Cognitive Science Careers & Grad School

What Can I Do with Cognitive Science?

  • Breaking Down Cognitive Science
  • Cognitive Science is inherently interdisciplinary, and cognitive science majors will look different at every university. At UC Davis, Cognitive Science is comprised of the following disciplines.

    Primarily:  Computer Science,  Linguistics,  Neuroscience,  Philosophy,  Psychology 
    Also included:  Biology,  Communication,  Education,  Human Development,  Math,  Physics,  Statistics

    This information will help you explore graduate programs and careers that could fit into the landscape of cognitive science. Using cognitive science as your keyword when searching grad school and job websites will yield limited results. Try searching for these other disciplines, too, especially when combined with brain science, mind, knowledge, and learning.

    Use the Cognitive Science Topics tab and the Health & Medical Fields tab at the bottom of this page to learn about various areas within cognitive science.
  • Career Databases (Cognitive Science)
  • These databases are described on our general Career & Grad School Resources page. These links are pre-filtered for "cognitive science" and related fields.
    ♦  What Can I Do with This Major?:  ECS,  LIN,  NPB,  PHI,  PSC
    ♦  California Career Zone:  ECS,  LIN,  PHI,  PSC
    ♦  O*Net Online: CGS,  ECS,  LIN,  PHI,  PSC
    ♦  Career One Stop:  CGS,  ECS,  PSC
    ♦  U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics:  CGS,  ECS,  LIN,  NPB,  PHI,  PSC

students and recruiters at the career fair in the gym

Can I really do ANYTHING with a degree in Cognitive Science?

Often students hear that they can do anything. Or conversely, you may feel limited in your career search. Either way, if you're feeling stuck, you're not alone!

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Search Cognitive Science Alumni

Use LinkedIn to search UC Davis Cog Sci Alumni and current students! This is a new major at UC Davis, and our first 4-year cohort graduated in 2020. See what alumni are doing now and connect with current students.

Graduate Programs & Jobs for Cognitive Science

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Internship & Career Center (ICC)     Pre-Graduate & Law Advising     Health Professions Advising (HPA)

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Cognitive Science Topics

Cognitive Science is multi- and interdisciplinary, which sometimes makes it tricky to fully understand the branches and subfields of cognitive science. Here's a list of topics that cognitive science researchers are currently discussing and investigating. 

Use this list to (1) take stock of your interests to inform your search for graduate programs and (2) brainstorm industries and employers who would benefit from your background in cognitive science.  

  • Statistical learning and development  
  • Advances in understanding spatial reorientation  
  • Health beliefs and decision making  
  • Toward a unified theory of proportion  
  • Unravelling past cognition: Approaches across disciplines  
  • Choices and Decisions  
  • Language and Groups 
  • Neuroscience and Psychophysics  
  • Judgement and Decision Making  
  • Human Learning  
  • Facets of Cognition  
  • Semantics  
  • Language Development  
  • Modeling Language  
  • Neural Networks  
  • Memory
  • Events, Actions & Sequencing  
  • Gender and Individuals  
  • Emotions and Beliefs 
  • Fostering deep integration between development and different domains of cognitive science  
  • New measures for the fundamentals of human performance  
  • Learning via insight  
  • Complex Dynamics  
  • Learning and Development  
  • Numerosity  
  • Language and Meaning  
  • Speech and Phonetics  
  • Spatial Cognition
  • Categorization
  • The impact of social, cultural and linguistic constraints on development  
  • Cognitive models of time: Across the lifespan, the world, and the mind  
  • Where is cognitive science now?  
  • Computational approaches to analyzing and generating comics  
  • Agent-based Models  
  • Reading and Processing  
  • Social Learning  
  • Language and Uncertainty  
  • Forms of Learning  
  • Linguistics 
  • Reasoning  
  • Comparative and Cultural Cognition  
  • Concepts and Systems  
  • Word Learning  
  • Biases 
  • Attention and Faces  
  • Social Inference

 

Topics taken from the Cognitive Science Society's 2020 CogSci Conference program. 

Health & Medical Fields

These health careers are strongly related to cognitive science. This is not a comprehensive list of medical fields. For more information, visit Health Professions Advising, BLS.gov, and Mayo Clinic.

Professional Organizations

Most professions have a parent organization that sets standards for careers in their field. These sites feature specialized content for professionals in the field, including: how to prepare for the field, grad programs, job boards.