Academic Opportunities

Psychology is distinguished from other disciplines by its wide array of methodologies.

As a field, psychology has its roots in philosophy. Thus, it shares with philosophy the use of careful reasoning from first principles as a means of discovering and verifying claims about the world. In psychology, this process is most often stated in terms of generating predictions or hypotheses from a theory.

Psychology shares with physics, chemistry, biology, and other sciences the use of empirical observations (data) to discover and verify hypotheses about the world.

In sum, psychology combines the intellectual rigor of philosophy with the empirical techniques of the scientific method. The result is an extremely powerful approach to answering questions and acquiring knowledge. As you study psychology here at Boston College, you will find that different courses and instructors vary in their emphasis on philosophical as opposed to empirical-scientific techniques. This diversity mirrors the heterogeneity of modern psychology and also makes for a lively intellectual community in our department.

In addition, this diversity creates a number of academic opportunities that can make your educational experience much more fulfilling. Please use the links on this menu to explore them all.