Landing a position in a psychology lab

[Confused_Engineer]

Good morning everyone,

As you may have read in my previous thread, I am currently a senior year student studying Industrial Engineering. I am considering a leap to a different field. I am strongly considering pivoting to psychology. The field has excited me throughout my life and I feel that it is time to start pursuing my own dreams (I'm 22, I'm not getting any younger!!)

That being said, I have had minimal formal experience in the field. I mean this quite literally, I have only taken an introduction to psychology. You may wonder why I have any interest in this field. Well, you can read about that in my other thread.

My current goal is to find an internship position in a psychology lab during this upcoming semester after I graduate. I know that the university I am attending allows students to conduct research over the Summer, though I have never seen a non-psychology student do such.

I am looking for tips in regards to how I can get involved in this research despite having minimal training.

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[PsychPhDone]

Good morning everyone,

As you may have read in my previous thread, I am currently a senior year student studying Industrial Engineering. I am considering a leap to a different field. I am strongly considering pivoting to psychology. The field has excited me throughout my life and I feel that it is time to start pursuing my own dreams (I'm 22, I'm not getting any younger!!)

That being said, I have had minimal formal experience in the field. I mean this quite literally, I have only taken an introduction to psychology. You may wonder why I have any interest in this field. Well, you can read about that in my other thread.

My current goal is to find an internship position in a psychology lab during this upcoming semester after I graduate. I know that the university I am attending allows students to conduct research over the Summer, though I have never seen a non-psychology student do such.

I am looking for tips in regards to how I can get involved in this research despite having minimal training.

Are you looking for a paid position? That's going to be harder to come by than volunteering, especially with a non-fall start date. With that said, you can cold-email profs whose research interests you. I've been in labs where we've taken on non-psych majors for volunteer stuff, though admittedly, we probably wouldn't look at someone who's only taken Intro.

 

[nessa34]

do you have any coding or programming skills? In labs that do a lot of data processing (fMRI is what I'm familiar with, may be others), you could have an 'in' if you know matlab or maybe python. We have taken students with good programming skills and less psychology knowledge before. I work with a lot of engineers but they are mostly bio/biomedical so I'm not sure how much your skills would overlap.

 

[deleted563975]

I would take a look at your schools list of research labs and start emailing those you find most interesting. In my experience, the basic psychology classes aren't going to prepare you to be a good research assistant. Express your enthusiasm for the subject at hand and why you want to get involved in research. I've hired a few undergrad RA's and the ones who seemed intellectually curious, motivated and disciplined were the ones who were invited to join. As others have mentioned, if you have any stats, coding or programming experience those are very desirable by some labs (e.g matlab, python).