Arcadian

Lol..."science PhD." Sorry, I just found it funny how vague you were. What field are you in?

That would be a logical fallacy, for why would the materials surrounding my body bare at all on my intellectual merits? Try to have some objectivity. I realize that most people are bogged down in social norms, but I would hope that most academics are able to rise above that.

If money and social status are factors involved with your depression, please realize that it is not your fault. Depression is, to a large extent, a socially-induced illness. I am a huge advocate of emphasizing environmental factors in mental illness. Is it your fault that education, a social institution for gaining knowledge and skills, has the potential to strip you of your present and future resources (financial and otherwise)? Of course not. Your biggest mistake would be to conflate a social problem with a self problem. Once you acknowledge this fact, you can begin to adjust your thoughts and behaviors accordingly. When you find yourself thinking something negative, correct it by responding with an equal-and-opposite positive thought. If you have to, make yourself obsessed with positive thinking. Cognition affects behavior, and vice versa. Then we move inside the head. It is known that depression, whether it is endogenous or exogenous in nature, correlates with a chemical imbalance in the brain. The details are still being worked out, but what is known is that certain classes of medicine (e.g. selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs) are as effective as the best psychotherapy currently available (e.g. cognitive behavior therapy, or CBT). There are no known long-term risks associated with medicine like this, so in a sense you have nothing to lose in trying it. Considering the current movement in psychiatry to emphasize biological mechanisms, you would have little trouble acquiring a prescription for such a medicine. (When you consider that their efficacy is often matched by a placebo effect, this might seem discouraging. But the placebo effect actually involves the same internal mechanism as taking anti-depressants - except that the mechanism is initiated by endogenous agents.) As far as the broad question of "how to live one's life," my advice is to make a list of priorities and distribute your time according to those priorities. If raising a family is your number one priority, then you should spend more time with that than anything else. Sometimes we have to sacrifice things that are incompatible with other things in our lives. My personal #1 priority is to learn as much as I possibly can about my field and contribute something novel to that field. So in my case, graduate school makes me very happy. I can't imagine doing anything else. But I don't expect everyone to be like me. I also think it helps to make everything in your life "continuous" (as opposed to the "compartmental" approach suggested elsewhere in this topic). I think a compartmental life can work, but it is likely to be less satisfying than a life in which everything you do fits together cohesively. I a'm not one person at school, a different person with friends, a different person with family, and a different person alone. I am consistently me. And I am happy about that.

My adviser sometimes neglects to respond to my emails, but he at least admits that he does this and views it as a potential problem, so he encourages me to either re-send the emails or call him. I would just re-send your email each day that he fails to respond, possibly including "IMPORTANT" in the subject line (if indeed it is important).

It sounds like their application system is too convoluted. Why would two programs have an online submission and other one requires a mail in? That's kind of dumb on their part. Obviously you're not going to say that, but I'm just saying they must be aware of the potential confusions and understanding when they do happen.

You shouldn't have applied to grad school simply because you couldn't get a job...but that's in retrospect. I guess you should start looking for jobs now, finish the semester, and then tell your adviser that you realized grad school isn't going to work for you (or some such vague reasoning, don't actually say you "hated" it). I think it's obvious that you will never want to return because you don't like research or academia. So start planning for whatever it is that you do want, and then gradually shift your focus to that.

Heh, I started college as a chemical engineering major for similar reasons. It was really a terrible decision, though, and I quickly fell into academic probation. Then I switched to psychology and everything was fine.

Interesting story. How did you take up an interest in social psychology after majoring and researching in chemistry? I read your whole post thinking you would say you were going into biopsychology or psychopharmacology, so I was surprised when you said social.

What exactly is sex therapy? Forgive my ignorance, but this sounds like it could be different things. Is there a distinction between sex therapists and clinical psychologists who specialize in sexual disorders? Or are those the same thing?

I wouldn't use the word "unfortunately." Avoid sounding negative, just say you are interested but cannot make a final decision yet.

I think this could potentially be a good choice, but it depends. You should know that academic psychology is primarily research-oriented. Even clinical psychology is heavily research-based, and therapy is often secondary. The trouble is, most people want to become clinical psychologists (or counselors) when they start studying psychology - partly because that's what most people mistakenly think psychology is all about - but most people end up going into different fields. An undergraduate psychology degree is focused on experimental psychology, the scientific study of behavior and cognition. All of your required courses will relate to experimental - not clinical or counseling - psychology. At most, you might take one or two electives in those areas, but not all schools offer them. There is also an emphasis on inferential statistics and research design and analysis. If you actually want to be a clinical psychologist - do a lot of reading before making this decision - you will need a BA in psychology and then a PhD in clinical. In that case, you have no choice. If you want to be a counselor, there are several routes to doing that. Many of them don't require a BA in psychology, and many of the graduate programs in counseling are in departments other than psychology. There is also a concern that your writing will need some, uh...de-individuation. As a graduate of English and history, your writing is undoubtedly brilliantly verbose, and your voice beautifully distinct. When you write scientific papers, all that will need to change. You will opt for brevity wherever possible, and your voice will have to be removed. (There is a social psychologist in my department with a bachelor's degree in English, so it does happen.) On the other hand, I generally think psychology is one of the best majors for anyone to take, because psychology is the most intuitively interesting subject in the world. All humans by nature desire to understand how other humans think and behave. The methodology is where many people lose interest, but the content is utterly fascinating. Not only that, but psychology is still a developing science, so there is no unifying theoretical paradigm for it as a science. This means that young/current psychologists are potentially playing a pivotal role in the history of psychology. If you are an empirical and analytical thinker, you will love it.

It's the latter from what I understand. But you can list more than one lab in your statement of purpose. So to answer your original question - if you only apply to that one lab with the famous person, then by sheer deductive reasoning, the probability of acceptance is lower. But if you apply to other labs with not-so-famous people, then no it isn't (the effect is wiped out). But the problem with deductive logic is that it ignores the context of your situation, e.g. how well do you fit in that lab? So don't be discouraged by that.

The program that accepted me invited me to interview in late February, and the interview weekend was in March.

I expect to have in the range of 3-6 publications by the time I finish the program. However, several of these will be third/fourth/fifth author. (I have a couple of those in progress now.) If you mean only first-author publications, I expect two at the most...maybe even just one. But I really don't know.

I'm in my first semester with my PhD program, and I am involved with a research project that I don't really want to be involved with. I am actually working on two projects, call them project 1 and project 2. Project 1 is fine - it is a combination of my own ideas and an extension of a post-doc's past research in the lab, we have collected pilot data and are beginning to analyze it, and there are prospects for a publication. That is not the point of this topic, but it provides context. Project 2 is...strange. It is a topic that does not interest me, and it has almost nothing to do with my desired program of research. Data was collected for this study three years ago, but it's one of those datasets that various researchers continue to analyze to produce easy publications. I showed up on the first day to work in my lab, and the post-docs told me about this project. They did not ask me if I wanted to work on it. The next day, they told me to begin compiling the data. There were so many problems with the coding, and the data was so disorganized, it is frankly a pain in the ass to deal with it. At first I didn't mind helping out because I was eager to get into research, and I have heard that it is good for a new grad student to be involved with more than one project. But now we're deep into the semester, things are getting busy, and I literally don't have time to work on this Project 2 in light of my other obligations. And yet every day, I am pushed to get more work done on it. Now, my adviser wants me to present analyses by next week. The only reason why I might want to keep working on this is because I might get a publication out of it. But is it really beneficial to be a third/fourth author on a paper that has absolutely nothing to do with my future research? And it sort of pisses me off that everyone in my lab just assumed I would want to work on this without asking me, despite the fact that there are lots of other research projects in and around our lab that I would rather be working on. My adviser is just really insistent that this project is important, but I completely disagree. Frankly, I view this entire project as frivolous, difficult to generalize, and uninteresting to most people. My adviser even seems to think this might be dissertation material down the road, and I do NOT want this to be my dissertation topic. I'm debating whether I should press on and get this done, or just tell my adviser that I don't care about it anymore. If I press on, that might create the false impression that I care about it. But of course it's hard to tell someone that I don't care about their research program.

I support it. I've been a Zeitgeist movement supporter for years, too. As Peter Joseph likes to say, we're not the 99%, we're the 100%, and everyone is to blame for this fucked-up social structure. The rich-elites are not "evil" and probably believe their lifestyle is healthy. They are victims of culture. "Socialism vs. capitalism" is a false dichotomy, and I wish people would stop referencing either of those nearly meaningless terms. Most economic systems are fundamentally the same in the sense that they are based on monetary, interest-based accrual of debt. The observation that activists are "spoiled white kids" is inaccurate and fallacious. The movement is now global, so it follows that activists are from a range of socioeconomic statuses and ethnic groups. Remember that this is truly a global, not a national issue. In the end, there are no "national" issues or "white" issues or "female" issues or "gay" issues. There are only human issues. Yes, we know life is generally better now than it was in the 60s, but that is a red herring. No one is equating the current movement with counterculture movements of the past. This is arguably bigger. Simpy stating that life is better than it was in X time does not suggest that everything is fine now. Whatever problems existed in the world back then are still alive today, just in a different form. Perhaps that form was latent for a while, but now it is beginning to rear its ugly head, and people are waking up to that sad truth. "The true terrorists of our world do not meet at the docks at midnight or scream 'Allah Akbar' before some violent action. The true terrorists of our world wear 5000 dollar suits and work in the highest positions of finance, government and business." (Zeitgeist Addendum)

Apply to UT Dallas! You might be interested in John Hart's work. We have a lot of memory experts here, but Hart is the semantic memory specialist. It's a growing program. (My undergrad credentials were very similar to yours, too, so you probably have a good chance of being accepted.)

My classes are overall easier than I expected, and they're not very time consuming, either. I study about 3-5 hours a week, but I'm involved with two research projects and I TA for a class, so most of my time goes to those. I am taking a "research methods" class which is basically a review of undergrad stats, a cognitive science course which is a general survey of the field, and a seminar which is pass/fail based on attendance. So yeah...pretty easy so far.

Usually, doctoral applications are due in December-February, while master's applications are due in March-July. This is done intentionally so that people who applied to doctoral programs but were rejected will still have time to apply for master's programs. I had the same initial strategy as you - apply to a bunch of PhD programs and one MS program as a backup. However, the application for that MS program wasn't due until July 1, so I filled out the application but waited to submit it. Then I got accepted into my PhD program in March, and I deleted the MS application.

Haha, um, no. I majored in engineering my first two years, and life sucked. (I mean, I'm an optimistic person, so I was okay, but relatively it sucked.) I've been much happier ever since I changed to psychology. You seem to think that a bigger "payoff" in the end is worth it, but not if you don't enjoy your work. I'd much rather spend 5-10 years not making much money but doing research than I would just graduating college and going to work for some corporation. And I've heard of many people who "bit the bullet" and finished their engineering degrees just because they would make more money, and they are not happy with their lives. Besides, there is a fundamental difference between science and engineering. If you want to study basic questions about the nature of reality, you should be a scientist. If you want to apply what scientists have already discovered to specific technologies and problems, then you should be an engineer. That's like, the first question you should ask yourself before you even begin to consider graduate school. To the point of the topic: it depends on how good you are at coping with stress. Sometimes you have to just sit back, take a deep breath, and realize that in the grand scheme of things, your problems aren't that serious. Then you move on with your life, taking it one step at a time.

GPA: 3.2 overall, 4.0 psychology GRE: 1250 (680 q, 550 v) 1 year of research (and nothing to show for it except a decent letter of rec) I was accepted at UT Dallas, a relatively small but up-and-coming research institution. It's ranked #2 in the UT system (behind Austin), its population and funding are both growing, and they are bringing in some great faculty from other universities. I feel like I kind of "sneaked in the back door" so to speak, because it will become increasingly more difficult to get into this program as they start receiving more applications. But it really is a great fit for me, as the department is focused on the precise research directions I want to pursue. They offer both PhD and terminal Master's degrees in several areas (the main divisions are developmental/social/cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, systems neuroscience, communication science, and speech-language-pathology/audiology). I am in the PhD program for cognitive neuroscience. http://bbs.utdallas.edu/

I had a similar situation. I also had a rough first 2 years followed by an exceptional last 2 years. Unfortunately, it seems that schools do look at overall GPA to some extent, so the applicants who were great all four years have a slight advantage. However, I had to change majors, and I only had one year of research experience, so you've got me there. It primarily depends on finding specific researchers who want to take you in. Don't just apply to schools because they have a good reputation or something. Decide based on which labs are a good fit for you.

Alright, thanks for the insight. The difference between your wife's research and mine is that I'll be working exclusively with human subjects (as in common in cognitive neuroscience, especially in the functional brain imaging methodology). I have stats/research methods Monday at 7-10, a cognitive science course Wednesday at 7-10, and a seminar Thursday at 1-4. My TA class is Tuesday/Thursday 4-5. One inconvenience with my program is that our research lab is a 30-minute drive away from main campus, so commute times have to be factored in as well. (On the other hand, it's a really nice research center, so I can't complain.)

I have questions more related to the research aspects of grad school, directed at lab-based experimental sciences. How many hours do you spend in the lab per day during your first year? Is there a specific work schedule, like having a 9-5 job? I was told that I will be learning from post-docs my first semester and starting my own project in the spring. So what exactly (in your estimation) does that entail? I have read my student handbook and asked the current students some questions, but there is still some uncertainty. As for coursework and TA duties, I'm all set. My grad courses are in the evenings and my TA class is in the afternoon, presumably freeing up mornings for research. Is this typical?

I fit the criterion that you mentioned - overall GPA 3.2, last two years 4.0. I got into a program, but was rejected by seven others. There are all kinds of variables at work here - the competitiveness of the schools, research experience, fit with the program, etc.