What are some good psychology schools on the east coast?

What are good graduate schools for a psychology and anthropology double major looking for a masters in interaction design?

• Welcoming insight from both recent grads and employers who have hired recent grads! I have recently been looking into the possibility of interaction design as a career choice, and I was wondering what sort of graduate school programs would be open to me. I have been perusing the discussion boards, but would like more insight on the subject. I am currently a psychology and anthropology double major, and will be graduating in May 2013. I have always been heavily interested in technology, and only recently discovered interaction design as a possibility to merge many of my interests. I have no formal background in programming or design, but I have dabbled on my own with HTML coding, Photoshop, Indesign, etc. and I have always been interested in web design or something similar. The psychology and anthropology involved in usability research and/or design is facinating to me, and I was looking for masters programs that would match these interests. Ideally, the masters program that would be great for me would have the following characteristics: -Faculty that care and are highly adept in their field -A school with abundant resources available for student use, up-to-date technology -Heavily based on the research and psychology of interaction design, but also has an emphasis in the design and programming aspects of interaction design -Does not require any kind of design portfolio for admission -Good history of career placement (high percentage, at companies like Google, Facebook, etc.) By doing research on these discussion boards, I have found several programs that look great and would like more updated insight from recent grads or from employers that have hired from these schools: -Carnegie Mellon's Master of Design in Interaction Design -University of Indiana's Master of Science in Human-Computer Interaction Design -University of Michigan's Master of Science in Human-Computer Interaction Any other insight or suggestions for additional programs would be great! I have also seen the debate about whether or not to even go to grad school for this sort of thing, and have determined that grad school is probably the option for me. The only suggestion I will not accept is the program at the University of Kansas, as I am currently an undergrad at the University of Missouri (rivalries, y'know!). Suggestions for ways to prepare for a career in interaction design as an undergrad would be wonderful! Thank you all in advance for your help!

• Answer:

  Carnegie Mellon has a rigorous interaction design program. Friends who've gone through it have told me that the program worked them hard for a year, gave them lots of practice with CMU's interaction design process, and they came out with a solid professional process. I'm about to finish a Masters in Informatics at UC Irvine, one of about a half dozen information schools around the US (UW, GeorgiaTech, Berkeley are a few others that come to mind). The program here is the opposite of Carnegie Mellon. Lots of freedom to chart your own path with electives, and access to one of the top anthropology programs, which recently got a grant from Intel to think broadly about technology and society. Highly recommended if you plan to go into academia and write social theory about technology; not recommended if you want to become an interaction designer or user researcher. With a background in psychology and anthropology, you might be interested in becoming a user researcher. Speaking as somebody who spent the last two years in grad school to become a user researcher, I'm not convinced that a university is the best environment for learning to become a user researcher. You can learn more practical skills reading a book like The Handbook of Usability Testing or Contextual Inquiry or Designing for the Digital Age or the free Stanford HCI class on Coursera. Ultimately you're going to learn from experience of actually doing projects, which you could do by volunteering to design and test websites for the organization or startup or hackathon team of your choice, or by doing assignments in school. I would argue that you'll learn more out in the real world than you would in school, since you're working on real-world projects with real-world constraints. If you get stuck you could ask another question here, or meet people in person at a local professional group (like BayCHI in Palo Alto). If you want to become an interaction designer rather than a user researcher, I'd suggest developing your art skills. I'm not too familiar with all the art schools that have an industrial design or interaction design program, but some names that come to mind are RISD and the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. If you're not sure about whether you prefer user research or interaction design, try searching those terms on a job search engine like http://Indeed.com and take a look at the job descriptions. Heck, you might even find yourself an internship to try it out. Before you invest a year or two and tens of thousands of dollars in a masters program, I'd suggest you read the books I mentioned above, do the Stanford HCI Coursera class, and try a few projects on your own. For user research and interaction design there's a lot you can learn in the real world and only so much you can learn in a classroom.