Fall and Spring Opportunities 

Summer Internship Programs

For undergraduate students

Summer Internship Program

Each summer, we have a competitive full time volunteer research internship that is open to students from Boston College and other institutions. 

The Cooperation Lab at Boston College directed by Katherine McAuliffe is seeking motivated, reliable and enthusiastic summer research assistants who would like to gain experience with research in social cognitive development. Research in the lab focuses on the development of cooperative abilities in children, with a particular focus on how children develop a sense of fairness.

 Internship Description 

Students will gain hands-on experience in recruiting participants, collecting, organizing and coding data as well as debriefing families about the research. In addition, research assistants will attend weekly lab meetings with other undergraduates, post-doctoral fellows, the principal investigator, and lab manager to discuss ongoing and key research in the field of psychology. 

 Eligibility and requirements 

Research assistants are asked to commit approximately 35 - 40 hours per week to research in the lab and should be open to the possibility of testing outdoors and on weekends. The start date for positions is June 3rd. Positions will last for 10-11 weeks. If a student is able to stay through mid- August, we are open to adjusting the start date. These are unpaid positions so students are encouraged to seek funding from outside sources and/or their home institutions.

 Anyone is welcome to apply. To do so, please complete the application linked below and send a CV or resume to lmcooperation@gmail.com with the subject line “Summer 2019 Research Assistant Application”. The deadline for applications is March 15th.

SUPRE program

The Boston College Developmental Psychology program is now accepting applications to our full-funded Summer Undergraduate Psychology Research Experience (SUPRE) program supported by the American Psychological Association. Summer interns will gain hands-on experience in all aspects of developmental psychology research while also participating in professional development meetings and learning some computer programming. This is an excellent program for students who want to learn more about research who may be interested in pursuing graduate school. 

There are three participating developmental psychology labs. Students will be accepted to primarily work within one of these labs for the duration of the summer.  Successful applicants will work full-time for 10 weeks from June 3 - August 9 and will be paid $12/ hour. 

Participating Labs:

THE INFANT AND CHILD COGNITION LAB (Dr. Sara Cordes) studies how infants, children, and adults track quantities (time, number, amount), acquire formal mathematical concepts (from verbal counting in preschoolers to algebraic concepts in teenagers), and how learning of these concepts are influenced by social contexts. 

THE LANGUAGE LEARNING LAB (Dr. Joshua Hartshorne) takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying how children learn language. In addition to traditional developmental research methods, the lab makes use of massive online experiments, in which tens or even hundreds of thousands of children and adults participate in a single experiment, and computational models of language acquisition. 

THE COOPERATION LAB (Dr. Katherine McAuliffe) studies how children acquire a sense of fairness, how they regulate their investment in cooperative endeavors, how the development of cooperation varies across different social and cultural contexts and how an emerging psychology of cooperation in children interfaces with other aspects of conceptual development like perspective taking and group bias.  

Eligibility requirements: Students who are from underrepresented minority groups or are first generation college students and who have had little or no research experience will be given priority. Additionally, applicants must be enrolled in an American undergraduate program and be entering their sophomore, junior or senior years.


Please send applications (CV and cover letter) to allbcdev@gmail.com by March 22nd. Please indicate how you meet the eligibility criteria in your application and indicate in ranking order which lab(s) you are interested in working in over the summer. 

Other Opportunities