LJK

While I am not having as extreme a case of writing stuckness as you, I can identify with you a bit. I should have finished my thesis weeks ago and have let whole days go by without making any progress. Similarly, everything is there and ready to go, I just need to get 'er done! So I'm not coming at this as someone with real answers, but as a comiserator trying to share what has worked for me. I don't know what you have tried/what your process is but some ideas: 1) go talk to people at your university's writing center. It is likely to by open and under utilized in the summer. The people working there are often graduate students themselves who can likely identify with you on writing a thesis more than your therapist. They will have the writing training to help you take on a major project with tried and true methods. 2) see if you can find someone else with a major writing goal who will be your writing partner - report productivity to each other, or sit side by side to feel the social pressure to work while they work. 3) break down your big project into itty-bitty pieces. By that I don't mean thinking about one chapter - I mean think about one paragraph. What is an idea that you need to get across? Write it. Go onto the next one. It is kind of like the choice of waiting in traffic on the highway or getting off and going the local roads: both will get you there, quite possibly in the same amount of time, but at least you feel like you are moving with option 2. Write up the bits and pieces as you get re-interested and excited about each bit and then put time into editing and smoothing them together at the end. 4) focus on all you have left to do rather than how much you have already done. I was just reading a blog the other day that it is a psychological phenomenon that if you think about what you have already done, how much you have accomplished, you feel accomplished and like you can rest on your laurels. But if you focus on what you have left, think about how much there is to do, you are more likely to be motivated to get it done. I have been having some success with #3 and 4 on this list. Hope something in there helps you!

I'm on the last day of my trial so I haven't made the purchase yet but: http://sites.fastspring.com/culturedcodeedu/product/main

Honestly, your verbal score is a titch low - some professors do put an emphasis on the GRE scores, but it really depends on what type of undergraduate experience you had: a high gpa at a no-name small liberal arts college doesn't hold the same weight as a high gpa at top-tier school. If you went to a top-tier school, I think your GPA will count more, if you went to a school lower on the scale, professors may pay more attention to your GRE scores than they would otherwise - its supposed to be a standardization across schools so if your school didn't have the best reputation, the GRE can help, if your school has a great reputation it doesn't matter as much. But, I think it is probably adequate if you don't have the time to put a ton of time into studying - taking the time to craft your SOP to perfection and gearing at least a solid paragraph to each school (the 'fit' paragraph) is more important then going from a solid verbal score to an excellent one. I agree on the psych test assessment - I didn't major in psych but I applied while getting a MS in psych and not taking the psych gre didn't hurt me as far as I know - I got 2 interviews and another professor was somewhat apologetic that she couldn't offer me an interview. So I wasn't one of these applicants that was invited everywhere but I got some interest - that is all you need: one offer! Try to appeal to everyone you apply to, but make sure you would be willing to go to any program you get into - that way it only takes one offer to be ecstatic come March/April!

I totally agree it depends on your area of study. In psychology there is a debate about whether a MS is actually helpful. For some, it shows that the student is serious, knows what they are getting into, and knows what they want to do. For others, it says that they student has already started to form ways of doing things that will need to be broken down and retrained before anything useful can come out of them. I think part of the reason for the second position is because a lot of MA/MS degrees come from 'lower tier' universities that often don't have phd programs. Getting the MA/MS on the way to the PhD gives the program and the advisor more control over the students training. In fact, many programs don't care that you have already taken a significant number of grad courses - they want you to take their grad courses and will only let you transfer in a few credits. So the trust in the quality of the training issue could account for why many top programs don't offer just PhDs after coming in with a MA/MS. As to why students want to go straight into the PhD? That means you will be done in 4-6 years (or the norm for your field) rather than 1-2 + 4-6 years. Of all the PhD students I know who got MS degrees before starting the PhD, none are taking less than the standard 5 years in my field to get the PhD, even though they did 2 year programs before hand. Who wants to be paid on a graduate student stipend forever?? (I am finishing up my MS and heading on to a PhD now, so I guess I do )

Hi Sildrugtanni, Your resume looks very impressive. I think you already have all the qualifications you need to be considered competitive, after that it comes down to research fit and luck. How many schools did you apply to last year? Did you email the professors you were interested in working with before applying to check that they were accepting applications/introduce yourself? Did you tailor your SOP for each school? If you applied to a bunch of schools and did all the rest, it probably just came down to luck. Did you get any interviews? If there are professors you want to reapply to, email them and ask if there is anything you could do that would make your application stand out. Doing whatever they say won't necessarily get you in, but if one prof wants to see whatever they suggest it should help across the board. Also widen your search of schools, consider places that aren't on top lists but have great professors. But only apply to those places if you really think you could/would be happy there - you don't want to put ourself in the position of having to choose between an offer you would rather not have gotten and not going to school the following year. I realize it sux to be qualified and not get in, but its awesome that you are ready to try again! Good luck!

First of all, while I wouldn't be that blunt, I think it is more than acceptable for you to be clear about your career goals. If you have a good advisor or even good relationships with other professors in the department, when teaching related opportunities come up that can build your CV for schools that are looking for teaching focused faculty, they can send them your way. You also won't get anyone good intentionally giving you non-teaching roles in your funding jobs (presuming you have funding) thinking they are giving you a better role. But, given your teaching focus, I would say the way to learn to love/like/tolerate research is to acknowledge how it can make you a better teacher. Research is how the knowledge you will be passing on to your students is created. Knowledge seems to just be fact early in education - by the time students are in college, they should be learning that knowledge is constructed - and is only as good as the assumptions it is built on. Maybe that won't make some of the more arduous and/or tedious tasks better, but if you return to thinking big picture on occasion about how your own understanding of knowledge and of your chosen field is growing and developing, and how that can help you to become a better teacher, maybe that will help you get through. Even for those of us who are research focused, I think that it is the big picture - contributing to a field, creating new knowledge - that drives us, not innate pleasure in every research related task. Personally, I am most excited about the research; teaching is this mildly scary thing that could very well become a major part of my life that I have no real idea whether I will enjoy!

I just downloaded Self-Control (http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/) for macs. It is free and open-source. There is a black list function where you list all the websites you won't have access to, and a white list function where you only have access to the websites you list. This can function as your anti-social in the black list feature or as freedom works by having a blank whitelist. It also doesn't work to restart your computer - you say 2 hours, those websites are blocked for 2 hours! I only just downloaded it but I like free!

I would suggest telling your advisor that you would like to follow her, that you would like to have enough money to live off of in that city and that you would prefer to get your degree from the original school. Let her figure out what the logistics of that is - where the money will come from, etc. If it sounds like she won't be able to swing that, then ask about doing the visiting RA thing. I don't think going in with detailed plans of money coming from this source, these other faculty needing to be involved and on board, etc will be helpful. Decide what your wish list is. I think you have already started, but formalize it to organize your own thoughts. What is the absolutely most important thing to you? Continuing to work with your advisor? Continuing to work with your advisor in close proximity? Keeping your committee? Make a ranked list so you know what you want most and what you are most willing to compromise on. And regardless of what happens, it sounds like you will be in a good situation! You either are in a comfortable, familiar place with access to your advisor and opportunity to strike up new collaborations with other profs, or are going to be in a completely different place/country/system where everything but the research and advisor is brand new. Since your advisor seems to care and is taking your needs into account, I don't think you can really lose here.

I'm not clear as to where you are looking to pursue your MS - internationally or in the US? I only know about the US: I think that your background is perfectly competitive for a psych MS. I don't know where you are getting your information about a strong psych undergrad being essential, but I have found that not to necessarily be the case. Plenty of the grad students I know have gone that route, but there are plenty of us who have majored in other things. My undergrad was in anthropology. I know another student who had a mathematics undergrad and is now a psych grad student. You just want to be able to explain how what you have done in the past connects and supports what you want to do in the future. Gaining more relevant experience never hurts, but I think you should be fine qualifications wise regardless. In fact, programming experience is probably a huge plus in a lot of programs' eyes.

Hi ekans, I think that this quoted paragraph reveals some misconceptions/generalizations you have in your head that don't necessarily reflect reality. First of all, not all undergraduates are drinking/clubbing/partying machines. I didn't drink until I was 21 and only regularly when I was 22 - I was older than most of my friends and wasn't going to drink alone. Instead, we were the kind of people who showed up to and even ran university events. There are plenty of undergraduates out there who had a similar mindset to you in undergrad and I know I wouldn't have a problem with being friends with them now even a few years into grad school. I won't rule all undergraduates out based on not particularly liking the loudest and rowdiest. Second, why in the world are you, a 19 year old almost grad student, convinced that you aren't as smart as the undergrads at your grad institution?!? That is a truly bizarre lack of confidence from my point of view. If you think an ivy education would be important to these people, I'm guessing that means you are attending an ivy for grad school? So you will be getting your phd from an ivy but you don't think that you can be on par with people getting BAs from the same institution? I think this lack of confidence is what you need to work on. I'm sure that you are fantastic in many ways, have your insecurities like everyone, and probably have your share of social awkwardness like the rest of us. You need to own who you are and not put too much value in something like where your undergrad happened. I think this was the only part of your post that screamed immature at me - most of my 'owning' of myself and who I am has happened 21+. I don't mean that cruelly at all - social and personal development progress somewhat independently of academic development and it can be seen in the way you are approaching this issue. It is fine that you aren't as mature as a 22+ graduate, but I think that could be a social limitation for you with more mature graduate students who are past these issues, at least at this level of concern. For you, I think having a mix of grad and undergrad friends may actually be best. Socially and academically you are at different places of development and there isn't likely to be many people in a similar circumstance. Having a range of friends who relate with different parts of your life could be a really good thing for you. Join clubs that interest you regardless of whether they are undergrad or grad. I know it will feel awkward for you to not quite fit age-wise with the grads and to not quite fit academic-standing wise with the undergrads but that also means that you are uniquely in the position of having a claim on both groups. Don't shut out potential friends just because they didn't skip a few years of school! Maybe look particularly for a club or two that already has a mixture of grads and undergrads in it - you wouldn't be an outlier but a bridge crosser in that situation! Anyway, hope that helps and good luck!

I in no way meant that all small liberal art colleges do not do research and do not provide good research experiences. I suspect that you will find good research opportunities at many liberal arts colleges. What I actually wrote: is a statement I stand behind. If you are interested in cognitive psych, make sure that there are courses beyond a single survey/lecture course. Are there upper-level courses on language, memory, cognitive development, cognitive neuroscience, etc. in the course catalogue? Ask how often the courses you are interested in taking are actually taught - sometimes courses are listed but haven't been taught in years. At my current university, the cognitive upper-level classes are usually the least in demand. The department still holds them but a less well staffed department may not. Check to see that the professors in the department are publishing current (within a couple years) work. If you really want to check things out, check the current course schedule and see how many courses the professors in the department are teaching at once. The more time the professors spend teaching, the less time they have for research. Just as another side of this perspective, graduate students being in a department doesn't mean that there are less opportunities for undergraduates to be involved. In psychology, graduate students often have their own line of research that is distinct from their advisor's rather than being handed a part of a larger project. These experiments need to be run, coded and analyzed just like the professors'. Graduate students often manage their own undergraduate RAs or help manage lab RAs that work on all of the projects in the lab. Graduate students tend to be in the lab more with fewer lab-external responsibilities in comparison to professors. They can be great mentors. Professors can be great mentors too if they are around enough. Basically, you will be able to find the experience you need as long as you attend a school that has an active research program. One last point - the liberal arts are still found at larger universities, usually within a college of arts and sciences or something similar. I personally ended up choosing a small private research university and in the end was very happy with my choice. The other school that I seriously considered was a second tier liberal arts college (I got into some first tier but they weren't giving me much financial aid). All the admissions materials said that they were active in research but on visiting, the professors were open in saying that that was not true. Anyway, good luck with your future plans! Remember that there is tons of stuff out there that you haven't even heard of yet, so while planning is good, also take some time to sample things that sound interesting!

A high school student? You are way more on top of things than I was. PhD programs do have very tough acceptance rates - but if you set yourself up with a great application and apply to lots of schools you will have a good shot (well, at least currently; I don't know what it will be like 4 or 5 years from now). One thing to realize is that there are many people (generally not the people posting to this forum) who don't really know what graduate school is about but feel like they want to go back to school. The people who know what they are getting into and can articulate concrete research interests that align with a potential advisor stand out. There are still many more of these people than slots at any given university, which is why you should apply to a good number. I don't know if you have chosen a college yet. If not, choose your undergrad university based on having a research program in your desired field. You don't need to find a lab that does what you want to do for the rest of your life. You just want to avoid going to a small liberal arts school that teaches one cognitive psychology course and has professors who teach four courses a semester. Those professors will not have time to do research and you will not get good experience. Research experience is often what makes a candidate really stand out. If you are a senior and know where you are going next year, figure out what you need to do to qualify as a research assistant. There may be some basic courses that you are supposed to take first. If there is something that really interests you right from the start, email the professor of the lab doing the research or drop by his/her office hours. There is a trade off of younger students knowing less background and having more time to teach them things that they can be doing for the lab for many years. If you are going to a small liberal arts college, start locating and applying to summer research programs (REU) right from the start. Job wise, I think $50,000 would be do able. What the job market will be like in 10+ years is hard to say, but my feeling is that cognitive technologies are a future direction that industry is going to go it. How can we capitalize on what we know about human cognition to make technology effortless to use and how can technology take advantage of the assumptions our brains make about how the world works? Industry will need trained cognitive scientists to deal with these questions. If there is a greater demand in industry, there may also be an expansion of departments in academia, though that is a slower process.

I don't take notes in my psych grad classes - most of them are set up to do some reading on some topic then have a discussion delving deeper into the science than we probably did reading on our own. They tend to be about training us to approach the literature in an appropriate way - so we can reach that deeper understanding without the scaffolding of having 5-10 other people also reading the same things. There is also a component of being exposed to the literature, but all of these types of classes have had papers rather than some sort of comprehensive exam - so to my mind, no reason to take notes that are more than comments in the margins of my print outs. I don't like reading long articles on my computer. The only exception to this is stats. I had a paper and pen notebook for stats. At the same time, stats at my school was more application based than mathematically based - it took TAing stats for me to really understand the underpinnings of the analyses. We were learning when to apply different tests and when the assumptions of a test had been violated - the sorts of things that are in the textbook. So for me, a laptop is not necessary for class. I would look at your research interests when thinking about this. Is there any possibility that you will need to go into the field with your computer? If you do developmental work, there may come a time when you go to them rather than having them come to you. I second lewin00's comment on conferences - if your presentation isn't 100% done before you leave for a conference, a laptop is very helpful! Laptops are useful, but you will probably be able to get by without one if that is your preference.

Not all funding in the sciences comes from grants and funded projects - many students in the sciences are funded on TA lines that come from the university like funding in the humanities. In fact, these are all coordinated through the graduate office of the College of Arts and Sciences at my university, crossing the same administrator's desks. Usually funding through the university is contingent on services rendered - teaching, assistant teaching, conducting research. The funding letters don't say 'we are paying you to get your degree,' they say ' we are paying you to teach XXXX for semester XXX." Only degree seeking students are eligible for the positions but the money is based on performing a particular function for the semester. It would be absurd, and probably illegal, for a school to turn around and ask for the money back that they paid for you to do a job. I don't know that there isn't a single school out there that tries to pull that crap, especially if it was some sort of fellowship or scholarship that is more 'free money' than the rest of the types of funding, but it is highly unlikely.

I think it is very unlikely that any program will make you pay them back if you choose to leave their program for any reason. If that was the case, there would be a much lower drop out rate among PhD candidates as the financial burden would be worse than sticking it out. Programs want you to get out sooner rather than later if you are ultimately not going to finish - they don't want to keep 'wasting' money on you. I mean check it out, but I suspect it isn't an issue. If the issue is that you aren't doing the research you want to do and aren't making the networking connections you want to make, moving may make sense for you. It will likely cost you time in terms of years to degree. That said I know of a girl (lab mate of my roommate) who is switching universities in the sciences. She already has her masters and passed qualifiers. She was able to strike a deal where she didn't have to retake classes or re-pass qualifiers at her new university. She also has a university independent scholarship, which may have helped her. But the reason she moved was because her specific subfield is a minority in her current department but she will be moving to a department devoted to her subfield - resources, networking, etc. were her main reasons. This was accepted by her current advisors, all but her main one (who she didn't feel comfortable telling before deciding to move) wrote letters of recommendations for her and supported her choice. She was confident and an advocate for herself and got a sweet deal in not having to redo any of her previous grad work at a new department. Ultimately what it comes down to is deciding what would be the best course of action for you. Are the resources that important? Does the extra year or two to your degree matter to you? If there is a faculty member other than your main advisor who you think will keep things confidential and you feel comfortable talking with, they may be the best person to contemplate this with. They will know your field, your interests, the relative strengths and weaknesses of the departments, etc.