watson

My guess is they were laughing at the suggestion of dropping half the sample after you ran the study just because you didn't get the results you want.  It's not the best way to do science and actually a hot topic right now about research analysis ethics.  Re-analyzing without the women to see if it warranted running a new study would be fine, but you'd have to then pretty much dump the first study to stay really above board.  Also, as bad as this is, people do tend to get annoyed when the undergrads ask questions/make comments (especially at job talks) and this can lead to less than polite reactions to their questions.

Uhhh YES.  My department will ask if we had particularly strong feelings (good or bad) about the applicants.  Faculty have never accepted someone that one of us has said was unfriendly/rude/arrogant/competitive/non-appreciative of the opportunity to interview in our department. 
 
The grad students end up seeing the applicants a lot more than the faculty, and you wouldn't believe how many applicants BLOW IT by saying something in front of a grad student that they just should NOT have.  Go in with the attitude you have and you will not be admitted into my department--we really do not want to work with someone who thinks they know more and have more life experiences than us--you don't even know anything about these grad students and this is how you view them!?  And even if you DO know more and have more (notice, not better) life experience, does this mean you cannot be friendly, polite, and interact with them in a professional way??  That kind of attitude would surely be communicated back to the faculty, the faculty whose loyalty is to the current students, who put their trust in the current students assessment of your character. 
 
How about you just act like a nice, happy, normal person who is appreciative of the opportunity to meet with current students at the place you might live the next 5-8 years?  Also these are the people who you will see more than anyone else for those years, so how about you try just being nice to them and maybe make a friend?

Uhhh YES.  My department will ask if we had particularly strong feelings (good or bad) about the applicants.  Faculty have never accepted someone that one of us has said was unfriendly/rude/arrogant/competitive/non-appreciative of the opportunity to interview in our department. 
 
The grad students end up seeing the applicants a lot more than the faculty, and you wouldn't believe how many applicants BLOW IT by saying something in front of a grad student that they just should NOT have.  Go in with the attitude you have and you will not be admitted into my department--we really do not want to work with someone who thinks they know more and have more life experiences than us--you don't even know anything about these grad students and this is how you view them!?  And even if you DO know more and have more (notice, not better) life experience, does this mean you cannot be friendly, polite, and interact with them in a professional way??  That kind of attitude would surely be communicated back to the faculty, the faculty whose loyalty is to the current students, who put their trust in the current students assessment of your character. 
 
How about you just act like a nice, happy, normal person who is appreciative of the opportunity to meet with current students at the place you might live the next 5-8 years?  Also these are the people who you will see more than anyone else for those years, so how about you try just being nice to them and maybe make a friend?

Honestly, I'd see if you can just move the flight up or back by a day rather than not stay a night with the grad student.  Usually this is not a problem if you get it cleared first, especially if it won't cost any extra money to the school.  Here's why I suggest this:
 
1. Staying with the grad student actually is a time you can really learn a lot about the program "off the record" when the grad student isn't worried about what other people are hearing her/him say.  You can ask questions that maybe you wouldn't feel comfortable asking in a group or with faculty in the room.  You can actually see what a typical grad student can afford on the stipend and what housing options are like in the area, as well as get a feel for local neighborhoods that you might actually end up living in someday.  These are things you don't get from being on campus and will remind you to ask real questions about quality of life outside the lab.
 
2. Admissions are a crap shoot and I'd take all the opportunities possible to get yourself an advocate.  Bonding with a current student can only help.  We use hotels, but if a grad student volunteered to share their apartment they probably want to talk to you and they can be useful to you!
 
3. Last year we invited students to visit and 2 of them took off after a dinner with the current grad students to go meet friends--everyone else hung a little to talk. They were already making the least great impression of the group, but having made the plans and run off did sour us on them even more.  It's probably not terrible if you're making a great impression otherwise, but if you're borderline it won't work in your favor.

Uhhh YES.  My department will ask if we had particularly strong feelings (good or bad) about the applicants.  Faculty have never accepted someone that one of us has said was unfriendly/rude/arrogant/competitive/non-appreciative of the opportunity to interview in our department. 
 
The grad students end up seeing the applicants a lot more than the faculty, and you wouldn't believe how many applicants BLOW IT by saying something in front of a grad student that they just should NOT have.  Go in with the attitude you have and you will not be admitted into my department--we really do not want to work with someone who thinks they know more and have more life experiences than us--you don't even know anything about these grad students and this is how you view them!?  And even if you DO know more and have more (notice, not better) life experience, does this mean you cannot be friendly, polite, and interact with them in a professional way??  That kind of attitude would surely be communicated back to the faculty, the faculty whose loyalty is to the current students, who put their trust in the current students assessment of your character. 
 
How about you just act like a nice, happy, normal person who is appreciative of the opportunity to meet with current students at the place you might live the next 5-8 years?  Also these are the people who you will see more than anyone else for those years, so how about you try just being nice to them and maybe make a friend?

I used to teach for The Princeton Review...I made a killer amount of money and worked only a few hours a week when I wanted, or volunteered to cover classes and worked many hours when I wanted to....for reference, 5 years ago teaching the SAT I was being paid $32/hour BASE with extra when they overloaded a class with students (I taught a class that got merged with another class because of a flub by a summer 'camp' type thing, so I was making an ungodly amount for the 9 hrs a week I taught that class).  Plus online grading of essays (optional extra work) was $1/essay, and grading took like 2-3 min per essay (they are short), so you could make a ton extra if you can handle reading that much bad writing.

Uhhh YES.  My department will ask if we had particularly strong feelings (good or bad) about the applicants.  Faculty have never accepted someone that one of us has said was unfriendly/rude/arrogant/competitive/non-appreciative of the opportunity to interview in our department. 
 
The grad students end up seeing the applicants a lot more than the faculty, and you wouldn't believe how many applicants BLOW IT by saying something in front of a grad student that they just should NOT have.  Go in with the attitude you have and you will not be admitted into my department--we really do not want to work with someone who thinks they know more and have more life experiences than us--you don't even know anything about these grad students and this is how you view them!?  And even if you DO know more and have more (notice, not better) life experience, does this mean you cannot be friendly, polite, and interact with them in a professional way??  That kind of attitude would surely be communicated back to the faculty, the faculty whose loyalty is to the current students, who put their trust in the current students assessment of your character. 
 
How about you just act like a nice, happy, normal person who is appreciative of the opportunity to meet with current students at the place you might live the next 5-8 years?  Also these are the people who you will see more than anyone else for those years, so how about you try just being nice to them and maybe make a friend?

Uhhh YES.  My department will ask if we had particularly strong feelings (good or bad) about the applicants.  Faculty have never accepted someone that one of us has said was unfriendly/rude/arrogant/competitive/non-appreciative of the opportunity to interview in our department. 
 
The grad students end up seeing the applicants a lot more than the faculty, and you wouldn't believe how many applicants BLOW IT by saying something in front of a grad student that they just should NOT have.  Go in with the attitude you have and you will not be admitted into my department--we really do not want to work with someone who thinks they know more and have more life experiences than us--you don't even know anything about these grad students and this is how you view them!?  And even if you DO know more and have more (notice, not better) life experience, does this mean you cannot be friendly, polite, and interact with them in a professional way??  That kind of attitude would surely be communicated back to the faculty, the faculty whose loyalty is to the current students, who put their trust in the current students assessment of your character. 
 
How about you just act like a nice, happy, normal person who is appreciative of the opportunity to meet with current students at the place you might live the next 5-8 years?  Also these are the people who you will see more than anyone else for those years, so how about you try just being nice to them and maybe make a friend?

Your request depends on how closely you want this based on the MBTI, considering the MBTI is copyrighted material.

My guess is they were laughing at the suggestion of dropping half the sample after you ran the study just because you didn't get the results you want.  It's not the best way to do science and actually a hot topic right now about research analysis ethics.  Re-analyzing without the women to see if it warranted running a new study would be fine, but you'd have to then pretty much dump the first study to stay really above board.  Also, as bad as this is, people do tend to get annoyed when the undergrads ask questions/make comments (especially at job talks) and this can lead to less than polite reactions to their questions.

I wouldn't mention it. You aren't taking a job KNOWING you'll be leaving, and if you do get into grad school and go off to study for 5-7 years, what are the chances that this will haunt you post-PhD? Extremely slim.

Discussing your psychological/physical/genetic disorders almost always works against you.
--you get to focused on telling "your story" and most people frankly end up missing the point of the SOP when they attempt this (or they come off sounding self-important, like no one else can be a good psychologist, but usually they waste space needed for other info)
--people worry that you're only committed to "me-search" instead of research broadly
--ad-coms are still humans, subject to biases against people with psychological disorders, even psychologists

Maybe the advocacy thing can be helpful but I'd probably only use it in the first few sentences as a set-up for the rest of the SOP. Definitely not more than 1-2 sentences.

Discussing your psychological/physical/genetic disorders almost always works against you.
--you get to focused on telling "your story" and most people frankly end up missing the point of the SOP when they attempt this (or they come off sounding self-important, like no one else can be a good psychologist, but usually they waste space needed for other info)
--people worry that you're only committed to "me-search" instead of research broadly
--ad-coms are still humans, subject to biases against people with psychological disorders, even psychologists

Maybe the advocacy thing can be helpful but I'd probably only use it in the first few sentences as a set-up for the rest of the SOP. Definitely not more than 1-2 sentences.

There are 3 major reasons to (in general) avoid talking about mental health issues/trauma in an SOP:
1. Worries that it will affect your grad work (grad school is hard emotionally and psychologically....though past issues may be irrelevant today, you can potentially bring up people's biases anyway)
2. That it will make your research interests appear too narrow--that you care only about this specific issue that occurred to you
3. Your intense connection to the subject may cause you to over-devote space in the SOP to describing parts of the story you feel are essential but make little difference to the adcoms, depriving you of the space to talk about the issues they REALLY care about

You can deal with all 3 of these, but you need to be aware of them as you write and edit your SOP. Especially with 2 & 3....really ask yourself whether each word of your 'story' needs to be there...how much does it add to why you'll be fantastic in grad school or is it veering into creative writing/motivational speech? Are you using it as an example of how it will broadly influence your approach to research/treatment, or are you just sharing an experience you had? Are you only interested in issues of over-prescription, or can you relate this to a more wide-reaching issue? Does your research focus on child-consent issues?

Just be very selective in what you include basically.

There are 3 major reasons to (in general) avoid talking about mental health issues/trauma in an SOP:
1. Worries that it will affect your grad work (grad school is hard emotionally and psychologically....though past issues may be irrelevant today, you can potentially bring up people's biases anyway)
2. That it will make your research interests appear too narrow--that you care only about this specific issue that occurred to you
3. Your intense connection to the subject may cause you to over-devote space in the SOP to describing parts of the story you feel are essential but make little difference to the adcoms, depriving you of the space to talk about the issues they REALLY care about

You can deal with all 3 of these, but you need to be aware of them as you write and edit your SOP. Especially with 2 & 3....really ask yourself whether each word of your 'story' needs to be there...how much does it add to why you'll be fantastic in grad school or is it veering into creative writing/motivational speech? Are you using it as an example of how it will broadly influence your approach to research/treatment, or are you just sharing an experience you had? Are you only interested in issues of over-prescription, or can you relate this to a more wide-reaching issue? Does your research focus on child-consent issues?

Just be very selective in what you include basically.

As far as I'm aware (and this could be true only of social psych or of my program only), they take the entire pile of applications and divide it up based on POIs listed. I don't think there is a secret algorithm in the formal sense, but each faculty member basically gets to divide up their pile how they see fit. Some put more weight on GPA, others on years of research experience, etc, but I do believe that they essentially make a few piles outright: (1) scores are high so look at the file closely and positively, (2) scores are middle-range so if they have a great research background move them to the first pile, and (3) scores are too low so barely look and only spend more than a minute if something amazing jumps out of the essay. Truth is, dealing with the anybody who doesn't make it into pile #1 after a review is a very low priority and why it takes SO long to hear from some places. POIs are busy and they choose to spend the energy wooing the top candidates rather than easing the misery of the rest of the applicants. Hell, NU makes their admission decisions and posts them online but doesn't bother to send an email out saying they are up--that is how sad the process gets and precisely why it is so frustrating to an applicant.

Very true. I know for psych (and particularly for non-clinical areas) the time frame is January and February for the most part. If you're on the top of a waiting list and get in that way you may hear from places in March as well, though you're usually informed if you're on a waiting list by the end of February/first week of March. I actually think it's pretty cruel how many applicants are already rejected but not informed for months because of this process--my current program is a particularly bad offender in this regard.

As far as I'm aware (and this could be true only of social psych or of my program only), they take the entire pile of applications and divide it up based on POIs listed. I don't think there is a secret algorithm in the formal sense, but each faculty member basically gets to divide up their pile how they see fit. Some put more weight on GPA, others on years of research experience, etc, but I do believe that they essentially make a few piles outright: (1) scores are high so look at the file closely and positively, (2) scores are middle-range so if they have a great research background move them to the first pile, and (3) scores are too low so barely look and only spend more than a minute if something amazing jumps out of the essay. Truth is, dealing with the anybody who doesn't make it into pile #1 after a review is a very low priority and why it takes SO long to hear from some places. POIs are busy and they choose to spend the energy wooing the top candidates rather than easing the misery of the rest of the applicants. Hell, NU makes their admission decisions and posts them online but doesn't bother to send an email out saying they are up--that is how sad the process gets and precisely why it is so frustrating to an applicant.

The thing is really just that there are far, far, far more really awesome, super qualified applicants than there are spots. Especially right now, as more people are applying to grad school than ever before coupled with less and less available funding. The crazy thing is, that with the number of people getting psych PhDs there aren't anywhere near enough jobs (especially academic jobs, if your goal is to be a clinician then you're fine), and now we have a backlog of post-docs who are far cheaper (they only need salary, not tuition remission) who are there to do a lot of the same work and already have training. So yes, a large part of that feeling like it is super random is due to the simple fact that ad-coms have to turn down really super qualified people for PhD programs all the time and right now is a particularly bad time to be an applicant.

You're also correct in that GRE scores are not a good predictor of success, but they are frequently one of the very few ways schools have to judge your quantitative ability. And while we do use SPSS, ad-coms are seriously impressed by strong quant skills because it signals a likelihood of having aptitude for understanding stats beyond the basics (and therefore understanding how to design studies and analyze them appropriately based on stats knowledge). That said, obviously GRE scores aren't about stats skills, but they don't have much else to go on which is why they keep relying on it (flawed as it is). And yes, between two otherwise equal looking applications, they will invite the person with a higher GRE score before the one with the lower GRE score.

I'm not really sure what to say about the ABD thing, since it's way lower in psych and also ad-coms have no way of predicting that based on the application. People admitted to PhD programs typically all look stellar on paper. I think the issue there is with funding matched with the finding that the longer you stay in grad school the more bitter about it you become. But yeah, it's frustrating to think you can't get your foot in the door when other people are in and not liking it or not appreciating it.

When I was applying I applied to 8 schools and got into 5....but now that I'm a 4th year and I see the list of people invited to interview (we get a 'cheat sheet' filling us in on the details) I am blown away by the sheer strength of their applications. I seriously wonder if I could get into a program these days based on what I've seen. The 8 people we interviewed this year (and we're accepting 4) all had worked in labs at least 3 years, were all graduating/graduated at least magna cum laude, had GRE scores that were sky high, had given presentations at conferences, and most had taken a year or two off to be a full-time research assistant or lab manager in a lab headed by a big name in the field. They all had super well fitting research interests and were quite clear about those interests. But I doubt they were the only applicants who fell into those categories and plenty of people never got an interview even with strong applications.

It's just really true that it has never been more difficult to get admitted to a PhD program.

Very true. I know for psych (and particularly for non-clinical areas) the time frame is January and February for the most part. If you're on the top of a waiting list and get in that way you may hear from places in March as well, though you're usually informed if you're on a waiting list by the end of February/first week of March. I actually think it's pretty cruel how many applicants are already rejected but not informed for months because of this process--my current program is a particularly bad offender in this regard.

As far as I'm aware (and this could be true only of social psych or of my program only), they take the entire pile of applications and divide it up based on POIs listed. I don't think there is a secret algorithm in the formal sense, but each faculty member basically gets to divide up their pile how they see fit. Some put more weight on GPA, others on years of research experience, etc, but I do believe that they essentially make a few piles outright: (1) scores are high so look at the file closely and positively, (2) scores are middle-range so if they have a great research background move them to the first pile, and (3) scores are too low so barely look and only spend more than a minute if something amazing jumps out of the essay. Truth is, dealing with the anybody who doesn't make it into pile #1 after a review is a very low priority and why it takes SO long to hear from some places. POIs are busy and they choose to spend the energy wooing the top candidates rather than easing the misery of the rest of the applicants. Hell, NU makes their admission decisions and posts them online but doesn't bother to send an email out saying they are up--that is how sad the process gets and precisely why it is so frustrating to an applicant.

NU (Weinberg, Evanston campus) is holding interview weekend for all areas (social/clinical/BBC/cognitive) starting Feb 3. I am fairly sure all the invitations to interview have been extended already, but am positive this is the case for the social area. If you have not been invited to interview I'd consider yourself on the waitlist/reject. Check the website as NU does not send an email to check until around April regardless of status.

I'm a social psych PhD student at Northwestern. I am on our recruitment committee for underrepresented students and so I'm pretty filled in on all details application/acceptance.

Those scores are enough to get you past the first review, meaning your letters and SOP will be seriously read over. So far so good. I'd talk about how your GPA improved in your SOP and have letter writers say it as well. Maybe also list your major-GPA.

For social psych, I always advise NOT to get a masters (unless you were not a psych major). You will have to repeat it at any PhD program unless you manage to stay at the same school for MA/PhD and that is highly unlikely--so you'll waste 2 years and probably a ton of money, and with your scores it really won't make you a more competitive applicant. You won't finish the PhD any sooner either since you'll have to repeat the masters. The best thing for your situation is adding to your research experience. Apply to PhD programs, and if you don't get in then look for jobs as a lab manager or as a full-time research assistant, or try to get a lab job at NIH. Those pretty much guarantee getting into a PhD program after 2 years--the same time it'd take to get a masters and you'll get paid.

I'm a social psych PhD student at Northwestern. I am on our recruitment committee for underrepresented students and so I'm pretty filled in on all details application/acceptance.

Those scores are enough to get you past the first review, meaning your letters and SOP will be seriously read over. So far so good. I'd talk about how your GPA improved in your SOP and have letter writers say it as well. Maybe also list your major-GPA.

For social psych, I always advise NOT to get a masters (unless you were not a psych major). You will have to repeat it at any PhD program unless you manage to stay at the same school for MA/PhD and that is highly unlikely--so you'll waste 2 years and probably a ton of money, and with your scores it really won't make you a more competitive applicant. You won't finish the PhD any sooner either since you'll have to repeat the masters. The best thing for your situation is adding to your research experience. Apply to PhD programs, and if you don't get in then look for jobs as a lab manager or as a full-time research assistant, or try to get a lab job at NIH. Those pretty much guarantee getting into a PhD program after 2 years--the same time it'd take to get a masters and you'll get paid.

Some schools do accept without an interview (OSU comes to mind from when I was accepted a few years back), however you'd have been notified by now in that case. Many will waitlist without an interview and wait to contact until they start getting declines from accepted students--this is how I got into 2 additional schools (Tufts & UVa) after I'd already picked a grad program--however, in both cases I was called and told that I was on the waitlist and asked around late February if I would like to be on the waitlist of if I had already chosen a program. Many programs however will only accept people who either interviewed or were invited to the visiting weekend (non-interview acceptance like at OSU but will only pick from the group that visits). I'm at Northwestern--we only accept people who interview, and even if they all decline we don't extend any other invites...we sent invites to interview several weeks ago.