OhSoSolipsistic

I also wouldn't look back on app materials unless you must, it's not going to help short term. Of course, many times an SOP to one school gets revised for another so you can't really avoid it.

A defense should be the least of your worries. Especially for a masters, it's really not a huge deal (more like a slightly more formal class presentation) but a formal thesis is in many cases. Like GreenEyedTrombonist said, it depends what your goals are. Some industries don't mind, but I would recommend a program with a formal thesis if you're trying to get into a PhD program.

I would contact the graduate department or appropriate college to try to get more context under anonymity due to concerns about labeling. Maybe the courses are so well-structured with plenty of clear, straightforward material that the instructor matters little, or maybe that instructor's skirting their responsibilities. Regardless, you should be able to find out more without fearing negative consequences - it's your education.

That is odd, at least for graduate courses. I know a bunch of UC classes with graduate TAs who've led lectures, and I've taught Intro Psych courses at a CSU after getting my masters, but I haven't heard of grads teaching other grad courses. I'm not too familiar with clinical, though. Is your school private? I know that some smaller private clinical schools tend to be more exploratory in their approach.

I would frame it as a request without any type of pressure. Even though it's likely the case that your app hinges upon her willingness and action to write on your behalf, frame the request in such a way that implies that her decision won't be the ultimate factor despite the fact it's likely all the other materials will be in except her rec. Maybe it's not the best way to go about it because she won't know the urgency of it, but you also don't want her to begrudgingly agree to do it and for that to come across in the letter. You might want to call the school and ask for an extension as a courtesy for all your recommenders also. I wouldn't include any material in the initial request either. Just something along the lines of: "There's this one other school that looks like a really good fit for me that I didn't consider until very recently, but unfortunately the deadline is in a few days. I apologize for asking so late and I completely understand if you have other commitments, but would you be willing to write a recommendation for me if I applied? Regardless of your response, I want to thank you again for your previous recommendations." I'm not sure if this is your only school or not or if she's even written other recs for you - but either way, something similar to that. And then respond immediately after her positive response with all the materials and info, or a polite "I understand, thank you very much for considering anyway" if her response is negative.

It depends. Priority deadlines usually mean they sometimes have resources after the deadline depending on who applies and is accepted before the deadline, and that varies each year. Call and ask.

How do you guys like it overall? Culture of the school, city, academics?

I have a similar background - 3.9 Experimental Psych MA, and I transferred to a smaller school exactly halfway through my undergrad and got a 3.55 GPA, but my first undergrad is horrible (I think 2.6 or something). Schools know that grad GPAs are inflated - well not really inflated, but grades matter less because generally everyone is near the top and most classes are seminar, and anything less than 3.0 is usually grounds for dismissal. So anyway, the two GPAs aren't really equivalent, and most schools will recognize and look favorably at your grad, but not consider it a replacement. A lot pay more attention to only your undergrad major GPA, or the last 60 units. Others will look for other strong components and not pay much attention to GPA as long as you meet a cut-off of 3.0 or 3.3, like professional experience in your field or publications or a strong GRE or yada yada. But most of all is fit. tl;dr: Grad GPA generally doesn't replace undergrad. 3.4 shouldn't be a detrimental factor, but it might be weighted more heavily without experience, etc.

Hm, well it's a toss up. I personally wouldn't since it shows a low verbal score again, and soc isn't a hugely writing-dominant field, and a 4.0 is already 59th percentile. I'd even argue that quant is more important in soc than writing as long as you included a well-written statement of purpose and writing sample in your application. Especially if you had a good quant in either of the two scores you sent, you're probably fine. The only one I might consider is the humanities school, but if they don't require GRE scores (if that's what you meant in #2 in the original post) I wouldn't. Actually I wouldn't either way, a 9 point drop in verbal isn't worth it.

In what field are you applying? A 160 and 4.0 are pretty decent... I'm not sure including a 3rd set of scores would be worth the extra .5 bump, but possibly if you were applying to a program that has a heavy writing component.

I'd say just go in with what you know. As others have said - it sounds like more of an assessment to gauge if they'll need to form a course on either intro or moderate stats. I think a good chunk of first year graduate students in psych - if they've had a mehods and intro stats class - have a basic understanding of descriptive stats (GRE stuff) and perhaps t-tests and pearson's correlations, but nothing beyond basic ANOVAs or linear regressions. But especially if the program is accepting non-psych undergrads, I really don't think it's an assessment of ability. If you really want to study for it, I'd just review mean, median, mode, standard deviation, t-test, and person's correlation. They might ask about z-scores or histograms or confidence intervals or other stuff, but you really shouldn't be expected to know that off the top of your head (or very likely anything else). Hell, I need to review those terms and I've been working with hairy within-subjects doubly multivariate analyses for the past couple years. Good luck!

I'm not (yet) privy to pools of student applicants, but from my limited perspective the engineer/psych integration overall hasn't been great across industry and government sectors. I know a few people who have crossed from undergrad to grad, but it’s been in those linked ^ interdisciplinary applied cog sci/human factors concentrations. Objectively speaking, I think psych would be wary of an engineer without some degree of experimental design and stats knowledge, and engineering would be wary of a psychologist without some degree of modeling/programming/industrial background. As you said, some academics are skilled in both but it seems like there’s far fewer outside of schools - especially in engineering-heavy industry - which is a big concern when looking at it from the perspective of conducting and analyzing cognitive or behavioral research appropriately.

That's true, theory will and should stay rooted in cognitive science. I guess I was trying to say the recent rise and focus of HCI/HSI seems to partially explain why there may be less of a focus and/or interest on theory-based cog sci research within psychology, even though I'd argue that necessitates more interest and funding.

One reason for the lower frequency or seemingly lower interest in this psych subdiscipline is because engineering has... er, hijacked the applied side of it within the past 10-20 years. It's a great hybrid and we're producing a lot of tech innovations, but now you'll see a lot of institutions calling their cognition/perception research "Human Factors" or "Human Computer Interaction" or "Human Systems Integration". I have a MA in Experimental Psych and some experience in HCI/HSI professional field, and more than half of grads entering the research/development workforce in this area come up through the engineering departments. This may be too overly simplistic, but I believe many academic institutions who have kept their cog/perception/neuro psych research unadulterated tend to be more theoretical (I'm sure neuro overlaps with med depts quite a bit too). Here's a few grad programs in this area: https://www.hfes.org/web/Students/grad_programs.html ETA: not that people in this field don't already know this collaboration with other depts, just trying to provide explanation for others who may not be as familiar

Powerprep #1 (8 weeks prior): 157V/149Q Magoosh #1 (3 weeks prior): 160V/159Q Manhattan (free online, 2 weeks prior): 162V/158Q Powerprep #2 (1 week prior): 162V/159Q Magoosh #2 (3 days prior): 164V/160Q REAL GRE: 158V/161Q Prepped 10ish hrs/wk 8-5 weeks prior, then 40ish hrs/wk last 4 weeks. Almost exclusively quant with Magoosh videos and practice questions. With the shock at how much the majority of my quant abilities had deteriorated when I started prepping, I'm fairly happy with the results. I'm a little disappointed with my verbal score, but I figure a slightly lower verbal will probably be buffered by strong publications and experience. I'm applying to a couple interdisciplinary human factors/experimental psych/systems engineering PhD programs after working with an aviation r&d lab in a well-known organization for a few years.