Celebrating 95 years of the Department of Psychology

This article was written by senior psychology major, Grace Martin, class of 2023.

From its beginnings as a single Educational Psychology course in 1915, to now offering 2 undergraduate and 5 graduate programs, Psychology’s presence at NC State has expanded alongside the University. Established in 1927, with the hiring of its first faculty psychologist, Dr. Karl Garrison, the Department of Psychology has been around for 95 years as of 2022.

Just over two decades later, the Psychology department established a home within the School of Education in 1948. By this same year, the faculty expanded to consist of six professors and two instructors. This expansion also marked the department’s reestablishment of the graduate school and, as such, NC State offered a master’s program in Industrial Psychology with the first students receiving their degrees in 1949. 

Fourteen years later in 1963, NC State established a school of liberal arts allowing for the Psychology Department to offer its own undergraduate programs. The first graduates of undergraduate programs in Psychology graduated in 1966. This decade also marked the expansion of the department’s graduate programs as Experimental and School Psychology programs were offered at both the master’s and doctoral levels. 

In 1971, the School of Education made the move to Poe Hall. Shortly after, in 1978, both the Ph.D. and undergraduate programs were revamped. The doctoral program established a department-wide criteria of training in the Scientist/Practitioner model and the undergraduate programs began teaching a combination of research methods and statistics. Then in 2001, the Department of Psychology found its home in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Presently, the Department of Psychology is home to nearly 40 faculty, who pursue innovative research to continue pushing the needle forward in the field, following the department’s history of innovation and excellence. The department is strong and growing, with over 100 graduate students and nearly 1,000 undergraduate majors.