lewin

How many words do you have? Cut that by half.

Many postdoctoral positions have time limits on eligibility, though usually I've seen them start at graduation, not the start of one's Ph.D. program. For example, the SSHRC postdoctoral fellowships specify that you cannot have graduated earlier than two years ago, though they do waive this requirement on account of delays "for the purpose of maternity, childrearing, illness, or health-related family responsibilities".

Have they changed the AW since I wrote it? In my day it was two questions: (1) Logically analyze an argument and (2) write a persuasive passage for or against some position. Both of those are valuable academic skills, even if one believes that the GRE doesn't capture them fully. Not to get into this too much, but the rest of the GRE is as predictive of graduate school success as GPA is (and it predicts independent variance). So it's not completely irrational to use it in the selection process, so long as it's one indicator of several. All I mean is that its utility is still an unresolved question and reasonable people could think it's useful. (Fully admit that I could be engaging in motivated cognition here because I scored 6.0 on the writing and had good scores on the rest.)

Ditto, my program gave a $10,000 top up annually to anybody with external funding and, maybe more importantly, a release from 75% of your TA duties. I'm far enough out of the program that I don't know what they do now.

This is a tangent, but I think this is a stupid trend and bad for students. The Ontario Graduate Scholarship is the same way now. Instead of an NSERC/OGS being a feather in a potential applicant's cap that can open doors, it's just another recruiting tool for universities. IMO, they should come up with their own recruiting money and leave the scholarships alone.

Your big hurdles will be convincing a graduate program that (1) you're actually interested in psychology and can maintain that interest long term (2) you actually know what a PhD in psychology entails and, (3) you have the background knowledge in psychology that's needed to succeed at the graduate level. I suggest finding a lab in which to volunteer/work for a year. That firsthand exposure would help demonstrate 1 and 2, and also help YOU to determine whether you're actually interested in psychology or just think you're interested in it. Demonstrating prerequisite background knowledge is harder, though you could always hope for an advisor who cares less about this. You could also try taking the psychology subject GRE; you'd need an awesome score to show you know your stuff. Here's an analogy that might illustrate what you're facing: I like balancing my chequebook and tracking my investments. It feels really good to make all the numbers reconcile and add up. Your degree is in math--would what I've said give me the background to succeed in a graduate level master's program in math? That is, to tackle material that's harder than what you ended your degree on? I doubt it. Psychology is the same way; you can't just jump right in. I empathize because sometimes I think I should have gone into accounting instead but, realistically speaking, I have no idea what accounting all entails because I have no experience whatsoever there (except for the aforementioned chequebook). Or, one possibility is to look at social psych programs with an emphasis in behavioural economics, if that's an area of interest. Then your degree might be an advantage.

The risk is you look like a moron who doesn't realize that self-publishing is worse than useless. It screams, "This couldn't get accepted anywhere noteworthy and I'm trying to trick my colleagues, who I must think are stupid not to notice."

If your advisor's advice is correct, it sounds like you might have to adapt your working style to succeed in the field. Save the idiosyncratic research for later when you're independent. This is hyperbole but I'm picturing... Student: "I want to go to grad school in chemistry, but I prefer working in the towers of an old castle using my own beakers and chemicals. I have very specific interests, like alchemy." Advisor: "Ummm, that's not really how the field works anymore. We're in labs now." Student: "Not going to change. Is there a program that can accommodate me?"

In my field you would definitely need to contact your past advisors because they'd be coauthors on any published work. Even if that's not the norm in your field, they might have useful advice. I might start with, "I'm considering rewriting these and submitting them for publication. Do you think this is feasible? I was thinking about X as an outlet, do you think that's appropriate?" But also, find out what the coauthorship norms are in your subfield. Do journals refuse unaffiliated work? Not officially, but everybody's affected by heuristics and unconscious biases and I'm sure author's affiliation (or lack thereof) could influence how a paper is perceived. So I think you could also list your affiliation as the institution where you completed the work (if you don't have a new institution that seems more appropriate).

Consider Canada? Many universities in smaller cities (100-300k) and there's much less crime than the United States. I don't know cognitive programs though, sorry.

Back in my day (NSERC CGS-M, SSHRC Doctoral) the proposal were non-binding but the research conducted still needed to be within the mandate of your funding agency. So as a clinical person, for example, no switching from social science research to health research mid-SSHRC.

I should have been more specific. I know it's common in other fields but I've never seen it in my area of psychology, which I think was also the OP's but maybe not this more recent poster's. Mea culpa.

I think you're better off finding another career. I apologize in advance for being really harsh here, but you've written several things that suggest you might not have the aptitude or background for PhD work, and included a few serious misconceptions about the field. Of course, I don't know you--so disregard if you like--but here are the details. Are you sure these problems are behind you? You yourself might be convinced that your record doesn't reflect your ability--and maybe that's true, I don't know you--but graduate schools won't take your word for it. They need to see a proven track record. Like, years of stellar work. Once I hired an RA whose academic record was spotty because he had some chronic illness issues that he assured me were behind him. I gave him a chance and he repeatedly missed work because of illness. Maybe he was really sick--and I was sympathetic--but I still needed the work to get done. Why should I take a chance on someone when there are many other qualified candidates that don't require taking a risk? Also, GPA doesn't just reflect capacity for learning but also whether you have the necessary knowledge to move on to more advanced work. Even if you could have done better if you'd been accommodated/diagnosed at the time, the fact remains that a low GPA suggests you might have missed much of the material that you should have learned and would need to succeed at the graduate level. In the graduate school context, a "relatively low GPA" means 3.0 instead of 3.9. I think the 2.4 gpa case linked above was a one-in-a-million shot. Non-academic work doesn't count, don't even mention it in any of your application materials or it will look like you don't know the norms. Also... are you sure your reference letters will be positive? They need to be stellar. I ask this because the record of being let go in other jobs suggests that you might also have had problems (about which you're unaware) in the research jobs. When you ask for reference letters, I would pay close attention for subtle or not-so-subtle cues that they're reluctant to write them. You also graduated a few years ago.... by now their memories of you might be fuzzy and the letters would lack the necessary details that make a good letter. This is just not high enough. Many programs require 80th percentile or higher. Put off writing and study longer. A score in the 50th percentile would just confirm that your GPA accurately reflects your knowledge and abilities, and not in a good way. This one of the misconceptions about the application process that I mentioned above. This is not what a personal statement should be about. It should be about how you developed your research interests, what you've done about them (in a concrete way), and your plans for pursuing that research in the future. I would look for a trusted professor who can read your statement before sending out. No. Very few PhDs get their coveted tenure track jobs and if that's not your goal, you're better off taking another path. A new assistant professor might make $60-80k starting but those positions are rare and getting rarer. Nobody goes into academia for the money. There's no shame in doing something other than grad school. Many times I wish I'd done something different and I regularly ask myself whether it's time to cut out of academia and find something else--and I started in a much better position than you're in now. The field is tough and getting worse so, based on what you've written, I can say with almost complete certainty that you'll be better off choosing something else to do. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but maybe it'll save you a lot of time and anguish in the future.

If you think you've worked in too many labs, just omit some. There's no rule that says you need to list all of them on your CV or even mentioning them in your statement. It's the same rule for any resume, you only list the job relevant positions or where omitting something would create an unexplained gap in your work history. As a student that latter problem shouldn't apply. You're probably better off using the space to describe the relevant positions in more detail then waste space describing irrelevant RA jobs. You wouldn't talk about working as a camp counsellor as a sophomore, right? It's different if you fill out some sort of application form that requests all positions, then you're being deceptive by omitting something.

Yipes, that's a pretty hard line requirement and, frankly, kind of stupid. My convocation was 9 months after completing requirements and nobody cared. But as others pointed out, not having an MA could affect your admission even if it's not a hard requirement. That is, having an MA when not required could have been considered a strength of your application and if it's absent, maybe you're now a weaker candidate. It's bad situation anyway, and you need to start asking people about your options.

I'm desperately curious which area of psychology you're in or which journals you're sending to because I'm in social psychology and this is NOT the case for any of the reasonably ranked journals (e.g., JPSP, PSPB, JESP, Psych Science, SPPS). It must be different in your subfield because this is really, really bizarre to me.

If you have lots of spare time to do other research then you're not working on your main stuff enough Everything snowballs too. Idiosyncratic research topics will have a harder time getting published, so they'll be less likely to help your career too.

Frankly, I think you should think even further ahead to what you want to do after your PhD. It'll be even harder getting a job with a dead research area. That said, there are research topics that touch on psychoanalytic ideas in a more modern way. I'm thinking of two review articles: Freudian defence mechanisms and empirical findings in modern social psychology (Baumeister, Dale, & Summer, 1998) and The scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: Towards a psychodynamically informed psychological science (Westen, 1998). They're almost 20 years old by now but maybe they could give you some inspiration about research ideas that are more mainstream psychology but touch on Freudian ideas. Other ideas: I saw Peter Glick (Lawrence University) give a talk on how incestual anxiety can be sublimated into creativity... but I don't know whether that's published somewhere yet. Carey Morewedge (CMU) and Michael Norton (Harvard) also had this really influential paper a few years ago on the motivated interpretation of dreams (though as a Freudian guy, you'll see that they don't mean it the way Freud did). P.S., I see you're in Winnipeg. UofW? Does Bradbury still teach honours seminars on Freud? Classic stuff there.

Updates should be event-based not time based. For close ones, email when you need their advice: "I've received offers x, y, and z. Any opinion?" and for everybody else when you have news like "I accepted at X". There's no need for monthly updates or whatever, but people will want to know where you end up. Also, write thank you notes for the letters on paper.

Apologies if this has been posted already--I did a search but nothing was forthcoming. Food for thought for graduate students since 10-year PhD completion rates are 50-65% depending on discipline: "Higher ed should create an alternative to ABD" Personally "certificate of doctoral completion" seems like a misnomer to me since we already have a doctoral completion degree: the PhD. This would be a consolation prize for INcompletion. I don't know about other places, but my program was direct-entry PhD and people who don't complete are often awarded an MA instead. ...but runners who drop out in the final mile also don't get an official time, nor undergraduates who lack that final course.

1. Don't mention the medical issue. 2. You could consider including a line that says "I have read this course is restricted to xxx majors but I'm hoping you can make an exception because....." Then it's clear you read the rules. There's nothing that bugs me more than a student email that looks like they haven't read the rules before emailing

I've done that for my research assistants too.

Good to learn from their experience but experience isn't a guarantee of academic competence so don't be too intimidated. People with work experience can be a mixed bag; I've known some who think they know better than everybody just because they have a little work or life experience, but academically it didn't help them squat. Maybe that's just coming from a social science background, but older students seem especially likely to insist that their personal anecdotes that contradict a study's findings are a cogent rebuttal to controlled experimental data.

I'm not kidding, I had a CBM sandwich last Friday and it was delicious.

This forum isn't here to help with your homework.