psych face

What up, anyone? I know affective science has already posted, but I can't find any signs of social. Anyone have word?

I think I've been doing both, alternating. Like - 1) ice cream, movie theater, just laying around feeling happy and like - 2) wish I wasn't in a semester so I could just shake it off faster, but being this busy makes it linger over me, weighing me down when I know I should be doing other things As it is - my summer plans are to do both 1) celebrating, good times, and 2) relaxing the F out and forgetting how stressful all of this was as soon as flipping possible, because I am really getting tired of thinking about it. (I'd be a lot happier if I weren't so busy right now)

I'm confused. Are you asking us to write your homework for you? Oh, I'll write your homework for you. But you won't get a good grade.

Well thanks, it's all a very confusing sort of fiasco, this stuff. Makes me want to go get a job and forget about it sometimes.

So, I'm confused by a couple of schools that have sent out interviews and rejections for a particular emphasis, but I've missed them both. Does this mean I'm on the backup pile in case some people decide to go somewhere else? Or isn't that what those extra interviewees are for? I'm confused.

I don't know man, I found you pretty easy:

Looks like accepts and rejects for Clinical went out over the last couple weeks. But that's all I found.

I also did not look at rank. I looked at specific people and departments that had the people. I looked for pockets of experts in my field of interest. And those were all over the rankings. And from what I can tell, they all had shit acceptance rates this year. Funding is just shit right now. I know some adjuncts at my school are actually organizing to formalize complaints. I wish them luck, but I'm afraid that is all they are going to get. Ditto on all of that. I feel dumb actually. A lot of things about this process are just ringing with dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

I'm worried about this too, but mostly because I already have a lot of things scheduled, like conferences and another interview, and they wait so long to tell you what weekend to pencil in that I inevitably have other stuff going on that takes precedence. I feel like they probably would have to expect that some people have things going on. I would honestly prefer to Skype just because I don't want to miss any additional classes or obligations this semester. Also, I just did a phone interview about a week ago, and it was perfectly fine. It went really well. They asked the same questions I expected them to ask in person and I had to do a lot of talking about awkward-ish things, but it was okay. I just don't like to talk on the phone for long periods of time like that, my ear gets uncomfortable.

My undergrad wasn't in psych and I didn't do any of that stuff. My school doesn't even do honours thesis projects for bachelors. Just two cents from the opposing viewpoint. I think they have a better chance than I did... - pick your school and POI wisely. I did some dumb stuff I would have done otherwise. Published abstracts are common after conferences - the journal connected to the conference will publish the abstracts in one of their issues.

ROFL... Interviewer: So tell me about yourself. Me: I love you. Interviewer:

I like a lot of what you have to say but I think it's also important to convey to students that if they do find they have the ability to break the methodology of someone's research, that it does not necessarily mean that the underlying theory is false, it just means that this particular attempt to prove the theory was a failure. The theory may still be workable. That's a problem I've come across a lot; sometimes they think one failure of an attempt means failure of the underlying theory, when really it was just the researcher's attempt that was a failure. Incorrect assumptions might have been made between the initial theory and the methodology, so the results don't imply what the researcher believes they do. Might be off topic, but also a difficult thing to teach sometimes.

I think exams, constructed properly, can accurately assess learning. Although, the Ed. Psych dude here has eliminated exams entirely from his courses, so take that for what you will. He uses interactive learning, group work, homework exercises, and generally forces the students to constantly prove they know the material through their experiences in class. That's all well and good, but I think it would be really difficult for the instructor to actually assign grades in that atmosphere. Now, if we didn't have to assign grades, that would be great. It would just be a pass/fail situation for the course, and you would only get credit if the professor considered you competent in the material. But this is more like a conceptual redesign of the entire system, and I don't think we're prepared for that right now, what with everyone's dependence on grades. But, Ideally, I think it would be better. However, I would still incorporate exams to verify basic acquisition of simple things like terminology necessary to sound like an educated adult moving forward. For example... I met someone once who was taking senior level biology courses and didn't even know how many chromosomes there were and thought all your heritable genes were on the X and Y chromosomes. I wanted to vomit, that the guy was getting a degree in biology. That's the sort of thing exams are for... People who fail basic stuff like that should be prevented from graduating. I mean, I think he slipped through the cracks solely as a result of these more 'fluid' experiential grading systems a lot of professors here are using now. A course based solely on exams would have prevented that level of incompetency. I would probably try to find a healthy mix. But this is all relative to what you are teaching and what your goals are; vocab and concepts vs mechanistic understanding. I did recently have this conversation with a statistics teacher and he decided to redesign his course in order to have the students following the scientific method, engaging in hypothesis testing. Then the course content, statistical methods, would come as a byproduct of this. Honestly, I'm a little concerned because a lot can go wrong when you try new things out, but his method sounds more practical. It just seems to me the difference between algebra via lists of problems or via story problems. Which, I don't know which is better, so it's tough. This is constantly being talked about at my school, by the way. Big issue, how to teach stuff.

It looked a bit like a form letter, maybe different POI's are going out at different times.

Boulder reject email today.

I had a similar question and it made me a little uncomfortable but I think I spontaneously redirected the question pretty well by talking about what their program was offering me, etc. It must have worked pretty well because they liked my answer and didn't bring it back up. It felt like they were digging for some sort of gauge of what I thought about them, and that was totally annoying. But, not totally unexpected. I mean, I expected annoying questions. So I guess I was prepared for that. It was the most shenanigan-ish question I got, so that's pretty good.

ROFL, I really don't want to waste a shirt with one of my posters! That's hilarious.

I know some writers do similar things, framing all the rejections they got before their first novel was published. It's sort of reassurance for the young and insecure writers, so they know it isn't easy to get into the business. It's funny that academics seems the same way, we always want to believe the choices are based on merit, but I think a lot of professions have similar stories that back up the notion it really isn't. I wonder what else funny things I have that could be framed for this purpose.

Yes, I also LOL'd this. I just got Miami in the snail mail - admitting 12-15 this year. I think framing these is a fantastic idea. It will look very nice next to my degrees, etc. And I also want to frame my student loan bills I get in the mail for zero dollars. Which is confusing - what if I don't send the stub back with zero dollars, am I in default? It's like a darwin award or something.

As far as the theories that need some work, I'm actually working out projects and papers of my own to deal with that so I'm trying to keep it to myself for now. I've been working with professors in the past who taught me to keep any bright ideas I had to myself until I could publish. There was a pretty common policy of making sure you got proper credit for your ideas, among the professors I was with (they are really great about that), so I've learned to be careful talking about things if I think I'm on to something important. Especially in a random and open forum like this one with people that might be bored 12 year olds, for all I know, if you know what I'm saying. As far as my interests, the only reason I'm keeping that to myself is that a few people have taken a disliking to me here and I don't want their attitudes to get in the way of my progress if they deduce who I am. I will say that I am in a unique position to see some of the systemic errors in my area field, and that position isn't something that a college education can bestow you with. For example; (and this isn't my position, but is elaborative of what I mean) a person who grew up in an African slum or worked formerly as a stock trader would be more able to see errors in assumptions with regards to ethics of poverty in African slums, or ethics employed by those in stock trading, respectively. I have a similar position. When you do have an insider insight on a particular field of research, it can be really irksome to read some of the assumptions that academics from outside of that world have made of the system as a whole and then built theories upon. It also makes it really easy to correct those assumptions because you can see exactly where the flaws in the logic are. I think everyone should capitalize on their strengths that way, it will make them more competitive (in my opinion). But it can take a long time to realize that you have a unique expertise to offer, because we are trained to minimalize and hide our differences from each other in order be more normal and fit in - ironically to be more competitive. So I think we frequently don't even consciously notice that we have these experiences to offer a discipline, making us uniquely qualified to help out in a field of research. And it might actually be really rare that someone with a strong and unique position of experience switches into contributing to psychology research in that area. I think it would be great if there was more heterogeneity in all of the disciplines, in that respect, but they seem to becoming more and more like a genre, or comical version of themselves, where you can make generalizations about "what sort of person goes into X,Y, or Z." I've noticed it in a lot of fields. Probably why it's a good thing that there's such a push for interdisciplinary collaboration now. I feel that I will go on tangents for a long time if I don't stop now. So,...

You're asking a lot of questions here that have long answers, so I'll just address the last thing, which is probably closer to current research interests of mine. Frankly, I have noticed that there are some issues within my particular interests that are systemic and almost paradigmatic assumptions that make very little ultimate sense to me, given my (frankly) broader education than a lot of psychology majors. For example, some major theories in psychology violate basic principles of evolution and are therefore eventually to be discarded when the field figures this out. -mistakes like that. One of the major things I'm coming up against when formulating projects in my subfield is that the whole set of premises the existing literature stands on need to be torn down and reformulated, and this is daunting to me. But it is more difficult to build a great house on a poor foundation than to rebuild the foundation - sometimes. This is one of the major issues that have been confronting me, as I come up with new projects. I suppose I'm coming up with difficult problems from the opposite end of the issue where your last concern is - that is, that I can see all the subparts that go into the problem and because of that it becomes a much larger problem than the simple project should have been. In that way it becomes a totally different problem, one where you need to step several spheres outside of your original question and figure out what you would really have to do to get to the true solution. This almost requires several sub-projects before you can even attack your inital idea. It's frustrating, but no shortage of research projects. Also, not bored. Nice questions.

I applied to more than my sig says, actually there were 12, but I've only heard from two. I think some of us just applied to really slow programs. I wouldn't worry about it too much.

The fact that you, and probably most of the people here, have assumed I'm a white male, or a male at all, probably from my choice of avatar, just goes to prove my point: you're stupid AND biased. Your judgments are made from incredibly stupid assumptions that have no basis in fact whatsoever. I don't mind pretending I'm a man in order to point out how biased you are against men. It's absolutely disgusting. You people need to open your eyes about your own personal problems. The reason I'm against bias is because I've been victimized by it in the workplace. But unlike most people, I don't think that reverse bias is any better. It's just as ugly. Peoople in a psychology forum should be a little more aware of their ignorant biases. I guess that's my own stupid assumption at work.

I had the same worry with my specific interests - no MA that allows that focus. So I found one in a related discipline that DOES allow that focus, and applied to that as a backup plan. I strongly suggest you work your little brain muscle and think about what other disciplines might have Masters on your favorite topic. I actually found something that would make me very happy to get into, probably allow more time focusing on my research interest than the first two years of a PhD, and has full assistantship/funding. So I strongly encourage you to not exclude related fields for further work, while still keeping your eyes on your Psych PhD.