paraent

I expect that practically all interview invites from the schools on my radar will be out within the coming two weeks. Moment of truth... Oh, I guess the interviews have to go well, too. Haha...

business casual w emphasis on conveying professionalism

Most interviews give you an opportunity for an opening or closing statement if they don't specifically ask about your interest in the program/lab. Whenever they give you the opportunity just tell them they're your top choice and explain why.

I dunno, maybe it's different in clinical psych, but I can think of loads of PIs who wouldn't care if a prospect had psych coursework if they instead had extensive and relevant research experience. Of course, all those PIs I'm thinking of probably focus on engineering/math graduates over philosophy ones when considering the matter, so maybe that's the thing. But I suspect this guy could potentially leverage his top tier philosophy degree to get an RA job in some moral psychology lab or even one that really figures logic into its theorizing. If he's successful there there are a lot of graduate schools he'd be able to leverage that into. Getting the position would certainly require a lot of luck, but the path afterward is no one near as doomed as you're implying. In fact, if OP would be interested in a non-clinical program, if he pms me with more details about his degree focus I might be able to share with him some examples of philosophy-adjacent psych labs he might have a future in. He could email any of their profs for advice and potentially find a path into the field.

Need research experience and clinical volunteering experience to get into a good school. Will take a year or two of this for you to get enough to be competitive imo.

I can never explain as clearly as I'd like to how fundamentally mysterious a thing the mind is. Like, it strikes me as super weird that I'm "taking in" and making sense of reality from the perspective of some arbitrary American boy and not that of someone else or of a rock or of no one at all. Any of those scenarios make almost equal amounts of sense given what I know about the universe, but we're in this one and I don't know why. I mean, if you think about it, our brains, the supposed seat of all mental life, is not very different at all from the computer you're using to read this. The exact processes being executed are different and the hardware's even more different, but the entire body of science on how the brain works offers no indication that our skulls hold anything more than really complicated symbol processing machines sculpted through evolution to process and act on information in our environments. In principle, no particular neuron in our brains does anything more complicated than what an undergrad could and maybe already has written in Python or C or some other programming language, but somehow from a concert of billions of those things, my brain doesn't just organize intelligent behavior: I have and you have these vivid, phenomenological, subjective experiences that make us, well, subjects in this universe instead of just objects! I mean, like any old rock in this universe, our bodies constantly move and are affected by ongoing physical and chemical processes happening in and around us. But we're also experiencing this dynamic, and if symbol processing explains that then it's something literally every atom in the universe is doing to at least some extent and even in that case there's nothing obvious out there to account for why. I've studied a lot of philosophy tied to this; I've read Dennett and Chalmers and Jackson and Searle and Ryle and Descartes and so on, but I still really, really don't know understand how simple chemicals could ever be conceivably be deconstituted and rearranged and "set off" in a way that makes them subjects in the way we are. I don't want to sound grandiose, but I sincerely think solving that mystery is potentially the most important endeavor anyone can do on this planet. I think it's key to understanding our place in this universe and what we really are. I know that sounds really mystical, and I don't at all mean to imply that something supernatural is going on (indeed, maybe just looking at the facts in a different way will clear things up immediately), but I'm convicted that it's a real fundamental mystery that we're a long, long way from solving. I don't know how anyone could even find out, but I think it depends on advancing our understanding of lots of smaller mysteries about how the mind works, maybe even through the uniquely powerful computationalist framework I just said doesn't seem to really solve the issue. But I don't think the necessary advances will inevitably happen as the wheels of society and science keep turning, and to be honest, I personally want to be part of the story of how we figure this all out. I want to build a lab that focuses on this mystery; I want to train students who'll do the same; I want a platform where I can do and think about and explore this stuff relatively singlemindedly rather than under someone else's close direction or as a byproduct thereof. Therefore, I want to be a professor. Don't get me wrong - I know that there are a lot of fun and interesting ways I could make the most of my life. I could find fulfillment from a career in industry, healthcare or even as a stay-at-home dad. In the end, the reason I've committed to this goal instead of others is because I just genuinely enjoy the practice of science, independently of what comes out of it. In fact, this post probably could have just been me saying that instead of this melodramatic mini-essay. I guess I wanted to give a sense of where that intrinsic enjoyment comes from: this really deep-set curiosity about what's going on when someone thinks and feels and lives...

having a lot of threads makes it harder to notice when something interesting has happened imo but i get the idea all my labs are cognitive something; hope i end up in a good one

Don't know about clinical. I actually found a really useful document earlier outlining the clinical interview calendar across many schools but it was useless for me so I lost it.

Can confirm they emailed a lot of penn invites yesterday. Can also confirm that 2/15 and 2/22 are dates set aside for interviews. No knowledge if they’ll send out more but I hope this info is useful.

I’ve been in this situation just with the various same-school skype interviews I’ve had. My strategy has been to be honest about your interests, but also be ready to talk about what interests you about the interviewer’s work and maybe parallels between your interests in theirs.

I'm fine typing here that the initials are RE. I imagine my last few posts are identifying anyway. I wish everyone the best; it's a shame that we all have to go through something so stressful.

hehe it turns out the invite was for me people pay money for this kind of shock and excitement

Kinda strange. Very few skype calls have popped up on the results page for UPenn, but this email is an invitation to a campus interview. I suppose Columbia was similar, though.

ugh i just got an interview invite from upenn addressed to someone else this week is really showing me no mercy

i got rejected from a thing today, not a grad school but pretty similar app process boy it stings! feeling pretty discouraged about everything everywhere now but i imagine the feeling will pass

My first skype interviewer told me that there'd likely be multiple skype interviews before campus interviews happen. The inference is that it'll be a while...

sry im such a ball of anxiety haha

Can't shake the feeling that I was a bit too uneven for my Brown interview Monday (I was a bit sleep-deprived!) but it seems that I'm bound to get more chances before they decide who will be invited to campus or not. Vanderbilt is similarly ranked and seem to be making much better progress there, though I suppose in the back of my head I was hoping to stay in the northeast US. If I were more clearheaded I'd probably be focusing more on my schools that have broken the top 20. I wonder how much rank matters for a person's career. Suppose my best result this year were a top 30 school. If I were sure I could get into a top 10 by waiting another year and building my CV, would that be the right call? Or would it just unduly slow my career by another year? Of course I know that it's the lab I should be focusing on over departments, but department data useful for comparision is much more accessible than single-lab stuff (beyond H-indices and whatnot). And perhaps more concretely, some credible research suggests that graduates frop top 10 departments are vastly overrepresented in professorships and so on, but on the other hand postdocs seem more important in theory and yet also reasonably accessible. Hmm. Either way, think I might spend some time this month applying to non-grad school stuff in case I do end up in a situation where another year as a postbac turns out to be the best available option.

ftr a solid alternative to postbac programs is getting a job in research there are a lot of those for BAs in neuroscience and they pay enough to live on and result in great experience

I've been invited out for one place but they're doing more of a reimbursement thing instead of buying the ticket for me. I thought this would be fine, but I'm having trouble scrounging up the needed cash to eventually get reimbursed! Course, I'm sure I'll find a way.

egh, hope that doesn't stop people from filling out the gradcafe's results tool

Have an overall 3.1 gpa and extensive research experience and am not having a bad time applying for grad schools (phd) at all. Of course it's really difficult to compare two apps by numbers alone but overall I'd say go for it, and focus on your research background in the app.

The psych department one has a primarily psych curriculum while the BBSP one has a primarily neurobiology curriculum. e.g.: https://bnpsych.unc.edu/curriculum/ https://www.med.unc.edu/neuroscience/curriculum/courses/ Psych neuro work often uses higher level methodology like fMRI/EEG research paired with computational modeling and behavioral experiments. Another common difference I see between psych and bio neuro programs is that the former is mostly an apprenticeship in one lab while bio neuro programs tend to begin with rotations between several labs before committing to a lab and thesis project. Because of this more communitarian approach to studentship, individual profs tend to have less agency over whether a particular bio neuro applicant get in than over whether a particular psych neuro applicant gets in, since the decision has broader implications for other labs' work. Alternatively, fit into a particular lab matters a bit more when you apply via the psych track while it matters less when you apply via the bio track. Not sure if that's true specifically for chapel hill or not, though.

Should look at job listings at different universities. Many labs are looking for lab managers and research specialists and that's often the postbac path to building one's resume for psychology grad school admissions. Anna Schapiro at UPenn for instance is looking right now for a lab manager/research specialist.

depends on the institution imo