropriate link below for specific criteria, application deadlines, and to access the Capped Major application. It also allows the School to keep class sizes small, which can lead to a better learning experience for all students. Continuing Students: Capped Major Application. Schools that assemble a CogSci degree out of requirements from an assortment of departments, without giving CogSci students a departmental “home,” tend to shortchange those students in terms of faculty support and mentoring.Īnd be clear whether you’re looking for the opportunity to delve deeply into a specialty area (whether that be psych, linguistics, computation, design, or other) or whether you’re just using the broadness of the major to get a basic “mile wide and inch deep” undergrad education before moving on to get your depth in grad school.Capped Majors Ucsd. I do recommend that if you want to major in CogSci, you choose a school that has an actual CogSci DEPARTMENT or at least houses the program within a single department. Programs range from psych-heavy programs like Occidental (which didn’t even have a computer science major until last year), to very computation-heavy programs like Carnegie Mellon. (And if you want to aim for an academic grad program, rather than a clinical one, then the priorities are different still.) If you don’t know yet which direction you may want to take, then opt for schools where you have the most flexibility.ĬogSci isn’t “bad for premed” per se the requirements just vary a lot from school to school, making some requirements easier to combine with med school prereqs than others. Whereas, to maximize immediate employability with an undergrad CogSci degree, the more CompSci heavy the program, the better. The fork in the road here is that, to maximize your med school potential, you need to prioritize GPA and pre-med courses. UCLA has a “Linguistics and Computer Science” BA in Arts & Sciences, which could be a great program if those aspects of CogSci interest you, but it wouldn’t be super efficient as a pre-med major. If I wanted to major in CogSci in order to work in UX or continue to grad school and do CogSci research, then UCSD CogSci would be the best program in the UC system, hands down.īut, if I wanted to use CogSci as a broad-based interdisciplinary undergrad premed degree, then I would major in CogSci at Davis, Irvine, or Santa Cruz. There are only a handful of professors who teach cognitive science and there are no “cognitive scientists” who are not professors. Their view is that cognitive science by itself is not sufficient to prepare one for life after undergrad. S’s very large university won’t allow students to take cogsci as a stand-alone major because they feel that students need to have a grounding in a complementary field. I also have a D currently in college and both D’s and S’s CS courses are filled with absolutely brilliant people which makes it difficult for the average brilliant student to get good grades. They may not get you the high grades necessary for applying to med school either.

However, those specializations won’t be as useful for med school. If you specialize in design and interaction or machine learning at UCSD you are more likely to come out with a job. Other students might be interested in the neuroscience or psychology or linguistics or computer science, especially artificial intelligence, portion of the major. S wanted to keep his options open, in case he changed his mind about law school. So cogsci is a good fit for what he wanted to get out of his undergrad. S was also interested in biology and psychology and the mind. Law school requires a fair bit of logic, which are philosophy courses, which his cognitive science major has, but it appears UCSD doesn’t. For example, S is interested in law school. His response was that people who go into cogsci usually do so because they have an idea of what career they would like to do and know that the interdisciplinary nature of the major will help them get there. I asked him this same question last week for another HS student on CC.
