About the Department
Welcome to the Department of Psychology at Notre Dame—a fast growing and dynamic department that is home to one of the most popular majors on campus.
Program Accolades
The Department has four programs, counseling, cognitive, developmental and quantitative. According to a 2005 study published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology, our counseling program faculty rank 11th in the country in scholarly productivity. In 1994, a study also showed us ranked 11th, ahead of Stanford, Illinois, Wisconsin, UCLA, and Texas.
A study published in Developmental Review in 2001 ranks our developmental faculty 10th in the country, ahead of Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, and Michigan. No comparable studies have been published in cognitive psychology or quantitative psychology, so we do not have data on their rankings although it should be noted that Notre Dame is the only university in the country with as many as 3 recipients of the Cattell Award for Outstanding Early-Career Contributions to Multivariate Experimental Psychology.
Faculty Achievements
In 1992, the Department received 3 external awards totally $273,647. Ten years later, the Department garnered 21 grants worth $5.1 million, an increase of 1,864%! In the most recent fiscal year, the Department was awarded more than four million dollars. A recent assessment by the Graduate School indicates that, on average, the Department makes 31 applications per year, and is awarded 16 grants, suggesting a success rate of 50%!
The Department is particularly proud of the contributions of John Borkowski, McKenna Family Professor of Psychology, who received the Office of Research’s Research Achievement Award for 2006 and has garnered more external research funding than any other faculty member on campus.
Innovation in Undergraduate Education
Research experience has long been an important part of our undergraduate curriculum. The faculty challengestudents to apply the aspects of theories learned in substantive courses with the research design and data analysis that they have been exposed to in our methods sequence.
Working in faculty research labs provides students with a guided opportunity to learn firsthand the many facets of research, including study design, the operationalization of the theoretical questions of interest, data collection, data entry, data analysis, and manuscript preparation or presentation at conferences. Students can also engage in a year-long independent research project through our senior honors thesis course.
Other opportunities for undergraduates include community-based coursework that integrate classroom learning with real world experiences. A more comprehensive opportunity involves the departmental externship program. The externship course provides students with an opportunity to work in a mental health setting with intense supervision and a concomitant classroom experience. The course is designed to expose our majors to the variety of roles within the field on mental health services, to broaden their appreciation of how research findings are used in daily applications, and to test their individual interests before they enter graduate programs.
Psi Chi and Psychology Club give students ways to generate and support important intellectual initiatives on campus and in the discipline, and provide opportunities for faculty-student interactions outside of the classroom.
We invite you to learn more about our programs and to contact us should you have any questions.
Cindy S. Bergeman
Department Chair