PsychedforPsych2

Here is a handout from a personal statement seminar I went to. 
I got some really solid advice from a good friend who is getting their PhD at Purdue, he talked about how to write your personal statement differently and interestingly without getting caught up in the natural formula that people use. Personal statements tend to be written chronologically. For example: "I've done A, I've done B, I've done C and those led me to D". There is nothing wrong with this, but there is a way to change it up so that your personal statement feels less formulaic and can highlight a lot more than just your resume/CV. 
Try writing your personal statement in terms of "themes". This is really hard to do because it forces you to look back on your life and analyze yourself like you are a character from a book haha. But I will show you what he sent me when I gave him my rough draft. Keep in mind that he helped me formulate this outline based on what I wrote, so yours could be very different: 
PARAGRAPH 1: Personal story
PARAGRAPH 2: Research interests: what questions interested you? 
How did your research mentor(s) introduce you to questions? PARAGRAPH 3: Research application
How did you start answering questions/researching into your interests? What were you doing to answer these questions
What did it show me (show that you know WHY you were doing research)
PARAGRAPH 4 - Research impact, personal motivation
How have you changed as a person through your research? PARAGRAPH 5 - Future; grad school (what is your research?); job after grad school (professorship, teaching, research), societal/community impact
From your past research, how have you decided what you are going to do now
 
One good way to organize your personal statement is to write what your story chronologically, then highlight in different colors the different categories of the paragraphs shown above. For example, highlight everything yellow in your personal statement that has to do with "research impact and personal motivation" and then organize your essay by color and see if you can get it to flow. If anything, this is a great exercise to conceptualize your own life, which is a super hard feat. Personal statements are very hard because of this reason. 
 
Hope this helped! Let me know if you have any questions 
 
Writing a Personal Statement_2018_handout.pdf

Here it is!
Why do you want to be pursue this field? What are your goals/how can a PhD help you attain your goals? What are you looking for in a graduate program? What interests you in our program specifically? What research are you interested in doing? If you were to design a study, what variables would you study and what methods would you use? (Usually they are wanting to get an idea of what you will do from start to finish). What are your strengths and weaknesses? What skills do you think will be helpful for completing a PhD? What challenges do you anticipate facing in graduate school? How will you handle these challenges? What are you looking for in an advisor? How have you shown initiative in your learning process? What was a difficult interpersonal experience you had in your life, while in your undergraduate or graduate program, and how did you deal with it? Name a time you failed to accomplish something. What did you learn from this experience? What is something that isn’t on your resume/CV, but you believe would be important for us to know?

I am not OP, but this would probably also be my biggest takeaway from a successful Round 2 of apps. Let's say you are interested in research topic X. If you apply to only labs that have X as a primary focus, you're going to be competing against every other applicant in the world who is also just as passionate about X as you are, and unfortunately, no matter how great your application is, it starts to become a game of chance in that scenario. Someone is probably going to edge you out based on a slightly better application or interview. On the other hand, if you apply to other labs who primarily study Y but perhaps did one project that included X or have been working in an area related to X, you can make a much more unique and convincing pitch that YOU are the one applicant who can bring this passion and experience for X to this lab that typically studies Y. 

I agree with the responses you’ve gotten so far. I’ll definitely be tweaking mine a lot and probably even re-emailing the POIs I emailed this past cycle and ask them to look out for my app again and update them on what I’ve done to try to improve my app. 

Personally, I would recommend redoing most of your old SOP, if not the whole thing. This is my second time applying. While I realized what my most obvious shortcomings were and fixed them for this round (specifically lack of clinical/research experience and published papers), there may have been other problems in my previous applications that were not so obvious that I could improve on. One of which I think was my SOP. Maybe it was fine, but personally, reading it over, I knew I could do even better. Not just with updates about my current endeavors, but just giving it a new spin to tell these schools about myself. I know the prospect of having to rewrite an SOP sounds utterly awful, but I think it'll help a lot!

Well I accidentally lost my old SOP due to being careless so I had to rewrite mine haha. Hopefully, in the extra year, you can put new stuff in your SOP (more diverse experiences more lab stuff) to make your statement a bit strong. I know my new SOP was much more focus in terms of what research I have done and what I want to do in the future.

Feeling SO grateful for all of the amazing TSA/government employees/airport staff working through this inexplicable/unnecessary shut down. 
To those of you off to interviews over the upcoming days/weeks: Remember to thank and recognize them. ❤️

This is all for social/personality, so I can't speak for any of the other areas, but: 
WashU sent out all of their interviews earlier this month and they're having interviews on the 31st of January. 
UT Austin is in the still in the process of reviewing applications and will hold interviews February and March (I emailed them on Friday so I can't guarantee this is still true). I know last application cycle they sent rejection emails to the bottom 50% of the applicant pool and interview invites to the top few percent. The rest were essentially considered "waitlisted". 
My PI initials were MS for WashU and SG for UT Austin. 

I am pretty sure that all profs invite their own students on their own time, so it would be completely dependent on who you're applying to work with. 

Does anyone know if UT Austin has sent out all clinical PhD invitations?

I personally would not ask until March when all interviews have been conducted and people have time to accept/decline offers

I am waiting on them too, I was thinking about emailing tonight/tomorrow if I do not hear anything today.
Good luck! 

anyone know if UT Austin invites were mass email?

It just says that they are still considering my application and that i have been placed on the wait list... so i'd assume, in that case, for admission? it looks like there are also a handful of other people who were also waitlisted. 

Anyone know if Boston University sent out a mass email for Clinical Psychology, Ph.D.?

What does everyone think about including the POI initials in the notes section of the results page, so that individuals do not have to request them?

It's hard for me to tell. The email is address to me instead of "Dear applicant" and has my POI's name in the body of the email, but the rest seemed like standardized information. 

Was it a personalized email or do you think it was a mass email to all interviewees at the same time?

ME FOUR. Gees. What a slow, painful death lmao. If any of y'all hear something re: Houston, let me know- I'll keep yallz in the loop as well  

No? LOL. If you got an e-mail with that information, then that's great news for you! Haven't heard ANYTHING from Houston ? 

me too please sorry to post here, wasnt sure if anyone has been checking the POI page...

For those who applied to Kentucky and/or UNC Greensboro, but haven't heard back...
I reached out to the program coordinators, and here's what I found out:
Kentucky: First round of interview invites have been sent out, but there's still a possibility of a second round. Interview dates are the end of this month, and final decisions will be made by mid-February.
UNC Greensboro: Initial reviews are still being made

Hopefully this helps ease some anxiety! I'm starting to get worried, but there's still hope.

To the person that was rejected by Case Western via email, was this a mass email or did you reach out to your POI or to the admissions office?

Saw this and was also wondering. However, it says they were invited December 19th, which is within a day of when two people posted UT Austin Counseling Psychology invitations, and UT invited clinical people mid-ish January last year, so I feel like it's safe to assume it was counseling, or at least not clinical.

to the University of Texas at Austin poster on the results page, was that for the clinical phd program?