lypiphera

I saw that post, but given how early it was and that no one else had heard, I assumed that it was an informal interview. He may have been contacted by a potential POI, but that doesn't mean all the professors did, and there's no mention of official interview weekend. As for my "incomplete" situation, I did email the grad coordinator but haven't heard back. I would be more worried, but I've now been accepted to a place that may be higher on my list, so I wouldn't be devastated if my application fell through. Good luck on yours though, I wish you the best! If I do hear from them, I'll post about it.

Also, looking at the results page, it doesn't look like anyone in psychology has heard anything from them about official interview days, rejections, or acceptances. Guess they're just a bit later than some schools. http://www.thegradcafe.com/survey/index.php?t=m&pp=250&o=i&p=9http://www.thegradcafe.com/survey/index.php?t=m&pp=250&o=i&p=9

If anyone has news one way or the other from Stanford or UC Berkeley, social psychology in particular, I would love to hear about it!

I applied to them as well and have not heard anything yet. I have not seen anybody else post about them either, though of course other people may have heard. I did notice on my application main page that it says my official test scores were not received, even though I sent them in November. I hope my application wasn't dismissed because of this. Did your application status say "Incomplete" as well? I'm hoping they just didn't update it....

I guess not, since I was offered admission before one happened. All of the other schools I've done phone interviews with invited me to an in-person interview weekend after the phone call. This was the only one that offered admission before, and it sounds like they aren't having an "interview" weekend at all, instead more of a visiting day for accepted students. I have no idea if it normally works this way for this school or not, but I do not think this is normal for most schools.

Like disillusioned, I just got an "recommended for admission but it's just a formality" acceptance. Woo hoo!! No funding information or "official" admission offer yet, but of course I'm still super excited. FYI, I did a phone interview with my POI but did not do an official on-campus interview.

Hi Iowaguy, I could be wrong about this part, but since I plan to continue my career in psychology academia, I would think that the degree would affect my future prospects. When I apply for professor jobs psychology departments, I would think they would be more likely to consider a person with a PhD in Social Psychology as opposed to a PhD in Management and Organization. In addition, the coursework is completely different. From the business department's website: "Courses are designed for prospective general managers and specialists in these fields. Those seeking career opportunities in human resource/personnel departments in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors as well as in corporations, labor unions, consulting firms and the government will benefit from the educational courses that the Management and Organizations area can provide." So while the research work may be very similar, the coursework (which may not be the focus of graduate school but certainly still matters) would be quite far form my area of expertise and not designed to help in my career path. As for funding, I don't know if their graduate funding is any better than psychology (probably is), but the difference in pay would be if I ended up teaching at business school instead of in psychology. Again, my main interest and passion is psychology, so that's not the path I want to take. While it's a shame that I couldn't work with that professor, there are others I fit with housed in psychology departments. I hope that helps explain my reasoning more. I think it really depends on the situation - this is my personal experience but it may be a completely different situation for the OP, where it would make sense to go to program Y.

It's been a while since anyone posted here, but I thought I would refresh it. I have been living in Houston for the past 5.5 years, so if anyone had questions about the neighborhoods or other things, feel free to post! Please don't PM me questions, because I'd rather have the answers posted where others can see. I'll try to reply as soon as I can and give the best information I can.

1. I already posted one specific tough one above, but in general, the toughest to me were things like "tell me about yourself" or "what should I know." I also found it difficult to answer one professor who asked if I was more interested in her work or her colleague's work, since I had applied to both. I told her honestly that I was interested in both, but if I had to pick one, I believed that her colleague's work was more closely aligned with my research interests. I'm pretty sure I shut that door on her as a possible advisor, but it would be worse to lie and then not have a chance with the professor I was more interested in. 2. That varied by professor a lot (I have interviewed by phone/skype with 5 profs from 3 schools). Most assumed that I knew the basics of their work and the research area. One in particular was asking me all about specific articles he had written, and if I had read them - I told him the truth, that I had read the abstracts but not full articles. He said "you should read them," and I don't know if he meant "you should have read them first" or just what he said. So be familiar with them just in case. This same professor asked a lot of specific concepts and theories in psychology (e.g. cognitive dissonance and other more specific things), not to test me, but to know how much he had to explain in talking about what he was researching. The more you know offhand, the better you look. Once again, I advocate honesty - if I had pretended to know about a topic that I didn't, I would not have been able to continue the conversation intelligently, because he would have assumed knowledge I didn't have. Also, about the notebook, I started taking notes (simple and short, not verbatim) on my later phone interviews. I wish I had done that for the first couple, since I can't remember if certain things were covered and don't want to look bad by asking again.

I had the same problem with UCLA. I was using Chrome, and it would not let me copy and paste into the text boxes, and I did NOT want to write everything out again and risk a typo. So, I went into Internet Explore to see if it would work there. Hooray, I was able to copy and paste into the boxes! I went to the bottom of the page to hit "Save & Continue...." and there was no save button!! I reloaded, re-logged in, etc., nothing worked - there was just no save button at the bottom of any page. Finally, I downloaded and installed Firefox, which was the only browser of the three that would let me both paste into it AND save. Very frustrating.

I have interviewed with my POI at one of my top choice schools, and it went very well. Our research interests are closely aligned and I feel like we would be a great fit. The one thing that I'm trying to decide if I should take into consideration is the fact that he is a very new professor, having received his PhD only a few years ago. This is is first year at the school. I fee like there are both pros and cons to this situation, and I'm not sure how accurate these ideas are or how much each matters. Pros: -Likely doesn't have other graduate students (yet), which would mean more time and attention to my work, and more opportunities for me to be on his research projects -More recently out of graduate school, so may understand it more? Cons: -I've heard from people that new, non-tenured faculty will be so focused on their own research and getting tenure that I would have less opportunities for authorship. I would imagine this depends greatly on the personality of the professor. -Less established background, networking, publications in the field, etc. -May not know as much about being an advisor. Any other Pros and Cons that I am missing? To me, the fact that we seem like such a good match and I really like the school will likely way out any potential cons, but I would appreciate any input/comments/suggestions from both prospective, current, and past graduate students!

I actually have a different opinion on this matter than some of the other posters here. I emailed a professor I wanted to work with who was in both the Psychology and Business schools. He said he doesn't accept people through psychology (which is what I am going into), but that if I applied to him through the business school, I would be doing the same kind of social psychology work (but would get paid more in the future if I taught in business school). Even if the coursework were the same as well (which I don't think it would be in this case), I knew that I wanted me degree to be in my area of interested, which is psychology. I would not want a degree to list me as a business student, because even if the research overlaps, that's not what I identify with. It might be a different story if the two areas were closer (e.g. sociology and social psychology), but I still don't think I would have done it. If Program X is your passion and what you plan to continue in, I would think you'd want your degree to reflect that, even if Program Y offers more chance of funding.

Thank you, Sing Something! I don't know why it is that when I go through the Stanford site, I get the same error message as the other person (about not being able to create a new application, even though I was trying to return to my application), but when I use your link it works.

I don't want to name specific schools, but the one application that drove me crazy was one where you had the main application and then the second department application. That wouldn't be so bad, except that for the department one, you couldn't save your progress. That's right - you have to do the entire thing in one go. Now, it was somewhat simple, but it's still frustrating to not be able to save and review your answers.

I think what you (OP) said and Bearcay said is reasonable. I would say honestly that you do have other interviews, but that you are very interested in and excited about their program. I wouldn't want them to misunderstand and think that I was committing, evne if I didn't directly say it, but you want them to know that you are strongly considering them.

I applied to the Social area at Stanford and have not heard anything from them yet. I'm assuming at this point that I have been rejected, because I likely would have heard from my POI by now if not. I've seen people post about affective science, but has anyone heard anything from Social professors/interviews?

Similar to what Quant_Liz_Lemon said, it really depends on the professor. I've done a few phone interviews, and they ranged greatly. One wanted a clarification on my research interests, meaning I may not have said enough in my SOP about it. Another made it clear that he would really like me to come to the school. Another told me he was deciding between me and a few other candidates on who to invite to the interview. Another was interviewing all likely candidates. So it could be that you aren't in the first wave of candidates, or it could mean that they didn't need to know anything else yet. I would give it another month before assuming that no contact yet is a bad thing.

Ha ha ha. Nice to hear others are in the same place! I'm not sure what program your applying to, so it may be a different time, but are any of you going to the interview weekend in February (psychology)?

Apparently you can't type "b" + ")" because it turns it into a smiley face.....

I have a few broadly-connected research interests, so I was able to find schools that had more than one professor I was interested in. In deciding what schools to apply to, I ruled out ones that only had 1 professor I was interested in, because a) I had less chance of getting in, there wouldn't be other people I would be interested in collaborating with, and c) if for some reason my advisor and I weren't a good fit in grad school, I would have no one to switch to. Obviously if your research interested is more focused and you don't have as many people working on it, you would have to just apply to places with 1 POI.

I keep my posts/profile anonymous, but I believe that people (aka POIs) could figure it out based on dates of phone interviews, or recognizing details of a conversation. What I do is make sure that I wouldn't be devastated if any POI read the post, knowing it was me. That isn't to say that I would be happy about them knowing that I posted details of a conversation online (even if I didn't mention the professor's name or even the university), but I don't feel like I have said anything negative or damaging. Again, it wouldn't be ideal if a professor saw me mention in interest in other schools, but I feel like that is expected and understandable. I think about each one of my posts and make sure there is nothing that would put me in a terribly bad light for posting. Still, I'm not going to make it especially easy for people to figure out who I am by posting my name.

Like some others on this thread, I'm working in research lab now and would continue if I don't get in. My husband is about to finish his PhD, and the plan was for him to follow me to where I get in to school. If I don't get in, then he gets to pick the place instead for where he can work, and I'll follow him. I like my job now, so I'd be fine with continuing as a full-time RA, but I would likely move and try to find a similar job. I'm not sure yet if I would re-apply next year - 3 years experience isn't all that much better than 2, there's no way to improve my GPA or GREs, and the schools I am interested in would be the same 10 that just rejected me. I would try to find a job I am interested in, whether it's in research lab or not.

So, I don't think your question was offensive, per se, but the issue may have been in the wording. Rather than suggest excluding women since we don't know if there is an issue with menstrual cycles, I might have suggested that you examine the genders separately, see if there is any significant difference, and then put the whole sample back together if not. I guess its the wider concept of excluding women because of the possibility that a period could affect results. Unless there's good evidence from your sample that the female data behaved differently from the male data in terms of your analysis, I would not exclude them offhand. It may have been seen as you saying that its okay to exclude women from research because their periods interfere. I don't think that is what you are saying at all, it sounds like just a statistical suggestion, but I could see how someone would misinterpret it.

Let's post our rejections as they come in, as well as your rationalization (whether true otherwise) as to why this is a good thing and a one word description of your feelings. I'll start, since I got my first official rejection letter. I'm sure more will come, but I think they will be later. School: UCLA Area: Social Rationalization: Well, the professors that I REALLY wanted to work with weren't accepting students, so I don't mind that I didn't get in, since the people I did apply to weren't my first choices. Word: "Meh."