At Cornell, she studied under E. B. Titchener, his first and only major graduate student at that time. Her major was psychology. As a graduate student, she conducted an experimental study of the methods of equivalences in tactual perception, as was suggested by Titchener. After two semesters of experimental study, she subsequently earned her Master's degree "in absentia" from Vassar College in the late spring of 1893 for that work. During her work on the method of equivalents, Washburn had simultaneously developed the topic for her master’s thesis, which was done on the influence of visual imagery on judgments of tactual distance and direction. In June 1894, she gave her oral presentation, and became the first woman to receive a PhD in psychology (as Mary Calkins had previously been denied her PhD because she was a woman). She was also elected to the newly established American Psychological Association. Her master's dissertation was also sent by Titchener to Wilhelm Wundt, who translated it and published it in his Philosophische Studien in 1895.