Practicum

This three-credit course will explore foundations in workplace culture and well-being through reading, experience-based observations, class discussions, group work, campus events, alumni engagement, and collaboration with campus partners. Topics will include communication, belonging, flow experience and job-crafting, time management, and work-life balance. Weekly assignments will include reading, class participation responses, and SMART goals and strengths observation homework.

This five-credit course will explore foundations in workplace culture and well-being through class assignments, experience-based observations, class discussions, group work, campus events, alumni engagement, and collaboration with campus partners. Topics will include communication, belonging, flow experience and job-crafting, time management, and work-life balance. Weekly assignments will include reading, class participation responses, and SMART goals and strengths observation homework. Students will work collaboratively to complete group conference projects (co-authored literature review plus class presentation) that integrate their experience-based observations, academic findings, and alumni insights related to their shared interests. Students will attend weekly conference sections (immediately following class) and complete weekly group conference assignments.

This five-credit course will explore building a professional identity through class assignments, experience-based observations, class discussions, group work, campus events, alumni engagement, and collaboration with campus partners. Topics will include communication, imposter syndrome, belonging, developing professional profiles, and networking. Weekly assignments will include reading, class participation responses, and SMART goals and strengths observation homework. Students will work collaboratively to complete group conference projects (co-authored literature review plus class presentation) that integrate their experience-based observations, academic findings, and alumni insights related to their shared interests. Students will attend weekly conference sections (immediately following class) and complete weekly group conference assignments.

This three-credit course will explore building a professional identity through reading, experience-based observations, class discussions, group work, campus events, alumni engagement, and collaboration with campus partners. Topics will include communication, imposter syndrome, belonging, developing professional profiles, and networking. Weekly assignments will include reading, class participation responses, and SMART goals and strengths observation homework.

In this research internship course, students will gain research experience through active engagement in a psychology research lab with a member of the psychology faculty. This will involve an internship within a research lab on campus, including a weekly lab meeting, a weekly collaborative meeting across labs, ongoing contributions toward research and practice within their lab and/or community settings, additional individual and group meetings as needed, and additional synchronous and asynchronous research work. Weekly lab meetings will involve reading and discussing research articles and research-methods papers specific to the topics of research being undertaken by each student and faculty member. Students will be expected to learn the current research approaches being employed by their supervising faculty member and to contribute toward ongoing research in the form of a research practicum. Students may also have the opportunity to develop and implement their own independent research projects within the labs in which they are working, depending on lab priorities. Students will be expected to make progress on research projects between meetings, as determined in collaboration with their primary supervising faculty. The weekly collaborative cross-labs meeting will include readings on, and discussions of, research methods and ethics—both broad and specific to the research in which students are involved—as well as the discussion of contemporary research articles that are relevant to student and faculty research projects. All faculty and students involved in the research experience will take turns leading the discussion of current research, with faculty taking the lead at the beginning of the semester and students taking the lead as their expertise develops. Students participating in the course will be expected to attend and actively participate in weekly collaborative cross-labs meetings and weekly lab meetings; keep an ongoing journal and/or scientific lab notebook; select and facilitate group and lab discussions of relevant contemporary research articles (at least once for each meeting type); work within a lab and/or community setting, as appropriate for their projects; contribute toward ongoing research and practice within their lab or community settings; report on their ongoing lab research in the form of a short paper prepared for possible publication and a poster at the Science and Math Poster Symposium; and provide their colleagues with ongoing verbal and written feedback on their projects. Students will be responsible for working collaboratively with their colleagues to further develop their understanding of each of the topics covered in class.

How does the setting up of a textile factory in Malaysia connect with life in the United States? Or of ship building in Bangladesh? What was the relationship of mothers to children in 17th-century, upper-class French households? What do we expect of the same relationships today? In the United States? In other societies? Across rural and urban areas? How do contemporary notions of leisure and luxury resemble, or do they, notions of peoples in other times and places regarding wealth and poverty? What is the relation between the local and the global, the individual and society, the self and “other”? How is the self constructed? How do we connect biography and history, fiction and fact, objectivity and subjectivity, the social and the personal? These are some of the questions that sociology and sociologists attempt to think through. In this seminar, we will ask how sociologists, and social thinkers in general, analyze and simultaneously create reality. What questions do we/they ask? How does one explore these questions and arrive at subsequent findings and conclusions? Through a perusal of comparative and historical materials, we will look afresh at things that we take for granted; for example, the family, poverty, identity, travel and tourism, progress, science, and subjectivity. The objective of the seminar will be to enable students to critically read sociological texts and become practitioners in “doing” sociology (something we are always already involved in, albeit often unself-consciously). This last endeavor is both designed to train students in how to undertake research and intended as a key tool in interrogating the relationship of the researcher and the researched, the field studied, and the (sociological) text. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.