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Expensiveswimmer, I’d recommend asking the PI that you’re working with if there are writing opportunities that you could get involved in. I find most PIs to be fairly flattered when a student they know fairly well does this. Many start out doing grunt work and can move past that if they ask. Maybe the assistant professor that commented earlier might have more specific advice.

Hi All, This post is a little blunt, but I hope that it is helpful. I hope to offer a little bit of a unique perspective to the grad school admissions process. We've had a courageous professor that has stepped up and offered some insight, but I have yet to see any comments from current graduate student from an R1 university. To give you a little bit of a background of where I came from, I came from a disadvantaged background, and almost didn't make it through high school - I flunked out of calculus. Right now is a super anxiety provoking time of your lives during the admissions process even without COVID-19. Throughout this post, I am going to focus on what you may not all be considering and what is out of your control. The first thing that is not getting enough attention is the virus. This caused a huge increase in the number of applications and a decrease in available funds. This means that a) the already small number of graduate student lines at my university decreased by a lot, and b) there were more competitive applicants than ever before. This application cycle is incredibly unusual and should not be considered to be normative. You all were extraordinarily unlucky applying this year. Second, although there are structural limitations (e.g., GRE) that can prevent quality minority applicants from receiving interviews at top-tier R1 universities, I come from a university with grad students and faculty that are diverse and that have ongoing diversity initiatives to recruit diverse grad students and faculty. Because we have these initiatives, we recruit top quality diverse candidates. These students come from a different universities including R1 and even R3 universities. Regardless of their sexual orientation, race, or socioeconomic background, these applicants come in with several (sometimes first authored) publications, presented at several peer reviewed conferences, won several research grants, AND are excellent clinically. Indeed, the most diverse graduate students in my department are often the ones with the best credentials. Further, a PI is not going to work with you unless you have those research "chops" that we like to talk about so much. Third, if the numbers alone don't convince you, this is a competitive field. Many individuals want to be clinical psychologist, and let me tell you - it really is some of the most gratifying work I've done. This includes the research, grant writing, computer coding, course load, assessments, and therapy hours. But a lot of people want to do the work. This means you have to establish yourself as a competitive applicant, and I will tell you from several conversations that I have had with several who aspire to be clinical psychologist, many are not. So here is my unsolicited advice for getting into graduate school and becoming what I believe is a competitive applicant in two pretty difficult steps. This first one is the most important: find a competent clinical psychological scientist that takes an interest in you as a person - this needs to happen. If it happens correctly, this person will advocate on your behalf that you are indeed a good person to work with to the potential PI of your dreams. Second, to be a really competitive applicant, you need to have observable skills, if I may be blunt: many faculty don't care about your GPA as much as this forum suggests. This means you need to publish (maybe even a few times), go to a number of conferences (to meet the PI of your dreams), and maybe even learn how to code and conduct some basic statistical analyses (time to start learning R). For some, this may mean getting a masters degree (many in my program have), for others, this will mean getting a post-bac position conducting good research with a quality PI. Many graduate students have to apply multiple cycles to get into graduate school because they do not know these things. Finally, I do want to mention that there is always room for improvement and change in the system - we want and need more diverse representation in academia. As has already been stated, advocate for more funding to higher education and bug your state legislatures. Right now though, finding a high quality mentor and developing some observable skills as well as respecting some of the things that may be outside of your control may be the best option forward. Nevertheless, I wish you all the best of luck moving forward and hope you get in to the school of your dreams.