Planning Your First Year

Select your courses to meet your degree requirements.

• Review suggested program layouts for all 3 or 4 years of your degree tailored for the B.A., B.A. Honours, and B.Sc Honours programs.
• Keep in mind that if you want to apply to graduate school you need to be in an Honours program.
• It is possible to change programs once you have started but there are certain requirements.
• When choosing your elective courses don’t forget to include credits to satisfy the Breadth Requirement.
• Consider taking courses in business or organizational society to learn more about the workplace.
• Consider taking a minor to broaden your degree.
• Whether you are or are not planning on graduate school, grades are important. Employers use grades as a screening tool too.

Familiarize yourself with Carleton Central, Brightspace, and your MyCarleton Portal email account.

• Carleton Central: You have probably already used Carleton Central to register for your courses but if you haven’t already, take a look at the other things that you can do within Carleton Central like request a degree audit to see your GPA and how you are doing in meeting the requirements of your program, request copies of transcript and access myCareer for career and job searching assistance.
• WebCT: Most of your professors will use WebCT and/or your connect email to communicate with you about important course information and provide course materials like lecture slides and course syllabi. Discussion sections on WebCT, if enabled for your class, are a great way to get advice or connect with your peers regarding classroom material.
• MyCarleton / Connect Email: Your Connect account is the only email account that you should be using to communicate with professors, TA and other university staff and the only email address that they will use to communicate with you.  If you find that you are not checking your connect account often or it is simply more convenient for you, you can forward your connect account to another email address of your choice, but remember that if your email client allows it, you should set it up so that you can reply to emails from your account of choice BUT change the settings so you can send as your email  ___@connect.carleton.ca.  Otherwise you will have to log in to your connect account to send and reply to emails. To forward your connect account to another email address, log in to MyCarleton Portal, click “Email”, click “Options”, then click “Auto Forward” and enter the address you would like to forward your mail to.

Participate in experiments/studies to earn extra marks

• To participate, you need to be registered in PSYC 1001, 1002, 2001 or 2002. Click on Participation in Research Studies to find out how.

Get involved with student groups on campus

• Psychology Society (pscarletonu@gmail.com)
• Check out the CUSA webpage for more information on campus groups.

Visit and Ask Questions

• Student Academic Success Centre
• Career Center
• Library
• Office Hours: Don’t be afraid to ask for help if there is something you do not understand. Your professors and TAs hold office hours for just that purpose.

Volunteer

• Volunteering is a good thing to give back to the community and it gives you great experience to add to your resume.
• It helps you to meet people and can potentially lead to practicum opportunities to earn credits.
• If you volunteer in a field you might be interested in working in, it will help you learn more about the field and get connections.
• For more information go to myCareer (through Carleton Central), the Volunteer Ottawa website, and the Charity Village website.
• You may also want to try to volunteer in one of the research labs at Carleton. You can visit the research section of the psychology webpage to find out what kind of research is being conducted and contact faculty members doing research you are interested in to see if they are looking for volunteers in their lab.

Use your summers

• Look for summer employment to boost your resume or learn more about a field you are interested in.