Joining The Change Lab
A Year of Applications by A Garron Torres, Mimi Brinberg, and Nilam Ram.
Thank you for your interest in joining The Change Lab @ Stanford!
Nilam Ram will be considering PhD applicants for Fall 2026.
Undergraduate Applicants
Undergraduate students are a key part of the Change Lab. We are extremely grateful for the outstanding work, contributions, and dedication of our undergraduate interns. Students working with us are encouraged to contribute their own research interests, life perspectives, and culture while developing advanced research projects. Our undergrads work closely with the rest of the lab, and regularly present research updates in lab meetings alongside the PhD candidates, post-docs, and other members of the lab.
A Year of Applications
A stream plot displaying the extent to which different types of applications streamed across one adult user’s smartphone screen during one year of smartphone use (June 2020 to June 2021), highlighting changes in the user’s media repertoire.
The vertical width of the “river” indicates fluctuations in the total amount of phone use and the vertical width of each color indicates fluctuations in use of different types of applications.
Data from The Screenomics Project.
Applying to Join
Undergraduate Research internships with the Change Lab focus on developing a strong background in statistical methodology, while also honing skills in project management, presenting, writing, and data visualization. We do our best to facilitate formulation and progression of research projects that are aligned with students’ own interests. These projects often both introduce new topics and intersect with ongoing lab projects.
Students who are interested in joining our lab often do so through the Psych Summer and SymSys Summer Programs. Our summer internship is a packed 10 week intensive program, designed for motivated students eager to engage in independent, substantive research projects. This program is geared to students interested in continuing to work with us after the summer and eventually completing an honors or coterm thesis.
If you have alternative funding available, such as Federal Work Study, we encourage you to apply to the summer programs and let us know! We often accept multiple students per program to join our summer cohort. If there is another program that we are unaware of that you qualify for, please do let us know!
If, after reading some of our papers, this page, and the Lab Values & Mission pages and you have specific questions that would influence your decision to apply, please email The Change Lab’s manager A Garron Torres @ agarron@stanford.edu (if you’re wondering, A is A’s first name. “Dear A” will do just fine!).
Capstones Projects, Honors Theses, and Coterm Degrees
Students working in our lab often complete capstone or thesis projects as a part of their research with us. Consistent with our deep investment in lab members’ development, we require students to already be working on projects in the lab to complete a capstone/thesis with us. We do not accept applicants solely looking for capstone mentorship.
Honors thesis research in the lab is often supported by VPUE major and small grants. We strongly encourage and work with our students to apply for these grants, to attend conferences with us (often funded by VPUE conference grants), and to publish their final manuscripts.
We accept coterminal applicants (e.g. in Communications and Symbolic Systems). Generally, we will have worked with a student for at least a year before considering a coterminal degree proposal.
PhD Applicants
Graduate students working in the lab come from multiple schools and departments – and work on a wide variety of topics. Some are directly mentored by Prof. Ram, and some are engaged through on-going collaboration with other labs and PIs. We are generally excited to work with students who are similarly excited by and eager to dive into longitudinal design and data analysis. We strongly recommend reading recent papers we’ve published to get a sense of the types of ideas and methods that Prof. Ram and the lab are passionate about, expert in, and busy developing. If your work connects to any of these themes, then The Change Lab will likely be a rich place to undertake your studies! The lab moves fast, supports students in developing their own lines of research, analyzes a lot of data, and provides an (over)abundance of opportunities develop and lead projects and papers.
Applying to Join
If, after reading some of our papers, this page, and the Lab Values & Mission pages, you remain interested in applying, we are happy to receive an application. Prof. Ram officially recruits and advises PhD students through both the Department of Psychology and the Department of Communication. Both applicant pools are very competitive, and each has their own requirements. In both pools, it is especially important to convey how your interests specifically align with and can extend work Prof. Ram and The Change Lab are currently engaged in.
Undertaking a PhD is an intense experience, but it can be incredibly rewarding. It is best to undertake a PhD after thinking long and hard about why you want to pursue a PhD. Do you want a job that requires a PhD? Do you have a strong need to know how a particular phenomenon you observe in the world works? Or how a complicated analytical model works? Do those questions keep you up at night? Having a goal in mind and a real desire to spend a lot of your time reading academic articles, writing academic papers, collecting data, analyzing data, presenting your work in front of other people, analyzing more data, mentoring junior colleagues, taking courses, conducting research fellowships, analyzing more data, being a teaching assistant is crucial to getting through a 5-year PhD program. You will be challenged to engage in projects about which you know nothing, to work through challenges by trial and error, and to persist at tasks that make you feel like your head is hitting a brick wall until you are able to solve the problem at hand through an AHA! moment or, more commonly, through sheer perseverance and hard work. And then do it again because the solution led to another question. You will get regular feedback and extensive edits on your writing efforts across more drafts than you ever anticipated being possible for something you have written. But, it will all be in the service of getting a world-class, rigorous education and training that will allow you to answer questions about the world that you care about, and that will set you up to flourish in your pursuit of understanding and changing the world.
Please note that at Stanford, individual faculty members do not make admissions decisions. Applications are reviewed by an admissions committee, shared with faculty or labs that might be relevant to applicants’ interests, and decided upon collectively within each department.
Post Doctoral Applicants
The Change Lab employs, hosts, and works with post-doctoral students, both as in-residence lab members and as collaborators from other labs. Visiting post-docs (from US or internationally) stay with us for varying periods of time depending on their funding, program, and what kind of project they are engaged with us on.
If you would like to discuss the possibility of joining The Change Lab as a visiting post-doc, please contact Prof. Nilam Ram (with cc to A Garron Torres). If we have any funded positions open, they will be posted in our News & Updates page.
Visiting Scholars
The Change Lab often hosts visiting scholars and has benefited immensely from the ideas, connections, perspectives, and work that they share with us and engage us in. We accept visiting scholars internationally over varying periods of time depending on the scholar’s program and funding, with intent that the collaborations will continue long past their time in residence with us at Stanford.
If you would like to discuss the possibility of joining The Change Lab as a visiting scholar, please contact Prof. Nilam Ram (with cc to A Garron Torres).
More About Our Lab
