brokepocket27

Sounds amazing! I admire your perseverance especially given your background. It must have been a pretty rough sailing

I fully agree here. My experience perfectly mirrors yours; I actually took the test one year before you but I felt that available resources (magoosh, powerprep, 5lb book and manhattan) were not adequate to prepare me for the difficulty of this test. The GRE is surely getting progressively harder ( My scores were 159V, 159Q, 5.5 AW but I expected to get far better in the quantitative section as I only prepared for that one ...ha ha

Thanks guys! I very much appreciate your views on this. Shadowing a clinician could be, I reckon, a little hard given my current background and location. I thought of volunteering in a counselling centre or something along these lines...

I have a question for those of you who are currently volunteering or have volunteered in a lab. What kind of work have you guys done? Have you been able to work closely with a faculty member on some research project? Have you been given the opportunity to come up with ideas of your own? Is it common for volunteers not to have access to professors and thus work with PhD students instead on their research projects and get recommendations from them?

@bcaitlin: you are definitely right I mean, it will be easy if I wanted to get into behavioural economics or even I/O but for clinical I need to think of a different strategy. Since I worked with children for a few years before and loved it, I thought I could perhaps build a case for developmental psychopathology. But I need much more than what I already have to make a compelling argument. The other danger is yes, the admissions committee may think I keep changing career tracks which is pretty bad and needs a lot of work to convince them otherwise. Thanks for bringing these important points up. Much appreciated. Just being curious: how did you manage to hold a full-time job in finance and volunteer in a research lab simultaneously? This is sheer madness and even then, how did you overcome the time constraints?

thanks a lot for your input. What I take from here is that among other things I should take the Psychology GRE and score high; also consider re-taking the general test. I have a few questions: 1) how do non-psychology grads prepare for the Psyc GRE? Do they use textbooks to cover the tested material? I have read about this test, and there is a book released by the ETS that provides some practice. But I reckon this wont be enough to excel in the test? 2) What scores in the general GRE test would be considered competitive enough for a PhD in clinical/developmental psychology? 3) Do you think that getting outside clinical experience would strengthen my applications? The limitation with this one is that I live in a small town and the opportunities are few and far between. But I intend to search and see what's available. 4) In terms of co-authoring a paper, I am not sure how things in the lab are in this regard as I only joined the lab last week. This may be a pretty silly question, but how do people (especially someone in my position) go about this and be successful? From what I have seen in this lab so far, the PhD students are the ones that write up the research reports and the others (mostly inexperienced undergrads) are mostly involved in admin work and at times participate in the actual experiments and data collection. As I said, i am new to this world, any tips would be appreciated.

Hey everyone I am new to this forum and I have a somewhat unusual story to share. I am currently enrolled in a fully funded master's program in economics at a pretty good university here in the US. Even though I am enjoying some parts of the program (mostly the research part), I have started questioning myself whether this is the track I would like to pursue after this program. I actually see myself as a researcher and/or in a teaching job, but I am not sure whether choosing an economics PhD and then pursuing a career in economics is something I see myself doing for the rest of my life. To cut it short, I am interested in psychology but for some reason I have never really thought of it as a career before. This changed when I came to grad school. The university at which I am currently studying happens to have one of the top psychology programs in the country and some of the finest faculty. My interests lie in developmental psychology and clinical psychology, or even developmental psychopathology. At some point in my life I used to work as a teaching assistant with children in schools for several years including some with special needs. Ideally I would like to build on my past experience. Currently I am doing two RA roles, one in my own economics department and another one (unpaid) in the developmental lab (I convinced the lab coordinator to give me a position for this term to get some exposure to psychological research). My GPA in the first term was 3.67 (I was struggling a lot, both to get into the studying mode after years of working and then to adjust to the US, I am an international student btw). However I am confident that this term will be better for me. My old GRE scores were 159V, 159Q and 5.5 AW. I am fine to retake them in the future if these do not make the cut for good psychology programs. Skills I can bring to a psychology PhD program will be research experience- both in economics and psychology (given that RAing continues up to summer 2016) - data collection, data analysis-, some hard stats (both theory and applied) and math classes (calculus 1-3, linear algebra, differential equations), survey design/analysis, knowledge of STATA and SPSS; and hopefully a strong GPA in my current program. I consider taking a few core classes in psychology until the applications are due and do well. As long as I am at this university, I am planning to get involved in other labs as well - particularly with some faculty active in clinical/ developmental psychopathology; at this stage this is just a goal. Some of my weaknesses in getting admitted into a PhD in psychology are: no major in psychology, no thesis focusing on psychological research, and obviously no publications in the field. I will probably have a good quantitative/economics background and probably one econ publication until I finish the program but I reckon this may be of no use to psychology grad programs. Any advice? any tips? Do you think this is pointless? Are there any other things I can do to strengthen my application? I am applying for Fall 2016 so there is some time left .. I also want to add that as an international student on an F1 visa, the prospect of getting a full-time lab research assistant position after my studies looks daunting because international students need employer sponsorship and I cannot see it happening for this kind of role. anyone else has been or currently is in the same position? anyone who has beaten the odds and got into a great program? Would love to hear from you guys... thanks in advance