Graduate Specialization Doctoral students in participating departments can obtain a Specialization in Cognitive Science.

• Requirements: five Cognitive Science courses, at least three outside of home department.
• Benefits:
  • Certificate with Ph.D.
  • Incoming Specialist Orientation tours
  • Lab tours for all specialists
  • Eligibility for travel grants*
  • Invitations to lunches and meeting with speakers
  • Input into selection of speakers and topic of tutorials

Student-focused Gatherings The Cognitive Science Program schedules two events specifically to encourage interdisciplinary community among students.

• Incoming Specialist Orientation, is a chance for the incoming Specialists to learn about the program, and to meet each other, and other students who are interested in Cognitive Science, as well.
• CogSci Fest, held in February, is for the Cognitive Science students to present their research. Undergraduates present their honors projects, and graduate students present the results of their Advanced Fellowship projects.

Travel Grants Graduate Specialists may apply twice a year for grants to help cover travel costs to a Cognitive Science related conference. We award ten of these $300 grants a year, and they are highly competitive. Most of these grants are given to students who are presenting a paper on which they are first author, although any Cognitive Science Specialist may apply.

Workshops The Cognitive Science Program sponsors and co-sponsors a number of interdisciplinary workshops. These workshops are focused explorations of an interesting topic in Cognitive Science. Recent workshops include:

• Comparative cognition of apes and humans, led by Michael Tomasello and Josep Call of the Max Planck Institute at Leipzig
• Meyerfest: A 50th Anniversary Celebration of Leonard B. Meyer's Emotion and Meaning in music cognition, from including neuroscience, psychology, and music theory
• Third International Workshop on Language Production

Colloquia The Program sponsors about ten to fifteen speakers a year. Recent speakers have included

• Ira Noveck (Institute des Sciences Cognitives, Lyon France)
• Marianella Casasola (Cornell University)
• Jim Haxby (Princeton University)
• Steven Palmer (U.C. Berkeley)
• Chris Manning (Stanford University)
• Josep Call (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology).

Tutorials These are two-to-five-day teaching sessions, taught by outstanding faculty from other institutions. These are intensive classes in topics or methods of great current interest – often in areas that are not currently well-covered at Northwestern. For example:

• David Plaut (Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, on connectionist modeling.
• William Croft, (Linguistics, Manchester University - now at University of New Mexico), conducted a week-long tutorial on linguistic typology and lexical semantics in 2004.

Advanced Cognitive Science Fellowships There are two one-year fellowships* for continuing students. The students receive a University Fellowship and also receive a one-time grant of $500 to be used for travel to conferences in their field. These are intended to foster interdisciplinary research in cognitive Science, and are quite competitive. Each proposal must be sponsored by faculty member from two different disciplines (in most cases, faculty from different departments). These fellowships are awarded on the basis of quality and interdisciplinarity of the proposed research, the student’s record in the program, and the faculty letters. We routinely receive many more good proposals than we can fund; in 2007, for example, we funded two of nine proposals, of which seven were well worth funding.

Incoming Cognitive Science Fellowships Each year, five outstanding students admitted to departments affiliated with Cognitive Science are awarded Cognitive Science University Fellowships. These fellowships are a valuable recruiting tool, and serve to foster interdisciplinary connections for graduate students at an early stage. Members of the Cognitive Science Program Committee nominate candidates from among the students admitted to their programs. Winners are chosen by the entire Committee on the bases of the overall quality of their applications and the interdisciplinarity of their background and interests. Once at Northwestern, the fellowship students join with other students in the Graduate Specialization.

• For 2007-2008, the incoming fellowships went to Psychology, EECS, Learning Sciences, and Music Studies.

There is no time limit on when you can become a Specialist. Email the Cognitive Science program assistant, Benjamin Dionysus, at cogsci@northwestern.edu, to find out how to do this.