Career opportunities
In your first year you’ll complete four compulsory training courses, covering quantitative and qualitative research methods, professional academic skills, and teaching and training. You’ll also familiarise yourself with relevant literature, create a research plan, develop your methodological and analytic skills, and complete your first study. Throughout your studies, you’ll gain a solid grounding in research methods and improve your communication skills to effectively convey your findings. You’ll collect and analyse data, complete a detailed literature review and then write your Psychology PhD thesis. Depending on your research project, data collection can take place in schools, hospitals, laboratories or online. Your final assessment will be based on the presentation of your research in a written thesis, which will be discussed in a viva examination with at least two examiners. You have the option of preparing your thesis as a monograph (one large volume in chapter form) or in publication format (including chapters written for publication), subject to the approval of your supervisors.
Programme Structure
Research themes
- The brain and behaviour, including changes across the lifespan, learning, training and rehabilitation, and the effects of modulators of plasticity.
- Cognition, including the contribution of language, reason and decision making, and asymmetries in our thinking processes.
- Development and learning, including attention and behaviour, emotional development in childhood, and neurodevelopmental disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). We also focus on colour perception and cognition across developments in infants and children.
- The environment, including when and how people interact with different types of environments and how these interactions affect both the quality of that environment and people’s own wellbeing.
Admission requirements
Academic requirements
GPA: Upper Second Class
English requirements
- Duolingo English Test: 120
- TOEFL iBT: 88 (or 4.5 new TOEFL iBT 1-6 score)
- PTE Academic: 67
- IELTS: 6.5
Other requirements
General requirements
- Applicants are expected to hold a minimum of an upper second-class honours degree (65 per cent or above) in psychology (or a related discipline) and a masters degree in a relevant subject with a pass of 65 per cent or above.
- IELTS Academic: 6.5 or above (or equivalent) with 6 in each individual category.
Fees and funding
Tuition Fees
- International: 48,571 AUD / year (≈ 25,500 GBP / year)
- Domestic: 9,977 AUD / year (≈ 5,238 GBP / year)
Additional Details (Part-time): UK £2,619; Overseas £12,800
Living costs
Guildford, United Kingdom: 1,257-2,171 AUD / month
Visit the programme website for more information
