Behavioral/Cognitive Neuroscience

[cogneuroforfun]

Thank you for the reply. I was just meaning how feasible is it to get into a neuroscience phd program with little neuroscience or biology coursework. Did you take classes like o-chem and bio and physics as a psych major?

I'm just really into cognitive neuroscience but only the neuroimaging and systems portion of it. I'm not into much of the molecular level so I didn't know if I could get into an actual neuroscience phd program or I would need to get into a cognitive psych phd program and work in a neuro imaging lab.

I took no chem, two intro bio courses, and had physics transfer credits from high school, so I don't think the stated requirements apply to every applicant. What's more important is if your skills and experience match the lab/program, not the department or umbrella program's requirements. I did take every cognitive and neuro psychology class I could (biopsychology, memory, sensation & perception, cognitive psych, developmental cognitive neuro, etc.), a graduate psychology statistics course, a graduate seminar on analyzing neural data (spike trains), and had experience with Matlab and fMRI data. So I did plenty else besides straight up bio, chem, and physics. Just to anticipate what might be your next question, I had no publications, did a behavioral honors thesis in a neuroimaging lab, and had around 2.5 years of relevant research experience total.

You can definitely get into a neuroscience program as a psychology major in undergrad, it just might not be the best fit for your interests and goals. In our neuroscience program, we have 3 out of ~40 students in neuroimaging labs, and overall maybe 10-12 students doing cognitive/systems/computational stuff (the rest doing developmental, molecular, cellular, or behavioral). So as I said before, you've got to think about the people who will be your peers and mentors in these programs and whether psych or neuro would be a better route for you. If you just want to do neuroimaging, a cognitive psychology program would be perfectly good, and would set you up with a lot of people also doing neuroimaging and cognitive neuroscience. If you might want to do some electrophysiology, a neuroscience program (with rotations) would give you the opportunity to try it out.