dancedementia

I keep checking this website as if it will make the next few weeks pass by more quickly...

USF Acceptance
LSU Acceptance (declined)
 

I can't upvote this enough. My life for the past year and counting. 

School: Yeshiva University/Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology
Concentration: Clinical Psychology with Health Emphasis
Type: PhD
Date of acceptance: 2/20/2019
Notified by: Email from admissions; formal letter to follow within a week. MY FIRST ACCEPTANCE!!!!! ?

I don't think people are holding offers just to hold them. People are deciding the next 5-6 years of their life. It's going to be slow. I have 3 offers right now + another interview + a waitlist... No idea where I'll be or if I'll go. I have major concerns about each and need to figure out which issue worries me the least.

As an anecdote, I'm holding multiple offers because my programs have been horrible about providing information about funding. A lot of programs (at least in the PsyD world) use March 1st as the deadline for financial aid, scholarships, and fellowships, so I'm actually still in the process of applying for funding at some of my programs. I would never accept an offer until I had full information about my funding situation, which means I'm currently holding on to more offer than I'd like to. A lot of people gripe about holding on to multiple offers, citing CUDCP's guidelines, but the guidelines do specifically state that waiting on crucial info (like funding) is a perfectly legit reason to hold offers.

By "haven't heard a single thing from", do you mean post-interview? Did you interview anywhere? Very rare to get offers if you didn't interview, unfortunately. (Not impossible, but at schools on par with Drexel and Duke if you didn't interview you ain't getting in...)

I can't upvote this enough. My life for the past year and counting. 

I had an interview with my dream school and POI Feb 1.. She said she submitted my name for acceptance but ultimately I need to get through ad comm.. She emphasized how competitive selection was, how the decision is now out of her control and said *FINGERS CROSSED*.
ughh... why does this process seem like it's pure luck sometimes?

I can't upvote this enough. My life for the past year and counting. 

Yeah, I was being partially facetious (and very very hopeful that embedded somewhere in there is a secret message that my acceptance is coming soon). I've had the ghost happen this cycle too, which has been super heartbreaking

I can't upvote this enough. My life for the past year and counting. 

School: University of Connecticut
Concentration: Developmental Psychology
Type: Ph.D.
Date of acceptance: 2/19/2019
Notified by: Accepted via email from area head. Stiped is ~$24,000/year (unclear if academic or calendar).

Why is there a limit to reactions on these boards? I just want to like everyone's replies on this thread because I feel y'all so much.

I dunno. I have siblings who’ve went to lower tier schools and to me it seems super obvious that they’re really not equivalent in rigor to the higher ranked school I went to and it’s much easier to get higher class ranks/GPAs there. Maybe other lower tier schools are different; I know for a fact that other schools in my tier have substantially higher grade inflation. But I think people are wrong to suggest that the only difference between the top and lower tier schools is how hard they are to get into. Not even going to get into how hard they are to pay for (I was able to go to college because the top ranked schools are so rich and generous).
At the same time, the phd students at my current institution come from all around the country, from well-known and lesser-known programs. They are all super intimidatingly smart and that comes through no matter where they went for college; I think that even the ones who went to Ivies would’ve made it here if they’d gone somewhere else. I think much of the overrepresentation of ivy league students in grad programs might reflect the bare fact that ivy league schools are very good at recruiting the kind of students likely to go and succeed in graduate school. 
The other thing though is that while undergrad programs may be mostly identical, it seems almost certain from recent published research that top ranked research departments are orders of magnitude more influential than even slightly lower ranked ones. This probably impacts undergraduates’ futures, too, since the admissions process is so much about who you know and who they know — working in a well-known PI’s lab is widely known to be the best way to improve one’s career prospects in this domain. 
Because of the network/reputational system that currently organizes science and hiring processes, on reflection I suspect that success here is way more contingent on going to a series of brand name schools and labs and so on than success in relatively adjacent domains like medicine or engineering. Only by segueing into an approach that’s more numbers-focused and less concerned about departmental “fit” can these inequities really be addressed. And honestly, there would be a lot of downsides to that kind of shift too. Egh.

I got accepted to Temple's School Psych program too, I remember speaking to you during the interview day! I haven't decided to accept the offer yet because I am still weighing my options with different programs. But, PM me so we can connect. I will also be attending the "admitted graduate students" thing in March.

School: Temple University

Concentration: School Psychology

Type: PhD

Date of acceptance: January 18th

Notified by: Email

While most people would (correctly) argue that undergrad institution doesn't matter, it does. I was recently at an interview and nearly 80% of the other applicants were from Ivies or schools that were near them in rank. If your POI grew up in the American education system which values those types of rankings, (which are often dependent on SES + generation + social capital), if they don't explicitly state it, they at least have an unconscious bias about it.
This bias is also shown when you see how many people from tenure track positions are from upper tier schools. It's not fair, but it's how this system works.

I can't upvote this enough. My life for the past year and counting. 

It's situational, honestly. I know that my undergrad institution (R1, consistently top 5 on USWR, etc.) definitely played a part in getting into some of my master's programs and jobs/internships (several masters programs have told me this outright). To say otherwise would be frankly privileged. That said, by the time I got to applying at the PhD level I don't think anyone cares anymore. They're much more interested in my research and clinical experience.

Except school psychologists! They can practice with the specialist degree.
To OP, it sounds like you're broadly interested in mental health professionals, not psychologists (at least, according to your answer choices to #3). You might want to change your scope. Note that "psychologist" can also refer to folks who are, for example, social psychologists or industrial/organization psychologists, who are not licensed to provide psychotherapy.

This happened to me before (not this cycle, but for masters programs in another career path). And of course, it has happened to me more times than I can count for internships and jobs. Those hiring - whether they're PIs or HR managers - need to go through the steps for appearance and legality's sake, but most often they already have a candidate in mind. It really sucks to get your hopes up about an opportunity only to know that you were shot in the foot before you ever walked in the room. At this point I'm just trying to be authentic, not overprepare (actually I don't prepare at all lmao), and take each interview as a practice opportunity. Once we're in, we're going to be interviewing for practica/externships, and then predoc internships, and then postdocs, and then jobs... the more practice we get interacting with other psych professionals in an interview setting, the better off we'll be. I've noticed that my confidence levels has definitely grown as I've gone through my interviews. My first interview was a hot mess (still got accepted so you never know) but my most recent one felt great.

Honestly I just wanted schools to embrace PSYCAS. The med schools have a centralized system, so does dentistry and podiatry and pharmacy and veterinary and physical therapy and public health.... I could go on for ages. But noooo, we still have to go through this horrid process. I was so thankful for my schools that DID do PSYCAS because it meant I only needed to send my transcripts ONCE instead of 15 times (that shit is pricey).

No one here knows what it’s like to be a psychologist. We’re all trying to get into grad school so that we can get a degree in psychology and become one.

I can't upvote this enough. My life for the past year and counting. 

This happened to me before (not this cycle, but for masters programs in another career path). And of course, it has happened to me more times than I can count for internships and jobs. Those hiring - whether they're PIs or HR managers - need to go through the steps for appearance and legality's sake, but most often they already have a candidate in mind. It really sucks to get your hopes up about an opportunity only to know that you were shot in the foot before you ever walked in the room. At this point I'm just trying to be authentic, not overprepare (actually I don't prepare at all lmao), and take each interview as a practice opportunity. Once we're in, we're going to be interviewing for practica/externships, and then predoc internships, and then postdocs, and then jobs... the more practice we get interacting with other psych professionals in an interview setting, the better off we'll be. I've noticed that my confidence levels has definitely grown as I've gone through my interviews. My first interview was a hot mess (still got accepted so you never know) but my most recent one felt great.