If you are interested in a position as an undergraduate research assistant, please email us at mcnlab@uchicago.edu with your academic transcript (unofficial version is fine), CV, and answers to the following questions:

1. What is your class year and major (if you have one) at UChicago? If you are not a UChicago student, please also indicate the name and location of your home institution.

2. Why are you interested in working in the lab?

3. What interests you most about psychology and/or neuroscience? Broadly speaking, what would you like to study here in the lab? To answer this question, you could share a thought about recent papers you read, and/or even propose a new study!

4. When (i.e. starting which quarter) and how long (i.e. how many quarters) would you be interested in working in the lab? Most RAs work in the lab for 3 consecutive quarters or more.

5. What relevant coursework or research experience have you had? (It’s OK if the answer amounts to “not much”)

6. What experience do you have with computer programming? (Note: if you are new to programming, you can sign up for a free DataCamp account and work through the R recommended beginner track as a learning resource.)

  1. What are your long-term plans? Feel free to be as broad or as specific as you like. 

Additional Resources

To learn more about the lab’s work, you can: 

  • check out the Publications page on our website. Particularly, we recommend reading the two papers below:

    • Leong, Y. C., Chen, J., Willer, R., & Zaki, J. (2020). Conservative and liberal attitudes drive polarized neural responses to political content. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(44), 27731-27739. 
    • Leong, Y. C., Hughes, B. L., Wang, Y., & Zaki, J. (2019). Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying motivated seeing. Nature human behaviour, 3(9), 962-973.