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Cognitive
Science at GU: What's Special?
- Focus on research
experience.
We encourage students to learn about and work on faculty research projects. For example, in our spring
core course (ICOS-202) students spend time in faculty laboratories, during which
they read about, discuss, and experience first-hand
the research projects underway at Georgetown. In addition, Cognitive
Science minors may choose to conduct a senior thesis in Cognitive Science, working with a faculty member who agrees to supervise the research.
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- Faculty from the Main Campus,
the Medical Center and the Law Center
Our program involves faculty from
several main campus departments (including Biology,
Computer
Science, Linguistics,
Mathematics,
Philosophy,
Physics, and Psychology)
and from the Medical Center (including
Neurology,
Neuroscience,
Pediatrics,
Physiology,
Pharmacology,
Psychiatry. We also maintain
close ties with Georgetown's Interdisciplinary Program
in Neuroscience (IPN), a Ph.D. program based in the Medical
Center. A number of our faculty are closely involved in work on language acquisition. We help students to take
advantage of the exciting research being conducted from one of the three campuses at the University.
In our spring core course, students visit
laboratories, and when students opt to do theses, they may work with faculty.
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- Team-taught core
courses
Both of our core courses are
team-taught and interdisciplinary, so that students get to meet
professors and students from a range of departments. This
offers the chance to experience an unusually large range of
perspectives and disciplines, all in a single course. For this
reason, our core courses can help students to choose a major during
their first years at Georgetown or to widen their horizons in their
later years.
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- Focus on connecting graduate and
undergraduate students
We believe that undergraduate and graduate students benefit and
learn from each other, and our program works to facilitate such
encounters. For example, we offer a course entitled
Disorders
and Diseases of the Brain
which was created by a group of
Ph.D. students from GU's Interdisciplinary
Program in Neuroscience. Undergraduates who take the course
get to learn about brain disorders from advanced Ph.D. students who
are doing their dissertation work on these topics, and so our
undergraduates see neuroscience from the perspective of eager young
scientists. We also have a growing list of GU graduate students who are eager to act as
advisors, mentors, or contact people for our undergraduates who are
thinking about careers and graduate school.
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- Bridging the sciences and
humanities
Cognitive science is a scientific enterprise, but it has strong ties
with the humanities, especially with philosophy, and so our minor and
our courses help to bring these approaches together.
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- Enhancing a premed program
Our minor works well for pre-med students. Many of the
science courses pre-meds take can be counted toward the minor.
Our minor offers a venue for bringing these various disciplines
together, as well as an opportunity to meet a group of students from
several majors, all of whom are interested in the mind and human cognition.
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