adk20180312

At the end of the day, your choice is probably highly personal and will probably depend on your interests, background, what you can see yourself "falling back" on, etc. In my case, I chose an experimental program that offers a heavy stats component and a lot of research opportunities, and I can graduate fairly quickly with my prior coursework transfer. Also I can't see clinical work/testing being my back up. Clinical programs I've looked at (particularly locations I was interested in) didn't offer the things I was looking for in my phd training. If the clinical program offers whats important to you and you can see yourself leveraging skills from the clinical program to positions in/outside academia, then definitely go for it. In my situation that wasn't the case, so I went experimental. I'm glad this topic is getting many responses because this is probably a frequent question people have. Sorry re typos, on my phone.

Agree with Oshawott. If you can't see yourself doing clinical work at all, then no point going to a clinical psych program. Also wanted to mention that it is possible to do research with clinical populations even as part of an experimental program (from personal experience, several friends in grad schools, and supervisors). However, I am thinking the reason it is more difficult is that your program is not going to have as much access to those populations, so you will need to put in additional legwork when it comes to finding those folks, learning additional clinical assessments (maybe), etc. In that case, I'd look for a PI who is either a clinician by training, but focused on research exclusively, or if they are not a clinician, then they are using the populations/techniques you are interested in. As far as the job prospects, as paranoid as I am myself on the subject, unless your goal is exclusively a tenure track position at an R1 university, then you will have options upon graduation. During the interview cycle and prior to that, I spoke to multiple people with an experimental psych phd, and everyone said they had either post-docs or industry jobs lined up prior to finishing the program. Just my lengthy two cents.

Hi everyone! I was originally going to post this topic under "Jobs", but I think it may be more relevant here. I just got accepted into an Experimental Psych PhD program, but still once in a while have bouts of anxiety over "job prospects" type questions. So I thought it may be fun to start a topic on what everyone's current plans are for their PhD in Psychology? Personally, I am hoping to at least try for academia first, but am also potentially interested in working for a CRO organization (bulk of my job and research experience was in clinical research/pharma studies at a medical center). What is everyone else hoping to do when they grow up?

Bumping old thread as this is a question I had. I did my bachelor's and master's in the US and then worked in a research field on opt/stem and 1.5 years on h1b (tired of school but wanted to stay in a specific research field). I just gained admission to a phd program and wanted to see if anyone recently had experience with changing status from H1B to F1? My concern is that it won't be approved in time and I won't be able to receive tuition waiver/stipend. I was thinking I may need to go back to my home country and apply for F1, but keep being paranoid about the current immigration climate and demonstrating nonimmigrant intent (my family still lives there and I never submitted any immigrant petitions, but still). Additionally the cost of travel is a little unfeasible right now. Any recent experiences or suggestions anyone has? Thank you guys for your help!!!