Best Summer Courses for New Transfer Students

You may wish to begin your studies at UCSD this Summer. The following courses are highly recommended for new transfer students. All Summer offerings are designed to be useful for completing your degree. You may wish to consider the full list of classes available on the schedule of classes. Summer enrollment information for incoming transfer students can be found here.

Incoming transfer students who are interested in taking upper-division courses must use the EASy tool to make your course pre-authorization request. Be sure to list any relevant information in the "Justification" section that will be helpful for our office to know (i.e. why you are making the request, why are you not able to enroll on your own) and upload your community college unofficial transcript in the "Supporting Docs" section.

Summer Session 1

PSYC 60 Introduction to Statistics
This course provides an introduction to both descriptive and inferential statistics, core tools in the process of scientific discovery and the interpretation of research.

PSYC 70 Research Methods - (Formal Skills)
This course provides an overview of how to choose appropriate research methods for experimental and non-experimental studies. Topics may include classic experimental design and counterbalancing, statistical power, and causal inference in experimental and non-experimental settings. Additional discussion required. Prerequisite: PSYC 60 (Statistics)

PSYC 101 Developmental Psychology (Core)
This course provides a comprehensive overview of the field of developmental psychology, including topics in cognitive, language, and social development. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 102 Sensory Neuroscience (Core)
This course provides a comprehensive overview of the neural mechanisms that support vision, audition, touch, olfaction, and taste. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 105 Cognitive Psychology (Core)
This course provides a comprehensive overview of cognitive psychology, the scientific study of mental processes: how people acquire, store, transform, use, and communicate information. Topics may include perception, attention, language, memory, reasoning, problem solving, decision-making, and creativity. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 106 Behavioral Neuroscience (Core)
This course provides a comprehensive overview of human and animal behavior from a neuroscience perspective. Topics include the functions and mechanisms of perception, motivation (sex, sleep, hunger, emotions), learning and memory, and motor control and movement. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 174 Visual Cognition (Elective)

This course provides an overview of high-level visual perception, and of how visual perception intersects with attention, memory, and concepts. Topics may include an introduction to the visual system with an emphasis on high-level visual regions; object recognition, face recognition, scene recognition and reading; visual attention, including eye movements during scene perception and during reading; and visual working memory. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 178 Industrial Organizational Psychology (Elective)
This course provides an examination of human behavior in industrial, business, and organizational settings. Topics include psychological principles applied to selection, placement, management, and training; the effectiveness of individuals and groups within organizations, including leadership and control; conflict and cooperation; motivation; and organizational structure and design. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

Summer Session 2

PSYC 104 Social Psychology (Core)
This course provides a comprehensive overview of the field of social psychology, covering a review of the field’s founding principles, classic findings, and a survey of recent findings. Topics will include social perception, attributions and attitudes, stereotypies, social influence, group dynamics, and aggressive and prosocial tendencies. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 122 Mechanisms of Animal Behavior (Elective)
This course focuses on approaches to the study of behavior and its underlying fundamental units of analysis in human and nonhuman animals. Students may not receive credit for both PSYC 122 and PSYC 103. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 144 Memory and Amnesia (Elective)
This course will provide a survey of current research and theory concerning human memory and amnesia from both cognitive and neuropsychological perspectives. Topics may include short-term (working) memory, encoding and retrieval, episodic and semantic memory, interference and forgetting, false memory, eyewitness memory, emotion and memory, famous case studies of amnesia, and the effects of aging and dementia on memory. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.

PSYC 191 Psychology of Sleep (Elective/Specialization)
This course provides an overview of the psychology of sleep, including sleep stages and their functions, neurological aspects of sleep, sleep across species and development, dreams and their interpretation, sleep disorders, and the role of sleep in learning and memory.