For undergrads & prospective students

Getting the most (fun👆 ) out of research

🐯 denotes resources developed by CoLab members!

Core skills

• Experimentology: A free textbook and comprehensive guide to open science methods in experimental psychology, from designing your first study to analyzing and communicating your results.

• ProbMods: Another free textbook, this time on building probabilistic models of cognition.

• Software Carpentry: Freely-available lessons in English and Spanish, teaching basic skills for scientific computing and reproducible data analysis

• Elizabeth Mieczkowski: python 4 beginners 🐯

• Natalia Vélez: R Workshop course materials 🐯

• Ten simple rules to make the most out of your undergraduate research career

Research and funding opportunities

For Princeton students

• ReMatch: A yearlong program that matches first- and second-year undergraduates with PhD students and postdocs. Culminates in ReMatch+, a paid summer research opportunity.

• Office of Undergraduate Research Student Initiated Internship Program (OURSIP): Offers a limited number of grants for first- and second-year undergraduates who have independently secured a faculty-mentored summer reearch internship

• OUR Senior Thesis Research Funding

• Undergraduate Fund for Academic Conferences

For everyone

• PNI Summer Internship Program: Hands-on summer research intership at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute

• Database of paid summer research opportunities by Científico Latino

• PsychResearchList: An absolutely massive list of paid internships, graduate school orientation sessions, funding opportunities—you name it!

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Applying to graduate school

Preparing your application

Mentorship & orientation programs

• Harvard Psychology’s PhD Resources and Online Tips Page (PRO-TiP)

• Stanford Paths to PhD

• Graduate Student Mentorship Initiative: A phenomenal program by Científico Latino that pairs applicants with PhD students who provide personalized support and feedback on application materials (check out their recent paper in Cell!)

• Application Statement Feedback Program

Preparing your application

• Database of PhD application materials (e.g., personal statements, CVs) by Científico Latino

• Collection of application materials from NYU psychology students

• Anita Devineni: Advice for applying to PhD programs

• Ben Barres: How to pick a graduate advisor

• Jamil Zaki: So, you’re applying for a PhD in psychology…

• Sokol-Hessner Lab: How applying to graduate school works

• Lucy Lai: All about PhD applications

Acing your PhD interview

• June Gruber, Jay Van Bavel: To ace your Ph.D. program interviews, prepare to answer—and ask—these key questions

• Interviewing Tips & Advice forSTEM Graduate Programs

• FAQ for Interview Preparation

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FAQ for prospective students

Natalia is not accepting graduate students for the 2024-25 admissions cycle.

Resources:

• Applying to the Psychology Graduate Program

• Princeton Graduate School Admissions: I highly recommend following the instructions on this page to apply for a fee waiver!

• Are you taking grad students this year?

  I will not be accepting graduate students in the 2024-2025 admissions cycle.

• I’m interested in learning more about your lab. Can we meet?

  To help level the playing field, I generally do not take meetings with prospective students before applications are due. However, I look forward to seeing your materials, if you do decide to apply!

  Here’s the advice I would give you anyway, if we did meet: The PhD “personal statement” is misleadingly named—it’s actually a persuasive essay. Your personal statement should lay out a case for:

  1. What research “puzzle” do you want to pursue in graduate school, and why is it important?

  2. How have your professional/research experiences prepared you to pursue this puzzle?

  3. Why is my lab/the psych department at Princeton a good place to carry out this research?

  For this last question, I hope my students will continue investigating the questions I have been pursuing, but I’m personally also very excited to collaborate with other labs across the department, and I hope that my students will initiate some of those collaborations. So, with that in mind, I encourage you to list a secondary mentor in your application who has complementary skills or interests. (Note that, even if the department website says that a particular faculty member is not accepting students in this cycle, they may still be available to serve as secondary mentors.)

• What does your lab work on?

  Broadly, the goal of my research program is to understand how humans collaborate. I approach this question at two levels of analysis:

  1. How do individuals solve the challenges of collaboration? Collaborations combine the efforts of people with differing experiences, skills, preferences, and goals. My past work has examined how adults learn from and about others by drawing rich inferences from sparse data. Moving forward, I’m interested in how human social cognition supports collaboration. In order to successfully collaborate, it’s important that we see where our knowledge and competence complement those of our collaborators, and that we efficiently divide tasks and apportion credit. My goal is to develop computational frameworks that capture the ways in which humans solve the challenges of collaboration, and to connect these frameworks to behavior and neuroimaging data.

  2. How can we structure communities to make these challenges easier? In order to understand collaboration, it’s important to understand not just how individual intelligences navigate collaborations, but also how communities create conditions where that intelligence can shine. I currently study this question by analyzing a naturalistic dataset of player behavior in One Hour One Life, a multiplayer online game where players can build complex societies from scratch. In the future, I’m interested in using a combination of observational, experimental, and computational work to understand how communities adapt to collaborative challenges, and how we might structure communities to make collaborations easier and fairer.

  But this is not an exhaustive list—I am also excited for these research themes to evolve as lab members bring in their own ideas and perspectives.

• What is it like to work with you?

  My favorite part of science is other people. It brings me a lot of joy to work through puzzles with my collaborators, and to see solutions emerge that none of us could have thought of on our own—so much so, in fact, that trying to understand how that magic happens, and how communities can make collaborations fun and fair for everyone, have become the driving force of my research.

  As a mentor, I am also excited to translate these questions into practice. As I see it, the most important part of my job is to build a community where my mentees can thrive. You can find a working draft of my mentoring philosophy here.

• Can I volunteer to work in your lab?

  Thank you for your interest in our lab! However, due to university policies, we cannot accept volunteer applicants.

• I'm a high school student. Can I work in your lab as a research assistant?

  We do not have any opportunities for high school students to join the lab as a research assistant. High schoolers are encouraged to check out the Princeton Lab Learning Program for research opportunities.