Information for Prospective Graduate Students

General Information:

For information about graduate study in our laboratory, please contact Dr. Holt by email.

You can also go to the Psychology Department website for more information on our graduate training program. You also might be interested in the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), which is not a degree-granting program but a supplement to the training that you receive through the Department of Psychology. The CNBC training provides an opportunity to broaden your experience with cognitive neuroscience and computational modeling. The CNBC bridges Carnegie Mellon with the University of Pittsburgh, so it also serves to connect you with an even wider community of students and faculty with similar research interests.

Information about Working and Living in Pittsburgh:

Carnegie Mellon University Department of Psychology is a fantastic place to pursue research training. It’s a consistent top-ranked department. The research environment is stimulating, challenging and friendly. (Check out the photos from the Psychology Department karaoke holiday party, psych-ski, and psych-bike as examples or read our department newsletter the Psycho? Logical? Bulletin.)

Our graduate students work full time as students and researchers. Your 12-month stipend, health insurance, tuition, and even a bus pass are covered by the department. The cost of living in Pittsburgh is quite low and the standard of living is high. Most students and faculty live close enough to campus to walk or bike to work and the housing options reflect the history of Pittsburgh – just around the corner from campus are many lovely old Victorian mansions that now provide apartment living with historic charm. You can check out Google’s housing maps to get an idea of what we mean. Pittsburgh is a city of neighborhoods. With the rolling hills providing some geographic isolation, the 88 neighborhoods and districts have maintained very distinctive characteristics. Carnegie Mellon sits at the junction of Squirrel Hill, Shadyside, and Oakland (the original “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood”!).

You’ll be welcomed into a great community of graduate students, both within and outside the department. CMU boasts a very active Graduate Student Assembly (with several Psychology grads serving as past Presidents) that organizes campus-wide events to promote life outside the lab. The proximity of University of Pittsburgh (just across the Panther Hollow with a dive bar conveniently located on the way) also expands the community. If you’re curious about what CMU looks like, rent Wonder Boys – filmed on campus and in our own Baker Hall in 1999.

If you have never been to Pittsburgh, you will be very pleasantly surprised! It’s not the steel city it used to be. Pittsburgh ranks among the cleanest cities in the United States and is the 17th cleanest city in the world, according to a study by William M. Mercer, a San Francisco-based consulting firm. As a grad in the department, your office will be just steps away from the beautiful Schenley Park, the 3rd largest public park on the eastern seaboard (after NYC’s Central Park and Phillie’s Fairmount Park) and home to rolling hills, woods, running trails, bike paths, a swimming pool, tennis courts, a skating rink and the Phipps Conservatory. Much of the park that borders CMU (and, in fact, all of the CMU campus) is “wireless” so you can check your email in the great outdoors or anywhere on campus. With three rivers in the city and a few with more raging rapids within a short drive, Pittsburgh is one of the leading cities for rowing crew and kayaking. Whatever you’re into, you’ll find active communities.

Home of Andy Warhol, Heinz Ketchup, Klondike Bars, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, and the unique culinary contribution of adding French Fries to both sandwiches and salads, Pittsburgh has lots of interesting quirks! Who knows? In the course of earning your Ph.D., you might pick up how to speak like a native or become a fan of one of the three home-town professional sports teams, the Penguins, Pirates, and Steelers. If that’s not your speed, Pittsburgh boasts world-class opera, theater, and symphony in its downtown cultural district and enough interesting restaurants to keep you eating well throughout your grad days.

Pittsburgh is a great place to be a grad, but the real appeal is the incredibly stimulating intellectual environment afforded in the department. As a graduate student you’ll find many outstanding intellectual and research opportunities with course work, lab meetings and reading groups, graduate-student run colloquium series, research retreats, etc. Graduates of our program have used this training to go on to build some pretty impressive careers!

We will be recruiting new graduate students to enter the program this fall. We are especially seeking individuals with interests in the following areas:

Auditory cognition
Speech perception
Perceptual learning and the effect of expertise
Plasticity and sensitivity to regularity in perceptual input
Word recognition
Multimodal processing for object recognition and language
Eye-tracking
Related areas

Please explore our website and see if our research interests align. You can find a list of our publications, explanation of our research interests, and research methods. If you have questions, please feel free to contact us by email.

We will invite the top applicants to visit campus in the early spring (expenses paid) to spend a few days learning about the department, meeting the graduate students and faculty, and finding out about what the intellectual community in Pittsburgh has to offer.

Feel free to contact Dr. Lori Holt for more information.