Left Skew

Just got an email from UNC: Charlotte, their interview day is February 23rd. On my way down, I'll be sure to stop at NC State, roll my eyes, then drive into the night.

Hey everyone!
@Stauce made this google doc that we can all edit and add when programs send out interviews, acceptances, rejections, etc. It's a little less bogged down than the results section here. 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hJFI7od93wXNHfLiUl0pv4lPUsueRmVg_6N85xgFQd8/edit?usp=sharing

I've had two so far (this year), a few more during my masters, and a lot of job interviews will try my best to give you some tips. 
A majority of the time you will sense the formality. Most faculty will present an overview of the program, process, etc. You'll pick up on how they present themselves. If you don't get a good estimate I like to lead with: 
"How do you like to be addressed?" 
My personal goal is to be unique. I tend to pick at least one question that isn't the traditional "what is the funding like", "how is research", "how strong is the advisor structure"....yet not nebulous.
Some examples:
1. How do you support students emotionally and socially?
2. If I did something wrong, like ran the wrong analysis or read the wrong article, how would you react?
3. Looking back, is there anything you wish you knew in graduate school?
4. If you selected students based on just one metric (i.e., GRE, GPA, Recommendations, Interview, Personal Statement, CV, experience...), what would you choose and why?
Best,

There's quite a few web resources on this topic and you can use Google to find them.
 
That being said, here's the common questions I ran into during my 7 interviews last cycle (I am now a 1st year at my top choice clinical program):
Why my lab/this program/this city/clinical psychology? If you had unlimited funding, what research topic would you want to explore?  Tell me about you/what you are passionate about. What is your long term career goal - academia, private practice, industry?  A note on this one - if you are interviewing at clinical PhD programs, most always want to hear "be an academic or work in practice ~25% of the time and be faculty 75% of the time so my research can be informed. Most clinical PhD programs, ironically, are aiming to create faculty and contributors to science, not  just clinicians. Saying you are just intereted in clinical practice can really be a bad thing to say... however, PsyDs and counseling psych programs tend (from my understanding) to appreciate this answer a bit more. All I can say, is if you are pursuing a clinical PhD, you should probably have at least a strong initial interest of going into the academy.  What are your strenghts? What are your weaknessess? Be genuine here. I told my POIs striaght up I over-committ myself (I'm a high achiever lol). I am aware of this though and didn't want it to be a problem in grad school, so in the same statement for weaknessess I talked about my reckoning with this being an issue and how I have been addressing it/plan to address it in grad school and beyond.  Tell me about your most recent research project? What are the main takeaways?  What's something interesting you just read (book or research)?   
Really there aren't too many odd-ball questions from my experience. Just be yourself, and the right program will accept you if it is where you are supposed to be. ALSO, this is supposed to be an opportunity for you to get to know the program and the current students as well, so ask lots of questions of them too! 

Here is a link of an editable Excel document we can use
 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hJFI7od93wXNHfLiUl0pv4lPUsueRmVg_6N85xgFQd8/edit?usp=sharing

I've had two so far (this year), a few more during my masters, and a lot of job interviews will try my best to give you some tips. 
A majority of the time you will sense the formality. Most faculty will present an overview of the program, process, etc. You'll pick up on how they present themselves. If you don't get a good estimate I like to lead with: 
"How do you like to be addressed?" 
My personal goal is to be unique. I tend to pick at least one question that isn't the traditional "what is the funding like", "how is research", "how strong is the advisor structure"....yet not nebulous.
Some examples:
1. How do you support students emotionally and socially?
2. If I did something wrong, like ran the wrong analysis or read the wrong article, how would you react?
3. Looking back, is there anything you wish you knew in graduate school?
4. If you selected students based on just one metric (i.e., GRE, GPA, Recommendations, Interview, Personal Statement, CV, experience...), what would you choose and why?
Best,

This happens in academia far too often. You could have near-perfect GRE scores, GPA, letters of recommendation, and even fit; yet you're still not selected. Social capital is a powerful thing, I wish there was more research on it. I worry when applying to programs that also have a terminal masters because of how often schools transition (though deserving) students from the masters to PhD program. Faculty of a student that know other faculty. Students finding their POI at a conference and getting face-time...they are playing the game. In IO we learn about how the most random factors like name and handshake can affect your likelihood to receive a job offer, especially when the process is unstructured. The application process is very unstructured: some professors hate the GRE, some love applied experience, some publications, sometimes it's just random in terms of who you apply to. It's hard not to take it personal. Graduate applicants are conscientious; you can tell by the path they've chosen.  However, I've never met someone intrinsically motivated that didn't get in. Keep hope. Learn. Find out what the accepted candidates "had" that you didn't. Objectively you may have been much higher on the list, but the list isn't objective; otherwise, a computer would select who gets in. 
 
 
In reality: I cry and listen to Katy Perry's "The One That Got Away"

My goal during this process is not to receive a rejection. I don't need to be accepted anywhere, I just don't want to be rejected. I want act like I just gave them the wrong email. Penn state must've got the emailed someone else...

After a short hiatus (to maintain my sanity) I've updated some things!
 
Cleaned Institution and Program - the past few days have been rough. I've realized what kind of garbage fire the Institution and program data from the results survey is. I emailed grad cafe in hopes they would standardize the text inputs for the aforementioned columns. You'd be surprised at how many different ways someone can type in "UCLA". Hopefully the data is more accurate but there is still a lot to do.
  Added more graphics. I've split the decision plots by clinical, not-clinical, and everyone combined because who cares about clinical applicants? Kidding. Their apps tend to be due a lot sooner, you can see this in the plots. I've also added result by day of the week thanks to  statisticalsleuth's suggestion. Further there is a table of the top schools that adds Rejection postings as a % of total postings (I removed postings involving other).
  R nerds: added a function file behind the R code so the script wouldn't be so overwhelming...though it's still overwhelming. This file is necessary for running the script (see the script here). I've also added an index of schools and programs for the string matching algorithm. ALL OF THESE FILES NEED TO BE IN YOUR Working Directory for the procedure to run. Finally I wanted to thank everyone for being supportive and giving me ideas. Best of luck during interviews! I've attached the PDF. You can also view it here. 

It's almost over....
Grad Cafe Decisions.pdf

Hello all,

I'm back again with some more data. For those of you that are unfamiliar with my original post, I create a procedure in R that scrapes the results survey and output some pretty-ish graphics from the data. 
After a bit of cleaning and consolidating, I looked into things like: common interview days, most popular schools, and most popular program types...
The data is based on self-report and isn't always the cleanest, so I have't taken the initiative to make more profound "predictions".

But here I am, one last time, to give some info on the qualitative metrics behind an application (i.e., GPA, GRE Verbal, GRE Quant, GRE AWA) to see if there is really a difference in those that get accepted and those that get rejected. 
I split the data further by program type; however, some of the programs (e.g., Developmental Psych, Quant Psych, Neuro) had such a small sample of candidate that reported their scores that I had to aggregate them-- these programs are in "psychology: other". Once again this data is not parametric because it lacks independence of scores and possibly normalcy. A candidate may be in the rejected or accepted sample multiple times given they reported their scores for multiple schools, so be cautious when coming to conclusions. Also we have no clue how accurate reported scores are; candidates may have forgotten their score or flipped their quant and verbal (these are things I cannot account for).

Conclusion: I had to actually go back and look at the raw data because the results weren't as I expected. There are many occasions where those rejected had a higher average than those accepted. I will work on further validating my numbers but I can say that the average score between those rejected and those accepted (based on the Grad Cafe sample) don't seem to consistently differ. This trend is not consistent across programs.
Social Psych applicants seem like the smarties among the top program-types.
Another conclusion is that it seems the grad cafe sample is higher on these metrics than an average applicant (I need to do more research) but given the average GRE scores are definitely above the 50th percentile, GPA is also high too.

The data is on the last few pages. Those of you that haven't seen the other graphics please feel free. You can see it HERE.
I'm also going to attach the file for those of you that don't trust clicking links (though I promise it's safe).
 
 
Grad Cafe Decisions.pdf

Hello everyone,
I've seen quite a bit of chatter around the timing of results, and the answers are obscure. I wanted to provide my services, and give you all some extra data. The beauty of grad cafe is that it is one of the most (if not the most) centralized data source for graduate students. Some data examples: What schools are most popular, what degrees, applicant metrics, dates of results, etc. Yet, I've yet to find someone that uses this information to help those applying.
 
Until now...
 
I used R (for those unfamiliar) to scrape the grad cafe results data related to psychology. I returned about 35000 records. There were a lot of un-tidy text strings (e.g., PhD and Ph.D.), especially in relation to program-title and institution; however, that is a project for another day. Data regarding dates and decisions did seem clean enough for me to analyze it and turn it into something nice for you all.
 
So what is it....?
Here is a PDF based on the results of all Psychology students (over 35000) since the origin of grad cafe. The first 3 tables show the 10 most common dates (by count) for getting an interview, getting accepted, and getting rejected ? .  I would do relative frequency and should've...maybe tomorrow.
Then a longitudinal line graph (which shows these decisions throughout the year)
Finally, one that focuses more on the "critical-period" when most decisions are made.
 
Conclusion
This was a piecemeal job that I should be done in R Markdown. I'll link my code at the end. Similar methods could be used to look at the "most popular" programs, probability of acceptance by degree type or program type, average GRE score for accepted candidates, and the list goes on. If anyone wants a csv of the dataset I used, please feel free to message me. I also welcome critiques and suggestions.  I wish you all the best.
 
R code here

This really helps, thank you! The questions you were asked are fairly similar to what I've been preparing for, so that makes me feel a lot more confident.
These are some great questions, thank you! He did mention he'd spend a few minutes talking about the background of the program, so hopefully that'll be a good place to gauge how formal the rest of the interview will be.

By my comment I meant "started sending results" not "completed results", sorry for the confusion.

I've scraped the results survey with R and attached some longitudinal data for I/O decisions. See the title of each page for the type of decision. I've attached it. As you can tell the sample size isn't so strong...so take it for what it's worth.

Takeaways:
Jan 15th - Feb 15th seems like peak time for interviews February is ride or die: 23rd - 28th prime for interviews but rejection is also high in Feb Notice that the Accepted numbers are higher than the others, this may be due to self-selection but let's hope that it isn't Wait-list....who knows Grad Cafe Decisions IO.pdf

I've had two so far (this year), a few more during my masters, and a lot of job interviews will try my best to give you some tips. 
A majority of the time you will sense the formality. Most faculty will present an overview of the program, process, etc. You'll pick up on how they present themselves. If you don't get a good estimate I like to lead with: 
"How do you like to be addressed?" 
My personal goal is to be unique. I tend to pick at least one question that isn't the traditional "what is the funding like", "how is research", "how strong is the advisor structure"....yet not nebulous.
Some examples:
1. How do you support students emotionally and socially?
2. If I did something wrong, like ran the wrong analysis or read the wrong article, how would you react?
3. Looking back, is there anything you wish you knew in graduate school?
4. If you selected students based on just one metric (i.e., GRE, GPA, Recommendations, Interview, Personal Statement, CV, experience...), what would you choose and why?
Best,

I've had two so far (this year), a few more during my masters, and a lot of job interviews will try my best to give you some tips. 
A majority of the time you will sense the formality. Most faculty will present an overview of the program, process, etc. You'll pick up on how they present themselves. If you don't get a good estimate I like to lead with: 
"How do you like to be addressed?" 
My personal goal is to be unique. I tend to pick at least one question that isn't the traditional "what is the funding like", "how is research", "how strong is the advisor structure"....yet not nebulous.
Some examples:
1. How do you support students emotionally and socially?
2. If I did something wrong, like ran the wrong analysis or read the wrong article, how would you react?
3. Looking back, is there anything you wish you knew in graduate school?
4. If you selected students based on just one metric (i.e., GRE, GPA, Recommendations, Interview, Personal Statement, CV, experience...), what would you choose and why?
Best,

Best and Craziest: Find a 9-to-5 job. Spend my nights crying myself to sleep, but capture my tears. I'll save my tears until I can fill a bath tub. Proceed to bath in my tears, but record it and post it on social media. The post will go viral, igniting my YouTube career. In my videos, I'll call out all those who've rejected me in the past; though I will still cry myself to sleep at night. 

By my comment I meant "started sending results" not "completed results", sorry for the confusion.

I've scraped the results survey with R and attached some longitudinal data for I/O decisions. See the title of each page for the type of decision. I've attached it. As you can tell the sample size isn't so strong...so take it for what it's worth.

Takeaways:
Jan 15th - Feb 15th seems like peak time for interviews February is ride or die: 23rd - 28th prime for interviews but rejection is also high in Feb Notice that the Accepted numbers are higher than the others, this may be due to self-selection but let's hope that it isn't Wait-list....who knows Grad Cafe Decisions IO.pdf

This happens in academia far too often. You could have near-perfect GRE scores, GPA, letters of recommendation, and even fit; yet you're still not selected. Social capital is a powerful thing, I wish there was more research on it. I worry when applying to programs that also have a terminal masters because of how often schools transition (though deserving) students from the masters to PhD program. Faculty of a student that know other faculty. Students finding their POI at a conference and getting face-time...they are playing the game. In IO we learn about how the most random factors like name and handshake can affect your likelihood to receive a job offer, especially when the process is unstructured. The application process is very unstructured: some professors hate the GRE, some love applied experience, some publications, sometimes it's just random in terms of who you apply to. It's hard not to take it personal. Graduate applicants are conscientious; you can tell by the path they've chosen.  However, I've never met someone intrinsically motivated that didn't get in. Keep hope. Learn. Find out what the accepted candidates "had" that you didn't. Objectively you may have been much higher on the list, but the list isn't objective; otherwise, a computer would select who gets in. 
 
 
In reality: I cry and listen to Katy Perry's "The One That Got Away"

So can we agree that Rice, NC State, UMD, Wayne State, UGA, Tulsa, and Northwestern have sent out their results?

Yeah I am feeling a bit anxious because I think she is going to take a bit of time to make her decisions. She said she was taking two students so maybe your professor is as well. Don't lose hope!

I don't know how this works in other departments, but I can tell you that in mine they only offer two interview slots to the terminal masters students. I don't think that's something they say on their website. This year a ton of masters students applied to the Ph.D. program and it was basically a bloodbath. Anyways, I wouldn't necessarily see the presence of a terminal masters program as negative. 
I don't think we ever really know why we don't get in. But here's a story I want to share from a PI I've worked with. 
There was a clinical program he loved and he applied the first time and didn't get in. Next round of applications he applied and didn't get in -- but he got into an experimental Ph.D. program and went there. He completed that Ph.D. After that he still had an interest in clinical work and applied again to that original clinical program -- and didn't get in. Even with a Ph.D. and years of research experience and multiple publications. But he applied again the next year and finally got in. He went and now he has two Ph.D.s. 
I think the point is that persistence is the name of the game here. The application process is crazy and a lot of it doesn't make sense. You could be amazingly qualified and still not get in. It isn't necessarily something negative about you. There are things we can all do to improve but that is always going to be true. 
So.... if I don't get in this time around I'll probably cry for a couple of weeks straight and then force myself to get back to work. Then I'll apply again next year with more experience... and show them that there's nothing they can do to make me give up on this. 

I ended up writing R code for scraping the entries on the Results page to get a grasp on how things were in the past. I know there is one available from the other thread by @Left Skew, but thought I'd do it by myself for a practice.
The queries were as follows: after searching with "psychology", entries with their major names including "quant" or "meth" were selected. Also, entries with "other" statuses were excluded. A total of 177 entries matched the criteria.
A weekly histogram of the collected dataset is attached, as well as their producing codes for future reference.
histogram (link)
code (link)

I had a--relatively--dead application cycle last year.
Due primarily to family crises and financial hardship, I only applied to a limited number of schools (3) and got accepted to one program but some things came up within the department and my PI couldn't take me on. As a result, I've had this year to work on myself and strengthening my application.
I can honestly say that being rejected was a really good thing for me as it made me really think about how badly I wanted to pursue graduate study. I accelerated through my undergrad and MA program and never really took the time to reflect on why I was doing what I was doing. I just always knew I wanted to be a faculty member. This year gave me the opportunity to serve as one--albeit as 'just' and adjunct--and it really solidified my drive to continue doing what I'm doing.
The soul searching really helped and I've been able to pin down my research interests more specifically which has helped a lot in the interviews I've had so far (4 of 11!). I took the year to focus on my research and finished about 7-projects with 3 out for review.
Refining my research interests also lead me to apply to new faculty members that I either didn't know about or was not confident enough to apply to last year and now they're some of the schools vying for me which is incredibly exciting.
Another benefit is that I got to take the GRE again and bumped all my points up a collective 22-points (Verbal and Quantitative).
Don't lose hope. A round of rejections is certainly a blessing so long as you look at it in that way. Sure, you're 'losing' a year but you're gaining perspective. Your statements are already largely written and can only be improved upon, you can retake the GRE if you need to, do more focused research, and really figure out if this is the right thing for you.

Two years ago, I applied to 8 clinical programs, and I didn't hear a word from a single one until I got my official rejection in the mail. Some of what I have ot say is advice, but I also find just writing about it be a bit cathartic. 
Self-Care
I'll admit my self-care following my rejections sucked...like really bad. I gained some weight and trended towards depression. I pretty much had no motivation to do anything for a few months. Didn't really go out with friends, let my school work go, and kept to myself. Perhaps what made the whole thing worse was that none of my friends or classmates or even my parents really knew what I was going through. Mostly, I regretted a lot of my choice during my undergrad and blamed myself for how things turned out. This isn't very fair to yourself though; you're young and you're going to make mistakes. Things improved for me when I started my Masters and a lot of my cohort were also Ph.D. program rejects. Then at least I could talk to other people about what I'm going through. I wish I could offer better self-care advice. All I can say is don't do what I did.
Motivation
Once I got myself more under control (several months later), motivation wasn't too big of a problem. One of the biggest motivators I've ever had is to make sure that this never happens to me again. While other people in my Master's program decided they wouldn't take the GRE again prior to applying to Ph.D. programs, I was motivated to not take that risk. Also, I was highly motivated to seek out opportunities to get publications, and I was motivated to do well in my graduate classes. Just let your rejection be a motivating force. It can really drive you.
What Now
A lot of people suggest reaching out to the programs you were rejected from and perhaps asking for feedback. I didn't do this. However, I did take a long, hard look at my application once I got back on my feet. *You don't need to do this immediately after rejection. You can practice self-care first*
Being critical and realistic about your application is one of the most important things you can do after a bad application season. A few things became clear to me. 1) My undergrad GPA was below average for all programs, 2) My GRE scores were below average, 3) My research experience wasn't enough at that point in time (only a year of experience), 4) My SOP sucked (everyone always assumes they wrote a great SOP. Have you noticed that? Looking back, I cringe at mine).
There were two obvious options of where to go from there. First, I could join a lab for a year and try again next year. Second, I could do a terminal Masters. My reasoning in picking the second option was that I had three big issues in my application, and I needed some extra help from a Masters. Ultimately, this has shown to be a good choice, but I often recommend people to just join a lab for a year if all they lack is research experience.
If you do end up doing a Masters, I highly recommend doing research outside of your thesis. A lot of people in my program just focused on doing their thesis and did not join other labs. This is extremely wasteful because your thesis won't be far enough along to discuss with your POI by the time you apply in your second year. Plus joining other labs lets you potentially get publications and posters and opens you up to other areas of research.
I took the GRE again, and I had some big improvements. If you have a less than stellar GPA, I really do recommend spending the time and taking the GRE again. Your scores don't have to be amazing, but don't let them be below average.
 Other Notes
"Everything happens for a reason" is a really sucky quote. However, I would acknowledge that I am glad I didn't get into a Clinical Program. During my Masters, I discovered Quantitative Psychology, and I realized that I really wouldn't have been happy in a Clinical program. In that sense, I think I really benefited from not getting into a Ph.D. program on my first try. It can be beneficial to regroup and realize that maybe what you thought you wanted to do isn't actually what you want to do.

This happens in academia far too often. You could have near-perfect GRE scores, GPA, letters of recommendation, and even fit; yet you're still not selected. Social capital is a powerful thing, I wish there was more research on it. I worry when applying to programs that also have a terminal masters because of how often schools transition (though deserving) students from the masters to PhD program. Faculty of a student that know other faculty. Students finding their POI at a conference and getting face-time...they are playing the game. In IO we learn about how the most random factors like name and handshake can affect your likelihood to receive a job offer, especially when the process is unstructured. The application process is very unstructured: some professors hate the GRE, some love applied experience, some publications, sometimes it's just random in terms of who you apply to. It's hard not to take it personal. Graduate applicants are conscientious; you can tell by the path they've chosen.  However, I've never met someone intrinsically motivated that didn't get in. Keep hope. Learn. Find out what the accepted candidates "had" that you didn't. Objectively you may have been much higher on the list, but the list isn't objective; otherwise, a computer would select who gets in. 
 
 
In reality: I cry and listen to Katy Perry's "The One That Got Away"