Study Abroad in Grad School?

[digits2006]

Is it possible to study abroad in grad school? I never went during undergrad because of money. But, is it ever possible to do that? I always thought it would be cool to study the justice system in another country. It would give me a good opportunity to go to another country and do relevant school work.

[JustChill]

Well, a lot of PhD programs require you to go abroad for research. I don't know about legal psychology, though. Check with your advisors/professors.

[LifeIsGood]

It's dependent on your diss topic. And it's one of the reasons I'm SERIOUSLY considering adding a Caribbean component to my research.

[rising_star]

It depends on what you mean by "study abroad". Are you talking about taking courses at a university in another country, working with researchers in another country, or doing research (ie, archival work, interviews, or other forms of field data collection) in another country?

[rogue]

It's dependent on your diss topic. And it's one of the reasons I'm SERIOUSLY considering adding a Caribbean component to my research.

Me too! I don't know why it took me so long to figure that one out.

[digits2006]

I dont care what I do. I just want to go overseas. I would like to do something like a "visiting student" type of things. Go to another university with a legal psych professor. Do research with them and take classes.

[rising_star]

I dont care what I do. I just want to go overseas.

No professor is going to take you seriously if you walk in and say this. The ability to do this will vary from one department to the next, and one university to the next. Research the university's approved study abroad programs and see if any of them offer graduate courses in your area. My guess is that they don't.

rogue & Lifeisgood, as someone who does overseas research in what are often considered desirable locations, I can tell you that it's not nearly as fun as it looks from the outside.

[DJLamar]

I have wondered this as well. I did a year in an exchange program at the Technical University of Munich (my home institution is Georgia Tech) as an undergrad and it was an absolutely amazing experience. I would really love it if I were somehow able to have another long term (i.e. at *least* six months) experience abroad before I get done with my PhD and do a post-doc...

Problem is, I'm going to be doing computer science (specifically, machine learning and perhaps natural language processing), and despite the NLP component to what I hope to do, I really think the chances are slim that it would be very *useful* to my research to go abroad.

I would love to go back to Europe though (in particular I would like to go a bit further east -- perhaps Poland or the Czech Republic), or to somewhere interesting and metropolitan in Asia such as Singapore or a big city in Japan (in both of those places I have a number of friends that I made on my first study abroad experience ).

I'm hoping to snag an internship this Summer either in Munich or somewhere else cool to fill up the Summer between finishing undergrad and starting grad school. That's only four months or so though, and I really feel that staying for a good long time makes a big difference and makes the whole thing much more worthwhile...

[LifeIsGood]

Me too! I don't know why it took me so long to figure that one out.

rogue & Lifeisgood, as someone who does overseas research in what are often considered desirable locations, I can tell you that it's not nearly as fun as it looks from the outside.

Rising_star, I'm sure you're right. You probably don't get to see anything, and just crash back in your hotel room every night. Archival work is not for the weak.

That being said, my father is currently doing a multi-year natural sciences project in the Caribbean and my mom tags along for the two months a year he's down there. They spent Christmas there in fact. But he's a climatologist, so no dark archives for him. Lots of boats, airplanes, and hikes to the tops of mountains. They've also kind of adopted a school on the island, so my mother volunteers there. Sounds nice.

My research is on free people of color and I have an Atlantic World component, so I may end up in the Caribbean anyway, whether or not I try to make it turn out that way. Maybe also New Orleans.

[digits2006]

@ rising_star: Im not going to bust into graduate school and say " I want to go oveseas and send me" Im not that stupid. Im a little lax here on the forums.

I do have research ideas that I would like to look in further and see. I want to see how jury bias might change depending on what country you are in. How the justice system is different. How americans pick juries versus how another country picks them. All depends if there are big universities out there that are also doing research like I want to do.