homonculus

Nice to finally find another social applicant! Last year was pretty crazy in terms of competitiveness. Oregon had 545 social applicants for 11 spots! I'm wondering if we can expect similar numbers this year. I'm also trying to finalize my applications, I only have 5 schools for sure, and a couple more I"m hoping to apply to: 5 PhD and 2 MA programs. I wanted to apply to at least 10, but these were the places I really felt were a match. Here's hoping for the best!

Hi everyone, This is my second year applying to social psych programs. Last year I was glued to the social psych thread. I've been waiting for someone to start it again, but since some of the other areas have threads already, I thought I'd throw this out there. In the last year I've gotten an additional year of research, finished and submitted my undergrad thesis for publication, and refined my interests quite a bit over last year, so I'm really excited to start submitting. I'm interested to hear your experiences applying in the past, what you've learned, what your interests are, and where you plan to apply. Hopefully this can be helpful for all of us!

Not my field, but since no one has answered yet, I'll take a crack at it. Do you need a PhD for the job you eventually want? I think you are right that 5+ years of work experience is valuable, so the PhD would be a big sacrifice. If you aren't interested in spending a lot of time on research and becoming an expert in a specific area, a PhD might not be a good option. Sorry for the vague answer, but I guess everything depends on your end goals.

Thanks to both of you, I was just worried that maybe there were some critical skills I'm missing because of my circumstances. But I think my experience has been at least decent. I've been heavily involved in data collection (full time since I graduated), which consists of long interviews for a longitudinal study, as well as the data entry, analysis, and reporting. The other weakness of my application is a lack of psych stats training. I took a stats class my first semester of college, but it was before I was a psych major. Since that class transferred over, I wasn't required to take a psych stats class or any more stats. Can anyone speak to the importance of a specifically psychology stats class? I have quite a bit of experience with SPSS, but my formal training isn't anything to write home about... Now that I've graduated, is there another way I can bone up on my stats that might give me an edge next year? If I report that I've done personal/informal studies on stats, would they even care about that?

Hi everyone, this is my first time posting, though I've been reading the forums and results page much more than I'd like to admit. I've applied to seven social psych programs for this year, and I'm fairly convinced I won't get in (five of them have already extended interview invites). I kind of think I overestimated my application quite a bit, and should have applied more conservatively. I'm already making plans for applying again. Like several people I've seen post, I attended a relatively obscure university that didn't have a focus on research-there are no labs or anything, just small research opportunities, such as a senior thesis-style class (just one semester-long class though). I've been pretty fortunate compared to other students here, I did my senior thesis and presented it at our school's undergraduate conference as well as a Psi Chi conference nearby. I also did another research project after that working one-on-one with one of our professors, again presenting the poster locally, and I'm writing it up to submit to an undergraduate journal, hopefully soon. However, most of my "research" experience has been program evaluation. I've done three projects for the evaluation I've been working on for almost two years now, one for the local conference and two at national conferences. I'm also working on a paper that we are hoping to submit for publication (though the results may not be publishable, still working on it). I guess my question is this: how does my experience compare to undergraduates who have lab experience? I know my evaluation experience isn't exactly relevant to my professional interests (social psych, though I am considering looking at more evaluation-oriented programs such as Claremont), while undergrad labs offer more specialized training. Do grad schools want me to have extensive research experience relevant to my social psych interests?