Start spreading the news
I am leaving today
I want to be a part of it
New York New York
-Frank Sinatra
I spent an inordinate amount of time pouring over the University of Kent Masters in Political Sociology and Stony Brook University Masters in Political Psychology. In the end I decided that my decision needed to be purely based on the program itself, I needed to decide which was best for me. Stony Brook is a better fit; it plays to my strengths. The program is heavily focused in psychology and statistics. I have a good background in psych. I have a BS in psych and I spent 3 years working in behavioral health direct care. I also have a good background in stats considering I have spent the last 6 years at work doing time series statistics, error analysis, data modeling, regressions and more.
I am so excited to start graduate school that I am already picking out courses I hope to take. I am required to take one semester of methods and two semesters of statistics. Those will be a cakewalk, the stats start with descriptive and inferential stats the first semester then move on to regression the second semester all of which I know rather well. The methods will be a good review for me but I enjoy analyzing methodology to figure out what you can really truly say from a study so that will go well. Then I get 2 elective the first semester and 3 the second. Then I hope to take “Dynamics of Public Opinion”, Passionate Politics: Mobilization, Interest Groups, and Social Movements”, “Thinking and Emotion in Public Opinion”, “Time Series Analysis” and “The Psychology of Voting”. If I can’t get those I would love to take “Persuasion and Propaganda” and “Social Influences” but both of those have equivalent courses for the PhD and I plan to get into the PhD program next year. So right now I want to build my micro-foundations of political psychology by looking a voting, opinion holding, emotional decision making and all of those low level effects on individuals. Then once I am in the PhD I will build up the larger social and group dynamics which will build off the individual level knowledge from my masters.
