Psychology major Victoria Lawlor’s recent co-op experience in the Affect Regulation and Cognition Laboratory at Yale University helped her realize her career goals and gave her valuable insight into the application process for graduate school. The variety of tasks in the lab made every day look different, always keeping the job interesting for her. Here, she gained exposure to a variety of methods like EEG, eye-tracking, and physiological measures.

Importantly, this experience solidified her intent to apply to research-heavy graduate programs by working with graduate students and an advisor. Consequently, she learned about the application process for graduate school and different types of programs, while honing her personal research interests.

In addition, this co-op experience revealed to her the importance of programming to psychology, and after returning to Northeastern she enrolled in the meaningful minors program for computer science. On this co-op, she realized how crucial programming proficiency is for creating behavioral tasks and analyzing data, and how sought after this skill is for many labs.