Prospective Students

Graduate Students

Dr. Syed will review applications in Fall 2026 for a new doctoral student to begin the program in Fall 2027. Please visit the Department of Psychology webpage on how to apply for a positon. Students may apply to join the NICE Research Group through the Personality, Individual Differences, and Behavior Genetics (PIB) doctoral program. Dr. Syed is also available to serve as a coadvisor in the Social Psychology program and the Quantitative and Psychometric Methods program. Dr. Syed no longer accepts new students in the Counseling Psychology doctoral program.

Competitive applicants will have substantive interests in meta-science, personality, identity, race/ethnicity/culture, and development. The NICE Research Group takes a meta-scientific perspective on all its activities, meaning we have a strong emphasis on methodological, theoretical, and historical issues in the field, and do not focus only on generating new empirical findings. Students interested in working with Dr. Syed should share this general perspective, or be eager to learn more about it and how to incorporate it into their work. Reviewing Dr. Syed’s Google Scholar profile sorted by year will provide students with a good sense for our recent focus. The NICE Research Group strongly prioritizes open, transparent, reproducible, and accessible science. Students are encouraged to discuss their experience with and/or interests in open science in their application materials.

Undergraduate Research Assistants

The NICE Research Group generally includes 5-15 undergraduate research assistants every semester. These students register for 3 credits of Psy 5993, Research Lab in Psychology, which involves nine hours of lab-related work per week for the semester.

Interested students should contact Dr. Moin Syed (moin@umn.edu) for an application.
After you submit your application, you may be contacted for an in person interview. Please be aware that there are typically many more applicants than available spaces, so applying and interviewing does not guarantee that you will ultimately be selected to participate in the lab. Decisions about fall positions are typically made in April, and decisions for spring positions are typically made in November. The NICE lab does not generally employ research assistants during the summer months.

Due to the fact that there are more applicants than available spaces, the NICE lab does not generally allow volunteer research assistants from other departments or universities. We do not have enough space to accommodate our own students, so it is not fair to offer spaces to those outside the department.