lewin

Hello! A while ago, my spouse and I did some research into very similar questions, although we didn't end up on that path. The short answer is that there are career paths listed on the Canadian Forces website that describe the amount of training you would require (military training as well as speciality training). Depending on the career, sometimes the training is done as part of your military training and sometimes you get your training outside of the military. If you are in the military while in school, they generally pay for school, but you are expected to serve in the Forces for some period of time (approximately the same amount of time they paid for your school, I believe).
But I guess it's not super clear to me when you say "work in the military" whether or not you mean "work in the military as an enlisted member or officer" or "work in the military as a civilian contractor". 
Generally, if you want the Canadian Forces to pay some or all of your educational costs, you will have to join the forces. Here are two Canadian Forces programs:
- University (Bachelor) level training (ROTP; Regular Officier Training Plan): https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/caf-jobs/education-benefits/paid-education/university.html
- Graduate level training: https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/caf-jobs/education-benefits/paid-education/graduate-programs.html (Note that there are only four career paths where the military will pay for graduate level training right now).
When we searched for Canadian Forces jobs/careers in the past, and with a repeated search this year, there does not seem to be a "Psychologist" position within the Forces, which would suggest to me that the Canadian Forces does not directly hire and train their own Psychologists, but would instead hire them as contractors. In this case, it seems like you would want to get your own training and then apply for any contractor openings they might have. Here is a link to the civilian job opportunities info page for the CF: http://www.forces.gc.ca/en/jobs-civilian/civilian-job-opportunities.page
That said, we did find that the Canadian Forces does have some military jobs that are related to psychology, depending on what type of work you want to do. Here are some careers that showed up:
Social Work Officer: https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/caf-jobs/career-options/fields-work/health-care/social-work-officer.html
Medical Officer (includes aspects of psychiarty): https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/caf-jobs/career-options/fields-work/health-care/medical-officer.html
Personnel Selection Officer (includes aspects of development psychology): https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/caf-jobs/career-options/fields-work/administration-support/personnel-selection-officer.html
To search for other career options in the Forces: https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/caf-jobs/career-options.html

These obviously aren't positions that involve being a Psychologist in the military of course, but I included them here since I wasn't sure if you were looking for opportunities in the forces to do work similar to psychology / help people in this way, or if you want to find a way to pursue a Military Psychology career with the forces. If it's the latter, it seems like becoming a psychologist first and then working as a contractor probably fits you better.
The above is mostly about the clinical side of psychology but if you are interested in the research side, you probably know that there are many Universities that study military psychology. Also check out the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research: http://www.cimvhr.ca/
Finally, this is all non-expert advice from someone who had looked into similar things 5-7 years ago and then refreshing that info with a bit of research after reading your post. So, I hope it gets you a starting point to find the information you want! Definitely talk to a recruiting office if you want more information about what programs/careers the Canadian Forces are actively hiring/recruiting today.

No reasearch experience is going to be a tough sell for any legitimate American clinical psycholoy programs or higher tier social psych programs (the same for Canada I've heard). 2 years is the minimum I'd recommend and maybe a year if you have very high gpa/gre scores. This is mostly because these field are so competitive that it doesn't make sense to take someone with no research experience over an applicant who's already learned how to help run an entire lab. I would say take off 2 years, find a paid research position (which allows you to save some money for app fees and interview travel), get yourself on 2 posters or preferably a publication and then apply. HTH!

I'm hearing people say two years but, in my opinion, you should go ahead and do a round of applications after the first year. (Unless, when you talk about your application prospects with a trusted professor, as you should, they say that you definitely need a second year.) You could get lucky and, worst case, you've wasted a few hundred dollars in application fees. Getting volunteer/research experience is less about the raw time and more about (a) getting a strong reference letter and (b) having a breadth of experience that can inform your research statement in a concrete way.

It is the rare first-year undergrad who can contribute effectively to a research lab; however, I wouldn't turn away an interested and motivated student because of their relative lack of experience. I've had an undergrad who started working with me as a first year and before her junior year she presented a paper at a national conference on her own research (that she started spring of her first year)!

American here.
I know that in my Uni a lot of professors expected you to take their class before you could even volunteer in their lab much less work so generally most people didn't start in labs until the second half of their freshman year at the earliest. The only exceptions were those who had existing research relationships from high school. I'm also pro 'wait-till-second year-then-take-a-year-off-after-graduating-if-you-don't-have-enough-experience' rather than have to deal with the adjustment to undergrad on top of a lab as I feel like your first year can give you some of the easiest throwaway classes you'll have. Many American grad programs (at least the more research heavy ones that I applied to) are now expecting 1 or two years post-bac experience from applicants so another thing to consider rather than volunteering your first year. But you have a better idea of what you can handle so go with what you feel is right.

I know a few RA's at my undergrad institution (in Toronto, so maybe that's where you are) who got positions in their first year, with one of them being hired as a work-study student over upper year students. Of course, they had very good resumes coming in with a lot of extracurriculars in high school (or were more mature students) so the lab managers were more willing to give them a chance because the primary concern they had was whether a first-year student would be able to handle adjusting to a university workload while working/volunteering for the lab.
If you don't have amazing extracurriculars but want to help out, I think another thing that would help is to read the publications of the professors you want to work with, and in your application, reference these publications in your reasons why you want to work with them specifically. Most profs have their publications posted on their websites as PDF's so it shouldn't be that bad, and if you limit yourself to reading things within the next 5 years it should be more accessible (older articles had this tendency to...use obfuscating language).
You should look at the professor's websites and see their instructions for applying for RA's, and set your sight towards volunteering rather than getting a paid position in your first year, since the first-year work-study student I knew was just exceptional in their credentials. Your best bet for a position is a social psychology lab as a lot of the research involves human subjects; the work itself is simple, but requires a lot of people working on them simply to run participants. I would recommend applying this early as it puts you in a good position to get paid positions if they become available, or to be accepted for independent projects for credit (which are honestly GPA boosters for the most part as long as you do work).

Wow. No, that won't happen.
First, your TA won't even be at your university 4-5 years from now. TAs are graduate students and they graduate at some point and leave. TAs also don't tend to remember their students that well years after they're done teaching them; I guarantee you that they've already forgotten about your question, and there is exactly zero percent chance that it'll suddenly pop into their head 5 years from now. 
Second, something would have to be seriously wrong with the university for it to entertain a complaint about a minor infraction do to with a student who's graduated a long time ago, and even more seriously wrong if they go through a process to find you guilty and impose a sanction. The Dean is a busy person, trust me when I promise you that the last thing they want to do with their time is try to work their way through an old complaint that doesn't make any sense from a former TA who's apparently lost their mind after a car accident. 
Third, even in the now impossible scenario that your grade changes, once you're in a PhD program, you're in. No one is going to care if your grade changed slightly. When you apply, you'll report your grades as they are, and that's what the university will use to make its decision. That will be what matters, not retroactive changes (and in fact it's entirely unclear how your PhD institution would ever even learn of a proceeding at another institution; such a matter wouldn't normally be reported to other institutions, you have a right to privacy). And once you have your PhD, you're done. Seriously, no one is going to know or care about this one grade from your BA. Revoking a person's PhD is so incredibly rare; it happens when a person makes up their entire dissertation data or commits some other serious fraud, and even then it'll only happen after lengthy proceedings. It will NOT happen because of such a minuscule issue with one undergraduate class. 
 
I seriously feel like I'm missing something. Are you planning to kidnap this TA's dog or ding their car five years from now? Why are you imagining these oh so unlikely revenge plots? 

None of that is going to happen. There are procedures for dealing with plagiarism and none of them would ever lead to the loss of a degree over one sentence in one paper, let alone three degrees. Not to mention the fact that it's entirely unclear how anyone would ever find this paper and want to pursue anything malicious because of it, and what university official would ever agree to entertain such a low-level complaint long after the degree has been granted. If it helps you, though, cases of very low-level plagiarism I've seen have involved nothing more than a reduction in grade in the relevant class for a first offense. Since you've actually gone to your TA, you also have a very good defense for having tried to rectify the situation in time and in good faith. Again, none of this is ever going to happen! You have done your best to deal with a mistake, and you've been told by the TA not to worry. Take them at their work -- don't worry! I understand that this is causing you anxiety, but you really need to put it behind you. You are causing yourself more harm with all this anxiety than an actual academic honesty procedure would.  
 
Technically any use of a source without proper attribution is plagiarism. That said, discussing commonly known facts is often done without citation and that's perfectly fine. Even if you did leave off a citation you should have had, this is such a tiny offense, and your TA has exercised their discretion and have decided to let it go, since it's a one-time incident and very minor. This decision sounds entirely reasonable to me, I would have done the same. As they told you, just don't do it again. 

In any case, I can't imagine that this essay will be in a place that anyone would see it.  Maybe in a Turnitin database to catch someone else's plagiarism, but that's it.  It's not like you've faked a degree and put it on a job application or your web page.
BTW, not to step too far into someone else's competence, but if you're still seeing someone about depression & anxiety, you might bring this situation up with them.  There's no way it should have to be eating at you this way.
 
 

I can say with absolute certainty that the MSW students in my area do not get enough training that is science based nor are they prepared for the myriad of consequential job responsibilities. Working with local state organizations (e.g., Child Welfare Services, Department of Human Service, etc.), I've seen many Social Workers make assessments, recommendations, or suggest interventions based on past/personal experiences. When asked how decisions were made and if they had a set of procedures (specific to situations or populations), I learned that decisions were commonly based on other cases or personal beliefs and no such procedure existed. Which worries me deeply - how do we know Social Workers are not influenced by biases in making their decisions? I've also witnessed Social Workers who categorize individuals into a immutable mold: "Oh, they've experienced sexual trauma? Well, then you can expect to see [X, Y, and Z] from them. They will not like [X, Y, and Z], so be sure not to do any of those things. Only [X, Y, and Z] will help in this situation." Perhaps, this is only my experience. To improve practice and service, attention needs to be focused on the ways that Social Workers form judgements and make decisions with an aim to have the most efficacious outcome. And, that's where research comes in, how do we train competent Social Workers - who are expected to make crucial assessments or provide counseling - when they simply do not know/implement the science? To be absolutely clear, I am not saying a MSW is lesser than a PhD. I am saying that a MSW should not be tasked with responsibilities nor make crucial, lasting decisions that are above their training level. 

According to a colleague of mine (and in my experience as a dilettante studying pseudoscience in mental health treatment), MA-level therapists who lack the research experience that a PhD brings tend to be more taken in by faddish treatments, e.g., rebirthing therapy, recovered memories, EMDR.
Clinical psychologists also tend to take on more complex case presentations (e.g., schizophrenia, anxiety, major depression) but that level of training isn't needed for every person seeking therapy, e.g., a nurse practitioner can treat many 'family doctor' conditions that don't require a medical doctor.
I'm blanking on the source but I recall reading that efficacy studies show that newly trained PhDs are more effective practitioners than MAs initially--because they get more training hours--but the difference disappears after something like five years (when equating the type of case being treated).
 
 
 

I'm intuiting that people have different definitions of "exclusion" and I'm curious about that. Grad school is less like undergrad and more like a workplace. Some people might want to take that relationship social but others don't and I don't think that's exclusionary. You can be professional and collaborative without being exclusionary. I'm probably jumping to conclusions but when I read "happy and bubbly" I picture the people who drop by my office and want to visit for an hour while I'm trying to work. Same with wanting to talk about cats instead of studies. I have much love for cats too, but maybe people talk about studies while they're at work because they want to be productive. I try to save that stuff for outside the office.

Here's a somewhat hyperbolic claim: Once you're a grown up there's no such thing as social exclusion (see Geek Social Fallacies 1 and 5). There are people I don't like and I don't invite them to parties. There are people who do weird research or who might require too much handholding and we don't collaborate. That is not exclusionary. Grad school doesn't come with an obligation to be friends with anyone or work with anyone. (That said, my dearest friends in the world, some of whom are also collaborators, are grad school friends.)

Limited exception to above: It's rude to flaunt it (e.g., throw party, talk about it in front of the uninvited person) but that's outside the bounds of normal behaviour; here I assume that grown ups act politely.

We actually have to take the GRE as well

The challenge is that lotsssss of research shows that intergroup factors influence raters' perceptions of candidates' qualifications. e.g., men get hired for potential but women based on past achievement; equivalent resumes are rated as worse if accompanied by a stereotypically female or African American name. Put another way, there's probably no such thing as an objective assessment of qualifications and it's better to recognize than minimize group differences.

I say don't email them--when I was applying last year, a big shot professor told me that emailing typically doesn't sway their decision either way. And I agree with you that it would seem like an afterthought. Good luck!

I don't think anyone has thought of the best way to address the concerns both of us have raised so far. In my ideal, the goal is not just to put people in a category of various assigned privileges. And I definitely don't think quota-based selection is helpful either (how would it feel to think that you only got hired because you are part of Group X, and how does it feel for your colleagues to treat you that way etc.)
I think one of the better solutions is to have people write diversity statements. This is very similar to what you say in your 2nd paragraph above. You say you want to go beyond "typical diversity factors". The way I see it, it's not that I'm saying we should only consider diversity factors / membership in groups because a candidate/person is more than just this! I wrote what I wrote above in response to the way some people think that we should't include diversity factors at all. I'm not saying we should replace diversity factors with everything else, but to consider an applicant as a whole person---both their background in regards to the skills required for the position as well as their background as a person. 
Finally, "affirmative action" is a vague term and people have different meanings for it, causing many misunderstandings, I think. To me (and to the Canadian laws, I believe) affirmative action just means making evaluations for hiring based on things outside of the technical skills for the job in the interest of promoting fairness in our society. For example, a hiring committee may recognize that women in science face additional challenges due to unconscious bias instead of ignoring gender altogether. Some other people I've talked to think that affirmative action means a company/school must hire/admit X% people who are women (just using gender as one example). I think quotas like this may have some small short term benefits but isn't a sustainable way of creating an equal society in the long run.
There are other hybrid models too, like the "Rooney Rule" in the NFL. Many professional societies in my field have started using variants of the Rooney rule after realising that prizes for "early career" or "late career" achievement tended to go to men way more often than women (more than the fraction of men in the field). So, for prize lectures and annual society prizes, the nomination period is open until X number of women are also nominated. This is meant to combat the problem that people's unconscious bias causes them to think about men as leaders in the field first/more often than women. But, if the committee is conscious about nominating the best men and women, it is less likely to overlook a qualified woman because of unconscious bias. (Note: This isn't like a "quota" since it can still create a scenario where only the nominated men win every year). This is a relatively new practice so I would be interested in seeing how the distribution of awards in some parts of my field change in the next 10-15 years.

Thanks for your considered response. Clearly, you have thought about this more deeply than I have. Where I feel a bit uncomfortable is when admissions or hiring decision makers try to correct or compensate for differences in past opportunities. Some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouth while as others have to claw and fight their way to success, battling prejudice and other challenges every step of the way. But how can we accurately factor this into our decisions without introducing a new set of biases? Are we to assume that just because someone belongs to a minority group or is a female that they had a harder time than a white male who came from a "privileged" background? Statistically speaking, this person probably did have a harder time than the white male. But we are making an assumption and reducing people into discrete categories (minority member or white, male or female, privileged or disadvantaged). This is a very binary way of looking at people.
I would like to evaluate people not based on their membership to some social category but based on all the attributes and characteristics that make them unique and well-suited to whatever role they are applying for. Past hardships or lack of opportunities are relevant to admissions and hiring decisions of course, but I would like to go beyond just considering typical diversity factors.
I know this is a touchy subject and I hope I haven't offended anyone. Of course, I am an advocate for the advancement of women, people of color and minorities, LGBT individuals, and other oppressed groups. I'm just not convinced that affirmative action measures are the best way to achieve egalitarianism, but I am open to changing my mind about this.

Masking race/gender addresses some issues of unconscious bias by the evaluator. Some schools go with this route, at least for the initial screening of applications. This works well at the graduate school level, however, it won't really work as well later on (e.g. postdoc and faculty hires). Most of these positions require detailed information about your research that will reveal your identity.
Also, masking these factors at the time of application doesn't change the fact that one person's lived experience is different than another based on their race, gender, socioeconomic class etc. One example: you have two students and a standard application form that asks for a few stats. Student A has a 3.7 GPA and volunteered in a lab for 10 hours per week during their senior year. Student B has a 3.7 GPA but no research experience. With this information only, you might want to choose Student A over Student B. However, if you ask for more information, you may find out that Student A was get some scholarships from their private high school to fund their university education and had the time and money to volunteer in the lab. Student B, however, needed to work during university to pay for tuition so they didn't have time to volunteer in the lab. They also showed that they applied for undergrad research grants (so they could be a paid researcher) but were not successful, demonstrating they were interested in this pathway. Now, how would you evaluate them? I think it would be unfair to not also consider the background of each student and recognizing that some people have more opportunities than others. 
In my opinion, grad schools shouldn't (and I know that many do not) simply evaluate students on how large their list of achievements are. Instead, schools are looking for certain areas of excellence in academic achievement, research experience, and character traits. This is why it's important to ask applicants for more information and to get the full picture. 
Finally, it is not impossible to suppress implicit bias. In fact, discussing that these biases exist and bringing them to the forefront along with strategies that remove ambiguity in the definition of a "qualification" can reduce the negative effects (e.g. [1], [2]). In my single experience on a hiring/search committee (for a Graduate Dean, not a faculty position), we spent the first 2 meetings with an HR person defining exactly what criteria we will use to evaluate candidates and which factors we will consider before even looking at a single application. I think this helped us a lot.

The challenge is that lotsssss of research shows that intergroup factors influence raters' perceptions of candidates' qualifications. e.g., men get hired for potential but women based on past achievement; equivalent resumes are rated as worse if accompanied by a stereotypically female or African American name. Put another way, there's probably no such thing as an objective assessment of qualifications and it's better to recognize than minimize group differences.

The challenge is that lotsssss of research shows that intergroup factors influence raters' perceptions of candidates' qualifications. e.g., men get hired for potential but women based on past achievement; equivalent resumes are rated as worse if accompanied by a stereotypically female or African American name. Put another way, there's probably no such thing as an objective assessment of qualifications and it's better to recognize than minimize group differences.

The challenge is that lotsssss of research shows that intergroup factors influence raters' perceptions of candidates' qualifications. e.g., men get hired for potential but women based on past achievement; equivalent resumes are rated as worse if accompanied by a stereotypically female or African American name. Put another way, there's probably no such thing as an objective assessment of qualifications and it's better to recognize than minimize group differences.

The challenge is that lotsssss of research shows that intergroup factors influence raters' perceptions of candidates' qualifications. e.g., men get hired for potential but women based on past achievement; equivalent resumes are rated as worse if accompanied by a stereotypically female or African American name. Put another way, there's probably no such thing as an objective assessment of qualifications and it's better to recognize than minimize group differences.

The challenge is that lotsssss of research shows that intergroup factors influence raters' perceptions of candidates' qualifications. e.g., men get hired for potential but women based on past achievement; equivalent resumes are rated as worse if accompanied by a stereotypically female or African American name. Put another way, there's probably no such thing as an objective assessment of qualifications and it's better to recognize than minimize group differences.

That's an interesting way of putting it spunky! Horizontal vs. vertical advancement. 
I'm biased towards the modern biopsychosocial model and don't have much regard for psychodynamics. That said, I think it's important not to view a biological/neuroscientific approach as superseding behavioral or social approaches. There's always a danger in science of framing phenomena reductively. Taken to an extreme, this leads to views like this:

Nobel laureate P.W. Anderson wrote an essay about the dangers of reductionism: https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/08/bblonder/phys120/docs/anderson.pdf
In his words, " At each stage, entirely new laws, concepts and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one. Psychology is not applied biology nor is biology applied chemistry. "
I think you could perhaps extend this to say that social psychology or clinical psychology are not just applied cognitive neuroscience. So while advances in neuroscience are yielding important insights about the operation of the human brain and mind, behavioral and intentional level approaches are not necessarily supplanted by lower-level explanations.
I don't think you can explain high-level cognition purely in terms of neural firing patterns. At some point you need to invoke emergent properties (emotions, thoughts, memories, language, etc.) that are the product of complex interactions or arrangements of lower-level phenomena. In fact, the brain itself is structured hierarchically, with feedback and feedforward pathways that give rise to higher level percepts from more basic sensory patterns (e.g., the work of Hubel and Wiesel on visual processing, the dorsal and ventral streams). Each level of abstraction has its own set of constituent units and rules governing how they are processed. Language is similarly hierarchically organized (phones --> phonemes --> morphemes --> words --> semantics --> syntax --> pragmatics --> etc). 

Is there any harm in sending her an email? Even if she is a bit miffed that you didn't contact her sooner (frankly, I don't think it's reasonable to expect all applicants to contact POIs in July), at least you'l get a response and have a chance of working with her. Frame the email positively without making any excuses. It might not hurt to be completely upfront and just say that you did not realize how closely your research aligns with her interests until recently and then pivot to saying why you are a good match for her.
To be perfectly honest, I contacted some POIs mere weeks before I applied, and at other places I didn't even bother emailing them in advance. This ended up not making much of a difference in the end. While I would not recommend most people to take this approach, if you are a qualified candidate POIs would be foolish not to accept you simply because you didn't contact them by a particular date.