aspiring_scientist

Hi GradCafe community, I've been applying for full-time lab manager/RA/Research Coord. positions in order to gain more research experience after college and strengthen my apps for PhD graduate programs. I'm having a couple of interviews coming up. I did a quick search for this topic on GradCafe, but could only find 1 thread regarding questions that should be asked to the interviewer. I thought I'd start a new thread on questions that an applicant might be asked. In case it helps, my background is a bachelor's in psych and I'm interested in PhD programs in social/cognitive psych. Specifically, I have the following questions: 1. What are some challenging questions that I can expect to come up in an interview for these positions? a) For those who have gone through the process of applying, what would you suggest is a good way to handle these challenging questions? b) For those who have experience hiring candidates for these positions, what sort of answers were you looking for? What should the answers highlight/include? 2. For positions with multiple-round interviews: a) What is one possible reason for having more than one round of interviews? b) What might be some differences in terms of questions between the first and subsequent rounds of interviews? c) Any advice on how to stand out or make a good first impression in the first round to facilitate progression into the second round would be appreciated! Thank you! If you have info or advice on any other aspects that I haven't covered, please don't hesitate to share. Thank you so much!

Hello everyone, My apologies for the delay in reply. I had actually been waiting to hear back and felt a bit disappointed for the past two weeks as I had been under the impression that I would receive notifications or alerts via email if someone posted a reply, but I didn't receive any emails at all, so I assumed that no one had replied. I was confident I had set my notifications settings correctly to receive these alerts, but perhaps I hadn't? Anyhow, I was standing in line at a grocery store last night and thought I'd just log in and check and was really glad to see all your feedback! Thanks again for taking the time to write yours out. I appreciate it! As an update, I declined the offer from the I/O psych-focused program and aim to apply again, this time with more focus and better time management. I have been applying to lab manager/RA/Research Coord. positions in hopes of strengthening my applications. @PsygeekThanks for sharing. If you don't mind me asking, what are you doing in the interim to strengthen your applications for future seasons? I've been applying to those postbac positions as mentioned above, but wanted to make sure I'm covering all my bases and and not overlooking any available opportunities/things I could look into to strengthen my apps. @SparkybobThanks for your feedback. No, there's no reason for me to leave home right away. I know the road ahead is going to be challenging, but I'm determined to do my best and re-apply. @TakeruKThanks for sharing. That's how I felt, too about PhD programs in general and that was part of the reason why I declined my offer. I thought about the potential challenging times that I might likely face in the program where I would need to go back to my original motivations for pursuing the program, rather than focusing solely on prospective salary ranges, and didn't think that I had the motivation for this particular program. @brainlassThanks for your feedback. It definitely helps make me feel more confident about my decision. @rising_starThanks for the info and your suggestions. Yes, I talked with the faculty and grad students there on my campus visit. I've also read through the faculty research as well and it's heavily I/O psych focused. There's only one relatively new prof. with a social psych research background who studies topics of interest to me, but given this and other related factors, I didn't feel strongly enough about committing 5 years to the program. I didn't look much into obtaining only a master's there, but I believe they don't offer a terminal master's degree in this particular program. Any other feedback or advice from you guys or anyone else would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Hello GradCafe community, This is my first time posting on GradCafe, so my apologies in advance if I'm posting in the wrong forum or asking questions that may have already been answered. I did do a quick look through the website for answers/advice on my dilemma, but couldn't find much info, so I've decided to start a new topic. So long story short, I applied to 5 PhD programs in Management/Organizational Behavior (OB for short) last fall 2017. My bachelor's is in psychology and my research background is in social/cognitive psych. Part of my reasons for having applied to OB programs as opposed to traditional psych programs was that 1) I had understood that it's more competitive to get into and obtain professorship immediately for graduates of psych as opposed to OB programs and 2) OB programs generally pay their professors better than traditional psych programs. I still wanted to pursue my social/cognitive interests, so 4 out of the 5 schools I applied to were social psych focused (despite being labeled OB programs) and 1 was Industrial/Organizational (I/O) psych focused. Why did I apply to this I/O psych-focused program? To be honest, if I could do it over again, I wouldn't have. It was poor planning on my part and a severe underestimate of how much time it would take to work on applications, so the process was very rushed and lacked careful consideration from me. Anyhow, I only got accepted to the 1 I/O psych-focused OB program and rejected by all 4 others. I'm facing the hard decision of whether to 1) re-apply this coming fall 2018 to the social psych-focused programs which study topics I'm truly interested in (this includes both traditional psych and OB programs), having learned the hard way from all the mistakes I've made this application cycle OR 2) accept the 1 offer I got from the I/O-psych-focused program even though I'm not really interested in their research or topics. This decision has been weighing so heavily on my mind these past few months to the point that I've needed to see a therapist about it and that it has made me feel extremely stressed out and unhappy almost every single day. Deep down, I'm leaning towards re-applying to the programs I'm actually interested in and focusing less on the job prospects/salary reasons (I have been applying to a number of postbac opportunities to beef up my applications should I decide to go this route). One of my mentors is supportive of my decision and has been a great resource for me in seeking out these opportunities. I'd been feeling confident with my preference until another mentor recently expressed that I should try the first year of graduate work at this I/O program and if I find that I'm not enamored of it, then I may consider trying a different program then. His reasoning sounds logical, but if that actually happens and I decide to "transfer" to a different PhD program after my first year there, how possible would it be for such a "transfer"? I put "transfer" in quotation marks because I understand that it doesn't work quite like undergrad transfers. Any advice or perspectives, especially from those who have been in similar situations, would be appreciated. Thank you for your time. Signed, ~Confused and Lost