Anita

Tell us more! I actually want to do something like this too if I don't get in anywhere. Apparently it's the sort of thing nobody ever regrets doing. Also, you sound like a challenger of authority and conventions. Maybe it's just me, but I think that's the most important quality for an academic - to be able to question and deviate from accepted norms. I'd play it up if I were you. You sound a little unsure now, probably because it's you that's being challenged, but I think you can afford to sound more confident of your choices

Ha! That's not unique! I do that too

Epic! Maybe schools will see you as you as someone who is so cool they can CHOOSE to underperform ("I could totally ace this thing, but since my brilliance defies mundane standardized tests, I'm just going to make a pretty pattern with my score sheet so I can give the scoring machine some aesthetic fun!") My turn: I'm applying to experimental psychology program, and I got a C+ in stats, which (to schools) means I can't run a stats test to save my life. My GPA is 3.5, which is below average for all but maybe 3 of the schools I'm applying to. The other 3? 3.5 is squarely average. And my school is notorious for grade inflation. And psychology is consistently one of the highest-GPA majors. One of my rec'ers is my advisor, but he has never taught me, failed to remember what year I was in after advising me for a whole year, and agred to write the rec without asking to see my transcript, resume or SOP. Another of my rec'ers taught me one class from which I got a B+. My last rec'er, also my thesis advisor, practically begged me to quit my thesis for my own good (as well as hers, I guess). I mentioned my first breakup in the SOP I sent to my dream school. And to top it all, I'm not American. Let's see what school has the gumption to sink $100,000 into educating someone who as likely as not will hightail it for her home country as soon as she's done and bring the school as well as the country zero prestige.

Anything unique goes, from the profound to the trivial. I'll start. One weird thing about me I just noticed is that I seem to be more concerned with the "greater good" than my own interest sometimes. What I mean is, unlike most people, I don't care much about such things as meeting the President or being mentored by a leading figure in my field. My rationale is, I'd rather have Obama spend his time solving national issues than talk to me, and I'd rather have said leading figure spend their time researching cutting-edge questions than mentor me. I don't think it's anything about my self-esteem. I just think it's more cost-effective for everyone who benefits from the work of those people. If I'm informed enough about political issues to make conversations with the President productive, I won't be afraid to meet up with him. Likewise, when I'm knowledgeable enough in my field to be an intellectual peer of leading experts, I'll hang out with them all day long discussing pressing academic questions When I was small, every time I heard someone ask "What would you do if you get to spend an hour with such-and-such?", I perspired a little. I freaked out because I not only couldn't think of anything to do with even people I genuinely admired, but I honestly didn't even want to meet them. I always thought I was weird, but now I think I know why. Next

Hm...Lucas never wrote back to me when I emailed him. I wonder if I said something wrong :| I'm just going to wait for Paula to review my app. We already know each other, so I'm sure she won't be shy if she wants to interview me

I have one that doesn't have an annual fee (the AmEx one) and got a free hotel stay out of it, and one that has a $90 fee (waived for first year) that I just used to score my flight and will cancel soon Meh, UMass used to have a page with admission stats, but I can't find it anymore. I seem to recall admitted GPA avg. is 3.5, but am not sure about GREs. Something like 1250 to 1300. Don't sweat it; the overwhelming response from most people is that GRE matters far less than GPA. This pagemay be helpful too. I'm applying to work w/ Lucas too! I didn't know he does CR though. Was going for his positive psychology work. How come you're not applying to Purdue and Stony Brook? They're like hotbeds of CR research right now.

Just bought my free flight to Las Vegas! Here's a tip to make your trip almost free: apply for one of those airline credit cards that give you 25000 bonus miles. That's just enough for one flight. See here for a list of credit cards, instructions and all that jazz. That's the blog that started all my almost-free traveling (I learned about couchsurfing from it too ) Yeah, the early marriage project? Man, that's some serious money. Do you have more specific research interests? The closest I get to a specific interest is stability of attachment styles and the interaction of autonomy and relatedness needs in CRs. Who's the Mich State person? As I recall, it has something called a relationship lab, but when I emailed Debby Kashy (sp?), who runs it, she said it's not her area of expertise.

Really? I thought being from Texas, you'd be really close to the conference site. Maybe $200 or so for the flight, and then find someone on couchsurfing.com to stay with? I think I have enough frequent flyer miles to get a free flight (and I'm in Mass.!) and if I find someone on couchsurfing to stay with, accommodation will be free, so I'll spend virtually nothing other than registration fees. Also, I heard from a conference organizer who shall remain unnamed (per their request) that they don't check badges for the main event talks, only the poster sessions because there's food there So you don't even need to sign up for the main event to attend it. Taken together, it seems sooooo worth it, because there are so many big names there. I'm actually applying to 15 schools. Why do you think 30? Each school has an average app fee of $70, and with GRE score reports it comes out to around $90 per school. I also ended up not applying to some schools I sent scores to (silly me). I actually tallied it all up and turned out I spent $1300, not 1500. Guess I should fix that signature Are you applying to work w/ Prof. Pietromonaco at UMass? She's a real sweetheart! What about TAMU, Paul Eastwick I would guess?

There's also a far easier (I believe) way to go about things, which is to get a textbook (say on close relationships), flip to the references and look up everyone who's cited three times or more. Also, the Social Psychology Network has a database of researcher that you can search by interest (including CR). I went through all that pain because, one, my research interests are too all over the place for that approach and two, in psychology language, I'm one of those "maximizers" who can't rest without examining all their options. I would get too tired to look at another prof's website, and then I'd be like, "What if the next guy's work is REALLY FUN? Huh?" I seem to recall from my Social Cognition class that maximizers tend to be less happy than their more easygoing "satisficing" brothers, so yeah, sucks to be me, but I just can't help it

Don't worry overmuch about that. Schools typically don't start reading apps until 1 month after the deadline anyhow. Seriously, the whole fuss they make with deadlines is ridiculous and borders on sadistic when they know full well they won't touch those apps for another month. But yeah, I had a couple panicking moments like that too *cough * UMass and Rochester *cough *

You guys are soooo wrong in making fun of the serious efforts committees put into reading applications. In reality, they always try to be as objective and unbiased as possible so that no application is unfairly favored. In fact, they go to such lengths as to outsource the selection process to an independent decision-maker who does the dirty work of rejecting applicants. To minimize personal and subjective involvement with the process, all the committee does is assign numbers to applications. Then a RA naive to the application contents feeds the numbers to the randomizer, and the first 20 numbers that come out are accepted. Thus, we can be sure the decisions are not based on such irrelevant human factors as the committee members' mood or whether the air conditioning in the meeting room is out of order again. It's a wonderfully perfected system, the fruits of many years of carefully controlled experiments, and not to be spoken lightly of by the likes of you insignificant lab rat-wannabes!

I too made a formatting mistake, this one a little more glaring, as in having one paragraph 1.5-spaced while the rest of the SOP is single-spaced. I did notice that something was wrong, but in the stress of last-minute submissions, I couldn't for the life of me figure out what. And I sent that bastard to at least one school, and my dream one at that. Can't tell you if that's the dealbreaker until April, but I hope you'll at least enjoy the company Oh, also, one school: where I should say "Texas A&M" I said "Texas T&M". And God forbid if I forgot to replace all instances of school names while recycling parts of my SOP. Oh and here's one more; also for dream school, I was so desperate to show my personal growth that I actually mentioned my first breakup. It really was a pivotal event, but apparently breakups just don't belong in SOPs, according to the writing center. Oh well. Expensive lesson, I guess.

Seconded about the 2-transcript thing. I feel like such a lucky bastard because I've only attended one school, and it's a school that sends out free transcripts to boot. I feel so bad for those people who went to summer school and studied abroad and transferred and so on. Especially if more than one of those schools charge for transcripts. Another kind of hilarious quirk is how you have to enter certain information in a specific format, i.e. phone numbers have to be in (xxx) xxx-xxxx format. Missed a bracket? Do it again! Seriously, whatever happened to regular expressions?

I agree with catilina that this is the best time to do all the crazy stuff you've always wanted to do before you're weighed down by family and responsibility and whatnot. I've been harboring, for the last couple years, a plan where I basically pull a Walden, although it'll be in my home country, not Mass. as I would ideally like I have enough money to live for at least five years in my super-cheap Asian home country without working, and during that time I would like to read and learn everything I've ever wanted to learn. I'll work my way through the classics, teach (or re-teach) myself math, physics and computer science, all subjects I neglected in school but now miss desperately, digest the literature in the fields of psychology I'm now applying to grad school to study, polish my Chinese and French (hopefully can pick up a couple more languages, because I'm nuts about languages) and generally geek the hell out of life. It's honestly my biggest dream right now. It gives me goosebumps just to fantasize about it. My hang-ups? First, how am I going to explain myself to parents, relatives, friends and all sorts of people who for one reason or another want to know what I'm up to? Will I be able to integrate back into society when I'm done? How am I going to find a romantic partner if I go into hiding? Second, I'm stuck with the Asian moral expectation of taking care of one's parents after one becomes self-sufficient. I really don't want to think what my extended family would say if I tell them I want to take a couple years (not days, not months, but years) off for my own self-actualization and whatnot, while it is time I help out the old folks with my own income and settle down so they can reap the rewards they worked for in raising me. I wonder if anyone else has a similar fantasy. So far the people I've shared it with have mostly shrugged it off as a juvenile plan that I'll soon outgrow. I don't think so. On the contrary, I think most people get it wrong in spending their days trying to earn more material comfort, while it's intellectual satisfaction that's most lasting and fulfilling. But I'm getting on a soapbox here *steps off soapbox *

Through trial and error I developed a strategy that's a mix of rankings and research interest match. All I did was going down the NRC ranking, visiting the social psychology graduate program website of each school (quickest way to do this is typing "[name of school] psy grad" into the Firefox address bar, e.g. "unc psy grad," press Enter, and let FF's "I'm feeling lucky" feature do the rest. Try it ). Then I read the faculty research interests, if the school was nice enough to put a list together. If they have a personal website with a publication list, I skim the paper titles to see if I care about their work. If there's no research interest list or homepage (yes UMich I'm looking at you), I went on PsycINFO and looked up the faculty's name. If someone sparks my interest, I enter their name, email, homepage URL and research interests into an Excel spreadsheet. I also download a recent paper or two and scan the abstract, sometimes the whole thing if it's something I'm super curious about. This helps when 1. writing the prof, 2. writing the SOP, 3. learning what's going on in the field in general I do this in batches, for 20-30 schools having the same, nearest deadline (I was lucky enough to have a kind friend compile a list of deadlines for me). When I'm done with the batch, I check to see which school has more than one potential advisor, or just one advisor I'm crazy about. I send an email to each interesting faculty at these schools to the effect of "I'm nuts about your work. Are you taking in a new lab elf next year?" When they get back and say yes, I enter "yes" in another column in said spreadsheet. When enough people have responded, I can see which schools have enough available POIs to make it worth applying, by tallying up the "yes" column. Then I fire up another sheet in the same Excel file, with the name of the schools I want to apply to in one column. Next to it, I record the URLs of the application instructions page, the URL of the online app, deadline, app fee and whether it can be waived (sadly, answer is no for most schools), whether they require the GRE subject test (because I didn't take it), whether they require the TOEFL (because I'm international), contact info of the department/admission committee, and any notes. I don't deny that this method took an insane amount of time (not to mention it's dorky as hell ). But grad school research takes up an insane amount of time no matter what, and IMHO this is the most organized and painless way to go about things. Once I got the system down, it went very smoothly, with less stress than "Yay! I love this guy's work!" moments. Also, I accumulated a lot of papers along the way by people I want to work with. I save them all in a folder after naming them in this format: [school name] [prof name] [identifying keywords]. This makes tracking down papers when the time comes to write SOPs a lot easier. That said, please, please, please start early, like August or so. I started in October, didn't get the system down until November, and suffered from lots of "Did I miss anything?" anxiety along the way.

Are you applying this year too? I emailed a LOT of professors, and 3 offered to meet me at the SPSP conference this Jan 29 in Las Vegas. IDK if it's too late to sign up, but if you can, try and do that - looks like all the big names will be there! And we can meet up, maybe? Btw, I didn't sign up for the main conference because it's so friggin' expensive ($200 or thereabouts). I did sign up for the Close Relationships preconference though, which is a lot more affordable ($70 - still sucky but at least something I can fork over on my own). As long as I get to meet the bigwigs, it doesn't matter, I figure.

Since the theme is already "scaring people off", here's a horror story I read recently that's been helping me keep my nose to the grind, so to speak. And this is someone who actually made it. There's just no justice in this world anymore.

From the admission guide I read (link in my last post), even if you're trained to do research as well as practice, most people end up not doing much research anyhow. Hence "more research-based" as opposed to "less research-based". Oh and SPFM (is it OK to abbreviate your name? ): that's an awesome post! If I do end up not getting in anywhere, I'll probably print it out and look at it every time I feel like punching innocent people who ask about my "graduation plans". Hell, I already need it right now What's with people who want to know what I'm up to after college? Have they never been in college themselves?

Never mind 2nd grade; I almost flunked first grade Was a math prodigy, but writing not so much. Ever had these interminable writing exercises where you write a single phrase/sentence over and over, supposedly for the benefit of your handwriting? I must have had ADD back then, because I could never finish the daily quota and was always busy doodling on the margin of my notebooks instead, resulting in many low marks that led to a year-end evaluation of "good student" instead of the "excellent student" badge my parents were hoping for Also, when you create your account, be sure to say you're international. Redundant advice it might be, but that's the key to accessing the hilarity Also, Beck, I'm sorry to report that's exactly the kind of nightmare I had thinking back on my TAMU app (as in, "Chin up, self. If you think you have it bad, think of people who have *that* background!" )

Yeah, good luck selling schools on the idea of spending their shrinking share of funding on making life easier for us poor inconsequential applicants

Oh yeah, that's right. My bad. I kind of think of clinical as its own little thing, because it's the only subfield that's more practice- than research-oriented. But among research-based subfields, I believe social is hands-down most competitive, yes?

This will tickle your HCI bone, rogue: UMass has its own online app, which sports "Save", "Check," "Previous" and "Next" buttons. You'd think clicking "Next" will save whatever you filled in as it takes you to the next page. Not. You need to click Save for that. Click Next, and none of your hard work is saved. Very intuitive. Totally ditto about Rochester's (probably cost-cutting) homegrown app. Their FAQ about not having a PDF-saving module bordered on ridiculous. My own horror story would be Texas A&M. Hands-down dumbest design in online app history. You wouldn't believe it (my friend didn't, and she saw it with her own eyes). Since I said I was an international applicant, they presented me with a grid of 18 lines, each line having a mix of text fields and drop-down menus where I was to fill in the age, starting and ending month and year, grade level, and degree received for EVERY year I had been in school, starting in grade 1, six years old. Since I had been in school for 16 years to date (shocker I know), that's 128 form fields I had to fill in, very carefully they told me, because "mistakes are costly to correct". Took an entire Sunday afternoon. I was also told not to attempt to translate my degrees to their US equivalent (we had a great laugh about my "small learn" and "middle learn" certificates, literal translations of the degrees I got). And the box where the degree name is to be put in? Has a 12 character limit. There were numerous other fails that pale in comparison but merit a mention, such as the fact that they have two text areas for entering the same statement of purpose, which the department then asked me to mail in again in a hard copy. Second horror story: All my Embark-based apps refused to log me in in Firefox. Since my first Embark app was UMich, every Embark app after that logged me in to my completed UMich app, even if the page I logged in from was NYU or Cornell or what have you. I eventually figured out the golden rule: if it doesn't work in FF, it works in IE. A rare occasion when I was glad I had IE on my system. Also, this is one quirk displayed by every single school I applied to. I had to tell the school app my GPA and GRE scores. Then I have to tell them to the department-specific app all over again. Really? What's an online database for?

Whoa, this thread is up again! Thanks everyone for suggestions. A lot of people are recommending that I look into MA programs. I'd be happy to, but I heard MA programs very rarely have full funding, and chances of funding for foreign student can only be worse (cf. this book). Does anyone know what MA programs, in other countries even, have generous funding?

Thanks everybody, especially sugarplumfilmmaker's very reassuring post @socialpsych: I appreciate the suggestions - this is more helpful than everything I've gotten out of my advisor :| I did think of taking another stats class, but it'll have to be higher-level since my school (tiny elite LAC) doesn't seem to have a retake policy. And I don't see how a more advanced class like Probability will be useful, but am sure I won't enjoy it, so I'd rather not use my very last elective on that. I'd be very happy to teach myself stats with a textbook all over again, but it's not the sort of stuff schools can see on a transcript. I guess I need a trip to the career center for this. The field of psychology in my home country is kind of a joke. There's one journal that's supposedly peer-reviewed and a handful of researchers who don't seem capable of running stat tests. I can tell you more, but it'll quickly sound like another rant I suppose I can find an educational research institution that'll let me study motivation if I dig deep enough though. The thing with finding RA jobs is that the lab you work for should study something you're actually interested in researching (right?) So just waiting for your department to drop you a lead won't work. I've tried asking a couple profs for pointers, but it seems they don't trade job opening info among themselves, so I guess it's down to contacting individual profs, distasteful as it might sound (but I'll check with someone in the know first! ) @sugarplumfilmmaker: that last part you said about being looked down on is so very true. In fact, it's my main concern right now. I don't think I can handle being around my more successful friends, my expectant family and everyone who had known me in a previous, more brilliant life. But then I don't know what I would do, put up with them like nothing happened, go into hiding and avoid interactions, or some other strategy? Am I overthinking things? That's why I'm so curious about what happens to across-the-board rejectees socially.

Thanks for responding everyone It's sad that admission does seem even more competitive than ever. I'm glad though that all of you seem incredibly resilient, which gives me more motivation to keep trying. After all, our individual failures are not as significant to anyone else as they are to ourselves, which takes care of the "what would they think about me" anxiety. Also, as long as you're not your own barrier, no one keeps you from working some more and then trying again. Hmm...I'm just thinking aloud here @socialpsych: I'd totally go work as an RA for a year or three. My main issues are, one, I'm a foreign student. I only get one year of paid work. Two, I got a C+ in stats (THERE I SAID IT). I imagine that's going to make every lab hiring person run away screaming, since stats is so central to an RA's job. Three, and this is probably easy to fix with the right advice, I don't know how to find RA positions other than the occasional email from my school's psyc department. Do you email professors you want to work with? Fourth, it's looking very hard to find paid RA positions, especially when you want to work in a certain area in social psyc. I may not care about the RA pay itself, but I need a paid job of any kind to even stay in the States and spend the requisite 10 volunteer hours in a lab. That probably sounds very confusing to you. Let me know if you are, indeed, confused, and I'll follow up with a crash course on the ins and outs of being an international student