The Psychology Department encourages close interaction among our faculty and students. On average, 10 Psychology majors graduate each year and upper-level Psychology courses average 10-15 students each. This departmental closeness allows us to provide you — and your individual needs — with a great deal of personal attention.

You also will be in classes that emphasize "learning by doing". For example,

* you will spend time with children and adolescents within their school environment in your CHILD or ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY course;

* you will gain direct experience in administering, scoring and evaluating test scores in your TESTS AND MEASUREMENTS course;

* after you gather your own data, you will be able to use a statistics program to "number crunch" in your EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY course;

* you will perform some intriguing research on attitudes, group behavior and social perception in your SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY course.

As you progress through our program and become an "advanced" student, you will have opportunities to engage in more focused experiences which are consistent with your developing interests. For instance, many students enroll in a "Practicum" to gain valuable "on site" experiences in locations which may include,

   * the Veterans Administration Medical Center (in Salisbury);
   * Rowan Memorial Medical Center;
   * the North Carolina Prison facility (in Salisbury);
   * any of a number of local area businesses.

Each of our faculty maintains an active research program in areas of their interests, and students are welcome to join in them in performing that research. Most of this research addresses questions for which technical expertise is not needed, while other questions rely on technology. For example, the department has a state-of-the-art transcranial Doppler unit that is used in neuroimaging research.

As you can see, we provide our Psychology majors with a number of diverse options, each giving an exceptional balance of practical experience and classroom learning. A partial listing of the jobs now being held by some of our recent graduates appears below: