yhat

I completed my interview at KU last Friday. Was a great experience and very interesting quant program. Good luck to everyone else throughout their interviews!

Research, writing, and moving. I'm sure some resting will fit in there somewhere!

If there are any faculty in the field at your school you can talk to them. Again I am not in your particular field and more basing it on generalizations guided by my experience. However, for example in my field of quantitative psychology (statistics, measurement, etc.) we happily accept people with no psychology backgrounds (math majors) or people with very limited math backgrounds (say Calc 1 & 2). I wouldn't say one has an advantage over another in terms of application. Rather, they are looking that you are interested in the area of research. Again, I like to emphasize that every field and even school has there own standards so I could be wrong.

First I am going to preface this by saying I am not in your field, but rather giving my general take based on experience with talking to professors and graduate students throughout various Psychology areas and this serve as a more general commentary. You will find that research experience is more of a indicator that you enjoy research, which is what a PhD. is about, that you can research in that area at a very advance level. This is the full point of a dissertation compared to say Master's comps. Even if you are in the same field every lab has 'their way' of doing it. So while researching in a same situation is nice, it is not a necessity. Either way, they are going to have to teach the lab specific procedures. They are more interested in people who can pick it up and understand it quite well and at a high level. A professor told me once (he was paraphrasing another professor and I am paraphrasing him) that first and second year graduate students are useless because they are still learning everything. That third year students are great to have because they have the information all down. Finally that 5th/6th year students are useless because they never around, be it working on their dissertation or flying to job interviews. I guess what I am saying is realize you can't do it all and they don't expect you to. (Sorry for any typos, poor grammar, or nonsensical ranting. I am typing on smartphone and heavily sedated because of a cold!)

UC Davis (Quant) will be sometime over the week of Feb 25. I was informed this by a faculty member at another school (they all got together so times would not overlap).

I started out by getting a recommendation from a professor and the professor teaching the class gave me an override to take the class for credit (by contacting admissions). From my understanding it counts just as any elective would credit wise. I'm sure not all schools are the same and other schools may have more restricted access to graduate courses than others (I know I was considered the bottom rung of the ladder as to availability). That would be more of an issue with your specific school. But once I took one graduate course and received an 'A' the others were a lot easier to get into. Of course my program, quantitative psychology, is a bit of a special case compared to most programs in psychology. Most institutions do not offer coursework in it at the undergraduate level in psych departments (besides the basic intro stats and research methods). Therefore, unless you go into the math/stats department or take graduate courses, you obtain little experience or knowledge of the field. That being said, most programs that you apply to are an application to the program, not a specific professor or research interest. Usually, you develop your research interest within your first year or two after you get a core curriculum. So as I said in my EDIT, my experience may not be representative of psychology as a whole, but I feel it does not hurt and it is a way to make your application stand out above others. As my I/O psych professor put it, a resume's purpose is to get you an interview. This can easily be extended to an application as well. As a final note, taking graduate courses also allow you to judge if this is what you want with your life by providing you personal experience into what is expected of you and by affording you an avenue to meet graduate students (who can provide insight into what it is like to be one).

I think people underestimate the power of this. Not necessarily a statistics class, but any field relevant graduate class. Doing good in graduate classes is another piece of evidence that YOU are able to succeed in graduate school. One has to remember that the GRE is used as a testing instrument in order to predict graduate success. Taking several graduate classes, even as an undergrad, would be a very strong predictor of graduate success (or at least in my opinion, which is solely based on its face validity). Even if this is not the case, it provides one with many opportunities. In my experience, graduate classes tend to be smaller, more intimate and afford one with opportunities for research and even a letter of recommendation (or at least if you work with the professor a lot outside of class). Even though I cannot speak for the admissions, I am basing this on my personal experience after taking several graduate classes throughout my junior and senior year. Edit: I might add, this could be completely different for other programs and only basing it on my experience with quantitative psychology.

KU (Quant) : Jan 25 ASU (Quant) : Feb 20-23

Hello! Your power analysis seems correct (from what I can tell), however, I would be concerned about one of your a priori assumptions: the effect size. If you have no clue as to what your effect size would be for an interaction (i.e., no prior research) I would recommend a small effect size. Interactions are known for their small effect sizes. With that being said, it is often an understanding that they are hard to detect without a large sample size. One thing I would suggest is to create a range instead of a single point as your estimate. You could take an effect size of f = .10 and f = .25. For example, in G*power you can use the 'X-Y plot for a range of values' to create a graph. Here is a quick example I did: Best.