eternallyephemeral

You don't need a business background to do IO, OB, or consumer psych (i.e., marketing). Most grad students in these areas nowadays are from psychology, so a strong research background is much more desirable than work experience. If you're referring to research-based masters and PhD programs, no work experience is required, but obviously some places take exception to that (i.e., Harvard's OB students all seem to have been in top-tier consulting jobs). Although salary estimates can be unreliable, the SIOP association does a rigorous salary survey of hundreds (maybe now thousands) of its members across degree type, years of experience, job type, and location for I/O positions. It is very favourable, as is the huge growth in jobs as predicted by the US department of labour and other sources.

I completely agree that getting any experience consulting is really helpful for eventually making it into industry. Consulting has taught me so much about communicating the business or policy impact, understanding how to reframe non-scientific questions into scientific terms, but also (of course) how to reframe scientific terms into the jargon that fits the situation best. Consulting can help (though so can other things) by showing researchers that they do have valuable skills. Because it takes a lot of confidence to tell someone much more senior and more experienced than you what they should do, it can bring our sense of our own skill better in line with our actual ability. We know this can be very skewed, in the case of impostor syndrome, generally low self-esteem, and on the opposite end, in the case of arrogance and narcissism.

Will do!

You would think that makes sense! I'm trying not to fret about it for at least 1.5 months, because I was told we typically don't hear until the break.

Apparently, it's normal we wouldn't hear back about Ottawa yet. However, your school might do things differently from the department to the university level. For mine, we were not notified if we did go through to the next stage, and we were notified if we didn't make it to the university level. But then it switches, and you are notified from university to Ottawa, and presumably not notified if you don't make it to Ottawa. So I have made it through the department to the university, but I didn't know, because I didn't hear anything. Confusing system, right?

So I went to my grad program person and while speaking to her, I realized that I misunderstood the university deadline as the day the university sends them to Ottawa, instead of its real meaning, the day the departments send their picks to the university. So duhhhhh. I was told that I was forwarded to that level, but that our school won't hear back from the university until near the beginning of the winter break. In case anyone's wondering.

I would apply for the PhD, but recognize that clinical is going to be insanely difficult, even for people that have been doing everything "perfectly". Unless you're open to counselling psych, just try for the PhD while working in labs, because that research experience will matter more than a masters. Especially a course-based masters, which is not as helpful as a research-based masters (the latter is less common in the US unfortunately, so you're unlikely to encounter many). In your minor, did you take at least one statistics course and one lab course/research methods course? If so, I wouldn't be concerned. Also getting into labs at Harvard is a pretty good pre-req for getting into graduate programs. They will teach you the research skills you need, hopefully you will get on some posters/papers, and then you will be prepared for the PhD (course requirements in the PhD are not something to be concerned about - most of them are not too difficult to handle, they don't mark very hard, and your real focus should be on your research). I know of people who have worked in labs at top schools and gotten into very good cognitive PhD programs, without doing a masters. In the process of working in a lab, you can learn more about what parts of clinical and cognitive psychology you like, because there is sometimes overlap in what people study.

I felt the same way that you do earlier in my life. I was also told by many people that men don't want to be with someone who is driven, accomplished, ambitious, etc. It was so relieving to learn that isn't always the case. I have a wonderful partner that I've been with for almost 4 years, who supports my academic and career goals, genuinely isn't bothered if I make more money than him, doesn't find any of this threatening/emasculating/concerning, etc. Unsurprisingly, he is a thoughtful and considerate person, who supports social movements including feminism, and is open to changing his mind when presented with facts. I met my partner in my research lab, which might not be where you meet someone, but the university environment, especially at the graduate level, has fewer people who are threatened by achievement, who are bigoted and inappropriate, and other things you want to avoid (at least in my experience). This article below is really relevant. Although the message can seem really depressing (stay single if you dont find someone that supports your career), I think you already have this part figured out: https://hbr.org/2017/10/if-you-cant-find-a-spouse-who-supports-your-career-stay-single As for layering on your minority membership on top of being a high-achieving woman, it is absolutely a challenge. Although I recognize that Canada is no better than the US in a lot of ways, it does not have the same issues of race relations that the US does. And if you're in specific cities in Canada, such as those with more than 50% foreign-born residents which places it at the top of list of diverse cities in the world *coughTorontocough*, you luck will be much better than the majority-white, racist college town I live in right now (for example). So being part of a minority group can make all of these issues even harder, you can still make it easier by choosing specific places to live and people to surround yourself with. I'm taking an online course and reading some books by Richard Florida, who studies cities and economic growth at U of Toronto. He finds that cities that prosper have all the tech and the people, blah blah blah, but they are also tolerant places. Tolerance for some people may be nice to have, but for other people it's the difference between having a relationship and not having one, or getting a job and not having one. So it's in your best interest to try to move towards those types of places, where you are more likely to be accepted for who you are than somewhere that is not tolerant (unfortunately).

Has anyone heard back about being forwarded to Ottawa? Our university deadline was this past week, but I wasn't notified (which could mean they haven't told anyone, or it could mean I didn't make it, of course).

1) I wouldn't put that much weight on what this one professor said. 2) As above, the experience admissions committees are looking for is not work experience, it's typically research or policy experience (where you can demonstrate a research component to the policy development, to make it most relevant). PhDs are not going to care about event coordinator experience. 3) Regardless of the political affiliation or controversy, I would leave irrelevant and nonacademic jobs (see #2 above) off your application. I did the same, because if it doesn't add anything, it's taking up space that could go to other, more relevant experiences. 4) Take a look at example CVs. If there is no section for what you are referring to on examples from your field, then you shouldn't include it. In some areas, there might not be a section for work experience at all, because you would only have sections for research experience and thesis projects.

You haven't come across this way, not at all. I have noticed, in other contexts, derision or disbelief that schools could choose younger people, with the underlying assumption that they must not have done anything useful in undergrad and therefore have no added value for the program. That can be the case, of course, but it isn't as common as these people were making it out to be. I absolutely agree that professional degrees often look for older applicants with practical experience. This is one of the main reasons I did not get into a lot of schools I applied to - I did not understand there was a difference in norms and expectations going from psychology to business, for example (both PhD programs). So even within research, those that are more "professionally focused", are looking for a different type of applicant. And that's great! I absolutely agree that no one should try to be something they're not, and that they should play to their strengths. I also agree that one is not inherently better or worse than another (as in, being younger is not always good), and I recognize that ageism is a barrier, especially in the minds of older people that may feel insecure about going back to school. I believe both types of applicants are important and bring different things to the table. However, for a research-based program (which is the limit of this conversation and of OP's focus), there may not be as many differences between younger applicants and older ones with the same research accomplishments. Yes, not many undergraduates have won a best article award, but they haven't all been doing undergrad-level research experience, aka data entry, as was implied. In competitive fields like psychology, if you only do data entry as your "research" experience, you're not going to get in on that criteria.

Unfortunately no, I don't think cancer has been cured, and if it was, it wouldn't be people in my undergrad psychology program doing it. Some of them had more relevant experience, some of them had first author publications (none of mine were), many of them had better grades, worked with people who were known for their track record of their RAs going to competitive programs, probably had better GREs, etc. I'm sure there are parts of your application that are very strong, like the publication and the award. Uniqueness is also important, but as someone else said, finding a good fit can be a difficult and frustrating process. My SO was in a similar spot as you're in (not as much the age part, but not even getting a chance to show his research skill because of poor GREs and such). Unfortunately, sometimes there is no way around it. He didn't get in to any of his 7 schools, and then applied for a masters (instead of a PhD) at a much worse school. Things are going pretty terribly right now, not completely because of the school, but the supervisor and the quality of the facilities would probably have been leagues better if he got into one of the original places. He may be changing his life plans because of this, which sucks, but maybe it'll end up working out better in the end. We're hoping so. Best of luck getting through those first hurdles!

You are still competing with people, especially at top schools, that have more than what you're dismissing as "undergrad "research experience" ". I worked in five-six labs (one was a collaboration) before starting graduate school, was on two papers, multiple international conference posters, managed a lab, supervised undergrads, etc etc etc. And I wasn't even competitive for the top schools I applied at. This was all during my undergrad, when I worked at other jobs at the same time. I'm not trying to self-aggrandize, I'm simply trying to give you a sense of what a person might have who isn't even at the top of their own class. Many students, especially in cog neuro, either have masters, have worked full time managing labs at Harvard, etc, and those people are who you're applying against. I think it's great for you to apply at any age, and not to give up on your dreams, but I've noticed a lot of older applicants on here expect that not being an "undergrad" with "undergrad experience" is somehow going to be a huge plus for their application. Given that in psychology, most accepted students are right out of undergrad or 1-2 years out having done a masters or worked as an RA full time, they aren't rushing to choose people specifically for their maturity or non-undergraduate qualities. There are other programs that do care, like business PhDs, but in psych, age/maturity/wisdom/whatever you want to call it, isn't a big part of their decision making process. Also, doing well on the GRE can be learnt. Unless you've done all the practice questions, you haven't practiced enough. I highly doubt that you are unable to improve your GREs to get past the cutoff for the schools you want.

At U of T, the psych program's minimum take-home is 17,500, but the students on average take home much more than that. Their tuition is completely covered from separate money, but they do not see any additional income if the scholarship they win is less than their funding amount. If it is more, from what I understand they get the additional amount beyond their original funding. At Western, the psych program's minimum take home is also around 17,500, but the tuition amount is part of their typical "minimum funding", meaning the numbers look different but they are really the same. Western guarantees you 24-25k per year, and they take out your tuition from that (about 8k), so you're left with around 16-17k as a minimum. There are no extra TA opportunities to make more money at Western the way there are at U of T, which means a common way to make more money doesn't exist at Western. However, if you win a scholarship, you receive that money directly, and the department just assigns you less work for your TAship (or no work at all, depending on how large the scholarship is). At Western in the neuro program, it depends on the host program (anatomy and cell bio, psych, physiology and pharmacology, etc), but you are usually guaranteed a minimum of 20-21k (but you pay tuition from that), so you really take home 12-13k, which kinda sucks. Also, the way the funding structure goes, you actually have to pay some tuition each term, and then you get that money back through the year. I think it's the worst process, but no one asked me. Finally, I believe that people who win scholarships get to keep some of it, but they may not get to keep all of it. In the neuro program, they also recently removed the guaranteed TAships, because of how many people they are admitting. Incoming students won't be guaranteed a TAship, and I'm not sure whether that money will be made up in some other way.

Other people have provided some helpful links here, but the number one thing you should look into is industrial/organizational psychology - all of the concepts above (teamwork, retention, predictive models for selection, performance appraisal, etc) are taught in IO psychology. We also do a lot of work for the military/DRDC during our graduate programs. There are five major IO grad programs in Canada: Western University, Guelph, Waterloo, Calgary, and St. Mary's. Most students apply to all/the majority of them, and you can find their alumni placements on the website. For some of these schools, people have gone to work for the military after graduating, and others have completed the program in the middle of their military work; they had two years off to finish it, and they were funded (I don't know how it split up between department and the military, but they received money to live on). Feel free to PM if you have more questions about IO - there might be military psychology-specific programs out there, but they will be very rare in Canada and I have not heard of them at top Canadian universities.

It is a true IO program as well, yes. A lot of the profs there did their PhDs at Western's program (e.g., Kibeom Lee, Tom O'Neill, etc), and it's a very great place if you're interested in the kind of research happening there. They have been very productive and are really ramping things up in recent years. I'd highly recommend it!

Absolutely, some findings are highly replicable and based on research and theory from decades of rigorous work. However, it is often the most incredulous findings, from the most implicit or briefly presented stimuli, that initially show the largest affects and then later don't replicate. A lot of this is due to small sample sizes, of course. I agree, a lot of business areas do think they are immune to this, and that is a problem. I also know a lot of people in neuroscience/animal behaviour that don't believe they need to worry about things like power and p-hacking, but it's just as prevalent there and they also have an issue with sample sizes. Definitely! I think it's great when people are rising to the occasion and giving everyone else a good example to follow. Not that it's only on the shoulders of people in social psych, but they can champion these issues and go above and beyond in responding to it. Haha I also don't like theory papers, I came from cognitive psych where the intros to vision/attention papers were 1-2 paragraphs long. Now I read 40+ page papers, mostly intro-heavy, and I don't enjoy it at all. I'm focusing on measurement issues and construct validity right now, and I have a very strong interest in philosophy of science from my undergrad days. Nice chatting with you, I'm glad to hear your perspective from the inside!

@crystalcolours I'm glad this helped you! Feel free to ask any other questions. I switched right before the application season (like right now, but two years ago), and it worked out well! @Oshawott - I'm glad to hear you agree, I hope I didn't misrepresent social psychology, and I definitely didn't mean to say that it is the only area afflicted with this issue of replicability. What I am noticing, actually, is people in fields more distant from things like social or psych in general seem to think they don't have this problem, when they suffer from it just as much as other areas do. So they think they are better, but they are really not!

The people here who are saying there is a difference are making an assumption that would make sense, if there was any sense to be made in the titles of different programs. The first school I went to had an MA, and the school I'm at now has an MSc. One is not "more scientific" than the other, as you do a thesis in both. One is not more of a "hard science" than the other, as they both offered neuroscience, cognitive, social, personality, etc in each of the programs. One was not more connected to comp sci, math, and natural/life sciences any more than the other was connected to fine arts and humanities and other social sciences. There was no. difference. whatsoever. Look beyond the name of the program and look at the subfield, whether you are doing a thesis, how many classes you have to take and what they are in, whether it is funded or not, and other aspects than the degree title.

Often, you can tell the difference between social-organizational (not true IO and much less likely to get you the kind of good starting-off jobs in IO that people are looking for) from true IO by how much of the I-side they have. If they are lacking in advanced stats, measure development, applied personality research, performance assessment, and courses/research areas like that, you're not looking at a true IO program. A social-organizational program is less likely, if it lacks those topics above, to teach you the hard skills that set IO apart from other fields in psych, and that are in job postings for this growing field. Having a strong psychometric background, coupled with as much programming and data analysis as you can learn, is key to a lot of beginner IO jobs, as a lot of the more organizational side jobs come from things like coaching and consulting, and are more fuzzy, which means the people who take up those spots and succeed in them are older and have usually spent more time in the workforce. True IO programs: U Conneticut, Florida International University, Akron, Minnesota, Guelph/Waterloo/Western (these three are in Canada) Social-Org, non-true-IO programs: Columbia, Adler, the New School, Windsor (Canada)

Hi! I did my undergrad in cognitive psych and human factors, and just finished my first year in IO. Obviously you could say I'm a bit biased, however I would highly recommend IO over social for a few reasons, and I would also argue that you should go right into it (you don't need a post-bacc) because you have the right background and you may even be able to bring more to the table than someone who was just from social or IO. Social psych can be really exciting and fun, but the reasons you provided are very legitimate for not wanting to do a social psych program. Another reason, though quite controversial, is that all of those flashy and exciting findings in social are built on a bedrock of shaky research, sometimes with questionable methods, and always with too small sample sizes. This means a lot of that research is not as replicable as things from cognitive or personality subfields would be. However, IO gives you the best of both words: it's basically taking social and personality psych, and applying it to practical problems (well, there's a lot of theory too, but the end goal is meant to be about the work world). As well, it's not as competitive as social, but it's much more applicable and there are specific jobs that look for a background in IO (at the masters at PhD level), in a hugely growing field that will mean your degree is in high demand. Also, you can look into marketing or organizational behavior, both just versions of social and I/O (respectively), but in the business school. You can go into those straight from a psych background (this was something very new to me when I learned it), and learn similar things (with less of a focus on the industrial side of I/O psych though, which is important for things like data analysis and assessment/psychometrics). A competitive applicant for IO can look like anything! In my interview day, there were people from neuro, cognitive, business, HR, social, and personality psych. I was very competitive with an above average but not super amazingly stellar GPA, and they require the GRE, but it's not impossible to get a decent score. It helps to have research experience, even if it's not in that exact area (as most schools don't offer IO anyways, how would you get that relevant experience?). Best of luck with your decision!

Hi! Aside from economics, you may want to look into marketing graduate programs, which have a quantitative side and a consumer behavior side, both of which you would be qualified for with a background in stats and psychology. As well, organizational behavior and industrial/organizational psychology uses a lot of stats, and not just for psychometrics (which is about more than education - its also about market research, analyzing HR/employee data, and doing data analysis on any of the psychology subfields that collect questionnaire information, like personality, quantiative, I/O psych, and social). I/O psych and org behavior also use social network analysis often, and they especially want students with strong stats and coding backgrounds. A lot of people from these areas go on (aside from academic positions) to data scientist positions, people analytics teams (like the one at google!), and consulting jobs. Population trends would be more of an epidemiology or public health thing, but you could look into business analytics, industrial/organizational psychology, organizational behavior, or marketing masters degrees. There's lots of options for combining these two fields. Good luck!

Therapy is a very broad field - if you are saying that people with MSWs don't have a background in CBT and therefore can not administer the most efficacious and scientifically sound form of therapy, yes it is true they have less experience in CBT than someone with a clinical psychology PhD would, because they have internships and placements and are supervised through these encounters to ensure they are adequately executing the therapy type. However, if someone did a philosophy degree and then was doing psychoanalysis, which is obviously not empirically supported through randomized clinical trials and is basically pseudoscience, then they are still doing "therapy", they are just not doing scientific therapy as you're describing. So yes, not everyone is doing the same therapy. As well, people with an MSW do not cost as much as someone with a clinical psych PhD, for a reason. But there are many different ways of administering community health programs, most of which do not use the best scientific methods we have available, and improving that so that people can have better outcomes would obviously be ideal. This movement towards evidence-based therapies, policymaking, governance, and business is slow, but it's gaining a lot of momentum. To summarize, yes @rising_star, there is a "right" and "proper" way to be trained to be a counselor, if we define counselor as someone who administers scientifically-based therapies that are more effective than controls and placebos, just like there is a right way to be trained to be a medical doctor or a scientist. If we define counselor as someone who talks to people, then of course anyone with any background can talk to people. But that won't necessarily be empirically supported. I'm sure you understand, being a scientist yourself.

Rent has gone up a lot in the past five years. Those posts were from 2012, and they are not relevant anymore unfortunately. The average rent for a one-bedroom is 1700 according to padmapper.com, so your estimate of 1200 is reasonable for the area (annex and other places close to U of T). I shared a brand new condo near the waterfront last year with one roommate, it was a one plus den (so I set up a curtain, basically made it a converted two bedroom) and I paid 600 while that person paid much more (they had the actual bedroom). I haven't seen anyone else with a deal this good for a new, clean place, so you could go down that route. But as far as living on your own, it's very expensive and the rez, if it's around 1,000 (last estimate I heard) might be worth it for that reason. Alternatively, some students live a subway ride away (around St Clair West) and likely pay less.

It depends what you're looking to do in the future. If it's research/a PhD, Columbia's Social-Org program is not as good as a higher ranked program at a lower ranked school (as most good IO programs are at relatively lesser-known schools). If it's IO specific jobs, those other masters may also have a benefit over Columbia, given the SIOP presence and the program-specific rankings, as you mentioned. However, if you want to get a more general consulting job where the school prestige and throwing around big names matters more, then Columbia would be better for that. As for alumni, I tried to find some on Columbia's website, but they pointed me to a linkedin group I wouldn't be eligible for. You can definitely find this info on linkedin, but I don't have that info right now. It's really about the tradeoff between school ranking and program ranking, something you have to fit with your personal career goals, imo.