Jump to content

AAdAAm

Members
  • Posts

    22
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by AAdAAm

  1. Do you know how to write proofs? (e.g., proof by induction, by contrapositive, by contradiction, etc.) Did you take multivariate calculus? Any statistics courses where you learn more of the mathematical theory (not only applications) of statistics?
  2. I think this is really at the bottom of it. If you check on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics you'll see the median hourly wage for a Social Worker is about $10-$15 cheaper than that of a Clinical Psychologist. I can see how people (or insurance companies) would be swayed by this.
  3. I don't think you're overreacting at all. I've also been first witness of incidents of racism/open discrimination both on campus and outside of it. I never thought I'd ever do it but I've been seriously considering buying a firearm lately and learning how to use it properly.
  4. I have never heard of something like this before. Is it a common thing to ask new potentials students to do? Or is this specific to School Psychology?
  5. Apply to as many programs as you can and keep in mind that you might need to realistically consider lower tier/less prestigious programs. The sheer number of applicants for Clinical Psychology usually make an application difficult to stand out (unless it is stellar, which would imply a stellar GRE). It all becomes a numbers game, so make the numbers work for you as well for you and apply apply apply wherever you can.
  6. I commend you on changing the focus on the question from "what is the best way to evaluate students" to "what is the best way teach Statistics" because this is really the crux of the issue (at least from an educational standpoint). I feel that if you can teach the content of the course effectively, then it does not matter whether you use exams, presentations, homework, assignments, etc. to evaluate students, students will get good grades because they understand the material they are learning as opposed to regurgitating it in an exam or following a step-by-step process in an assignment. I do feel like many of the introductory courses in research methods I took did not really prepare me well to do research. They seemed more like a workshops devoted to explaining which SPSS windows to click on, how to read SPSS output and how to follow a 'decision tree' of statistical techniques. You mention that you use R (I feel like I need to jump into that bandwagon ASAP) to create animations and class discussions/activities to teach Statistics. What do you feel you are doing differently than say a standard intro to a research methods course? I mean like one in which there is a Prof in front delivering a lecture and everybody else is taking notes. Do you feel it is working?
  7. I am not in graduate school (yet) and I remember I lamented a few months ago in this board about the lack of job opportunities for people in the social sciences, especially in academia. Well, I did my homework, spent time emailing programs and actually talking to a few students who were either in graduate school or had graduated shortly after that and I have to say that has changed my focus a lot in terms of planning for a career. The people in this board and outside of it are right: there are very, very few jobs left in academia that are worthwhile. Tenure-track positions have given way to adjunct professors and dwindling funding opportunities makes the competition all much more extreme. There *are* jobs outside academia, many of which are interesting and rewarding but what the “real world” pays for is not your knowledge of cutting-edge psychological theories but your ability to do research and make sense of data. I am not the best when it comes to math or stats but I do see that there are many “applied statistics” programs in Departments of Psychology and Education that I would not mind applying to if I know at least I’m gonna have a fighting chance of getting paid enough to survive on something better than ramen noodles and free pizza. If the world places emphasis on technical skills and data analysis then so be it. I refuse to become another statistic in some un- or underemployment report where my PhD in Psychology only gets me to the point where I need to suffer through another +10 yrs of ‘almost-poverty’ before I can join whatever is left of the middle class. I’m aware that nobody gets into graduate school to become rich but… a decent (small) home and a living wage? Going out to a restaurant every once in a while? Is this too much to ask in today’s world?
  8. It could be legit. Googling around I found this: www.sagepub.com/video which takes you to a video that more or less explains what's on the email you got. And it's on the official SAGE website. It's weird to say but maybe you should be patting yourself on the back for writing an article that people actually liked?
  9. Well, Vojtko’s story is by no means the sole example of the plight of adjunct professors. You can check the Adjunct’s Blog: http://adjunct.chronicle.com/category/blog/ which contains a collection of stories about the abuse by university officials and the little power they have to control them. I see the adjunct crisis a little bit like the strikes from fast food employees in New York and other states. Fast food jobs were not created with the idea to propel people into long-lasting careers or pay a living wage. They were something people did on the side while waiting for something better to come along. The problem is that the tyranny of the capitalist economy has forced A LOT of people to rely on these jobs are their sole means to survive. Adjuncting is no different: the for-profit model that universities are adopting have forced countless of talented PhDs to sell their talents for cheap or face unemployment. So when I read on here that you consider the suffering of adjuncts as “disaster porn stories” I can’t help but think how entitled and self-serving you sound. Maybe you need to be unemployed for a few years without being able to care for your family or even pay the rent to learn how difficult life is for other people before you equate other people's misery with “disaster porn stories”. I don’t think it is taboo to work for the private sector but mostly a gamble. When you work for a company your job is to make money for the company, not to pursue research. Academia does allow the flexibility to pursue worthwhile scholarly goals, whether they are in basic or applied research. But in the private sector money is king and your interests have to be tailored to what makes your boss money, not what you think it’s important. If your research interests happen to overlap with the board member’s quarterly budgets, then you’re set. But the moment your research interests do not overlap you either need to leave or force to work on something you may not have the slightest interest in. I don’t see tenured professors heading projects that they hate. They choose something they love and make a career out of it. When you do research for a corporation there are a guidelines the corporation places on you and there is no escaping them unless you leave.
  10. I think that (indirectly), both of your responses help highlight the issue I am bringing… which is that you now need to jump into a PhD with a Plan B I guess I was hoping that because of how difficult it is to get a PhD and all the hardship involved with it (application process, living off basically nothing while you’re a student, stress, etc.) you’d at least be rewarded after 6-7 years with a secure job in your area. But this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Even the APA acknowledging in an article last year that more and more PhD students are relying on foodstamps to get by (and that the situation doesn’t necessarily get any better after graduation). I feel like if I wanted to work in the industry like juilletmercredi said, maybe choosing a major in marketing or PR would have been more useful. But I can’t get those 4 years of my life back, lol. I guess I just feel like life is so unfair. When people study something like engineering or medicine they go out and become an engineer or a doctor. But when you study Psychology you go out and become a marketing specialist or a publicist or a data analyst of some sort and maybe, just maaaybe if you get super lucky you’ll get to actually work as a Psychologist.
  11. Ok. I feel like I need to have “the talk” (never fun) about what people go on to do with their lives after a PhD in Social/Personality Psych (which is the area I’m leaning towards). So far, the research I’ve done about employment prospects (especially in academia) is somewhere between “dismal” and “desperate”. I watched that documentary “Ivory Tower” about the state of affairs as far as education goes in the U.S. (and I would dare to extend that to Canada) and I’m starting to get scared. It seems to me that since universities are jumping into the “for-profit” model, it’s against their best interest to hire tenure-track faculty, favouring either temporary contracts or expanding their pervasive use of adjuncts (eeek!). That “Ivory Tower” documentary prompted me to do some serious soul-search and actually look into what real opportunities look like. I checked out the survey of doctorate recipients from the National Science Foundation and sort of cross-referenced it with popular job sites for Psychology graduates (like the wiki page of psychjobs and the official APA jobs’ site, psyccareers) for the past 5 years (since the crisis of 2008 started) and there’re just too many PhDs in this area and not enough jobs. I was able to contact some (relatively) new graduated PhDs from the schools I’m planning to apply (who graduated from 2010 onwards) about what their job prospects are looking like and I don’t think I’ve ever felt more discouraged. Most people I’ve found seem to have gone straight into a post-doc because, in their experience, no one is really interested in the PhD anymore. You need a few years as a post-doc before you can even consider an academic job. One had been so frustrated with her job search (landing apparently quite a few interviews but 0 job offers) that she’s considering going to teach English in Asia after her post-doc because of how difficult the job market is right now (and because her student loans are eating her alive). The only two people I was able to get ahold who are meaningfully employed said that they were employed because (a) they looked for research jobs in the private sector (like marketing or consulting) and ( that what really got them their job was their data-analytic skills and research design knowledge, nothing directly related to psychology. One even was candid enough to say something like “I worked too hard and studied too much to be a 30-year-old PhD working at Starbucks, like some of my colleagues are doing”. I’m starting to freak out right now. I’ve always dreamed of an academic job but it seems like the time to get those is long gone and that most new PhDs in Social/Personality Psych are faced with the choice of either leave academia all together or be willing to suffer extreme financial hardship before they can even consider a career (and that is *IF* you happen to be selected among the hundreds upon hundreds of qualified applicants). I know nobody goes into Psychology to get rich… but… is it too much to ask for a small (but decent) home? A salary where you can support a family? Just some basic middle-class dreams without having to owe everything to the bank? Is a PhD in Psychology a “bad investment” now?
  12. Yeah that cleaning “joke”… I mean… I guess the really sad part is not that he espouses those limited views but that he thinks OTHER people (particularly in here) subscribe to them as well. When I read it I thought “well… what the F is he thinking? How is that supposed to even be funny?”
  13. Oh wow… this is all very useful feedback so I appreciate it very much. Although the general trend I’m sensing would be that if I really want to do it I’m gonna have to ‘fake it till I make it’ in terms of looking for more popular or better-accepted research interests. Maybe once I get my PhD I can come out from the Freudian closet! To be honest with everyone, I’m not really doing this for the ‘honour and glory of the psychological science’. All I want is a decent (not good, just decent) paycheque at some point while doing something at least remotely similar to therapy. The best option would, of course, be to become a Psychiatrist but I don’t have what it takes to go to Medical School so Clinical Psychology is my next best bet.
  14. Thanks for your recommendations! But yeah, I think you touch exactly on what I’m struggling with when you look at the most ‘recent’ references concerning psychoanalytic ideas. They’re all pretty old. And I’ve tried to stay on top of the literature in this area and all I can say is that it becomes scarcer every year (unless you solely dwell in Journals specifically devoted to psychoanalytic/psychodynamic theory). I’m starting to get worried, to be honest. Do you think it would be a good idea to ‘fake it’ until I get into graduate school? Maybe focus on more popular research topics and do the psychoanalytic stuff on my own time? Gosh, I hate having unpopular research interests. Even the people I would like to work with are either retiring or on the verge of retirement. With Bradbury being a good case in point. I’ve heard about his honours on Freud but it seems to be an on-and-off kind of thing. Maybe it’s not as popular as it used to be before? But Bradbury’s the person who single-handedly made me fell in love with Freud’s approach to personality/therapy more than I already was! Fate can be cruel sometimes
  15. I’m not sure why but I’ve always been fascinated by the more psychodynamic approach to the study of the mind. When I was in high school I wanted to become a Psychiatrist just so I could go and train to become a psychoanalyst in an either Jungian or Lacanian tradition. Fast-forward four years of undergrad and now I know that most psychodynamic theories have, for the most part, being discredited and are just relegated to the pages of History of Psychology books. The professors who are writing my letters of recommendation told me that unless I can modify or somehow “mask” my interest in psychoanalysis, my chances of making into graduate school are close to 0. Has anyone ever struggled with something like this? Like really falling in love with some very old-school (mostly discredited) ideas? Is there a way around this aside from just forgetting about it completely
  16. My thoughts exactly. I was thinking "Oh man... if you didn't jump in the cool boat as an undergrad, I don't think you're gonna find it in gradschool".
  17. I've kind of been wondering the same for a while. His previous posts have this general feel of "oh-god-i'm-so-butt-hurt-that-I-need-to-blame-everyone-but-myself" and suddenly he turns out to be a stellar candidate (minus the GRE)? Either he's not as special as he wishes to portray himself or is just a general-variety troll.
  18. Haha, definitely! But, unfortunately, the gravitational pull of the couch or the bed is too much for me to resist if I chose to do anything home. I guess the gym had that added thing of "heck, I'm already here. I might as well just go through with it".
  19. Oh wow. I mean… first, I want to say I think you’re pretty brave sharing all that. I think I can relate somewhat to what you went through (not as intensely though) but definitely the part about looking at yourself in the mirror and just not liking what you see. Some days it’s easier and other days it gets more difficult to ignore it. I do have to say I don’t think I’m quite *there* yet in terms of harming myself emotionally in order to achieve my goals but, heck, you took something that was potentially very negative and transformed it into motivation that now gave you positive results. And, at the end of the day, all that matters is that you got there. It’s just so hard to get started man.
  20. May I ask how to you manage to force yourself to do it? I've found myself in a similar situation innumerable times before. I know I need to get in shape so I try and go to the campus gym only to quit after maybe two weeks or so. I usually lie to myself saying things like "I don't have enough time this semester" or "once X or Y projects are done I will go back" but the fact of the matter is that I just don't like going, so I look for excuses not to go. And at the end of the day I'm the one who suffers because I'm just getting bigger and out of shape. You seem to be capable to invest a lot of time in something that you dislike a lot and I wonder how you do it because I need to start doing it (or something similar) as well.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. See our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use