uberskooper

I would recommend you retake. Look at the average score for each institution listed on SIOP. 1130 isn't great. It may get you into some Masters programs.

I may be able to give you some advice if you have any questions. I started the last I/O thread (it looks like it's still there at the bottom of the page). Since that time, I've been accepted into a Ph.D program and will begin classes in about 3 weeks. Out of curiosity, which programs are you applying for? I keep hearing that last year was a tough year to get in and that this year isn't any better. I personally think that it doesn't matter much for serious minded students.

I know! When I talked to one of the profs before I applied, she told me that they have an interview weekend. They don't pay for anything. And if you don't show up, it counts as a strike against you. She said that grad school was a big investment and a truely serious applicant should make the effort to come to an interview. While I suppose this is true, it's still a dick move on the part of the school to require a face-to-face interview that they don't help pay for. It's a huge burden to ask of poor students. I don't understand why a phone interview doesn't suffice if they really want to penny pinch.

I got a letter today from Case Western Reserve University. I wasn't accepted into their Organizational Behavior program. Oh well. At least now I won't have to fork out money for a mandatory in-person interview that they don't help pay for at all.

That's a bummer. It feels doubly unfair when it might have been someone elses mistake rather than your own merit. I hope you get accepted into one of your other choices. I haven't heard back from anywhere else besides the ones I already mentioned. I've lost hope on Purdue, because someone on the results page got accepted there a few weeks ago and said they were one of three. Oh well. We'll see about the others.

A professor that I did undergrad research with actually got an article published in Science on the subject. He did a huge meta analysis of scores of admissions tests for various disciplines (GRE, MCAT, etc) compared to various measures of grad student performance (publications, grades, time in school). He found that these tests were actually pretty good predictors, with correlations between .3 and .5. They aren't the best, but they're decent predictors of performance and the best we've got. That being said, everyone still hates taking them.

Ouch! That really sucks. I thought most programs informed you if you had stuff missing. Is it really an official rejection? Maybe you can still send them whatever they need, especially if it's something dumb like a transcript.

I'm interested in working with Christiansen and Wagner. They both seemed nice when I contacted them and they do solid reserach, and they publish a lot. I'm definately more on the Industrial side of I/O, though some things on the O side interest me. I kind of got the same imrpession from GWU also. It's definately more on the O side. Though they are due to get two new faculty members, which might change things up. I don't know how much chance I'll have at GWU anyway, or even if I want to go since their stipened is the same as everywhere else but the cost of living is incredibly larger. Do you go to CMU? It's a pretty good school. Who do you work with? How's the town. One of my main concerns is that my girlfriend won't be able to find a job in Mt. Pleasant.

I've been accepted to Central Michigan University today. No word on funding until later. So far I have two acceptences, one waitlist, and one interview (which I declined).

All this talk about how good the applicant pool is this year and whatnot makes me glad that I was accepted into a program I wanted to attend early on. For those of you talking about Central Michigan, it's a good school but I thought they were more of a safety school. Just look on the SIOP website. They get like 50 applicants on average, but they make about 25 offers. Meaning most everyone chooses to go elsewhere. It probably has more to do with the location then the quality of the school, but still. It looks like someone was one of three people to get into the Purdue I/O program. I wasn't called so I was probably not one of the three. Just as well. The guy I wanted to work with was not tenured and could leave me high and dry.

Yep. That was me. I got into Wright State today. Yeay!

I just finished a second interview with Wright State. Hopefully I'll get an offer from them. I should know in a week or two.

Got an interview from Wright State today. A good sign.

Has anyone heard back from any of their programs yet? I'm anxious to start getting offers.

How do you folks extract any useful information out of applyingtograd? The Livejournal format makes it hard to navigate. I'm primarily interested finding people in my field (I/O Psychology), and preferably those applying to the same schools as me.

Your situation is a little similar to mine. At one point I thought it might be a palatable idea to go premed (thanks mom), so I tried to double major in psychology and physiology. I thought that I would major in both, take the GRE and MCAT, and decide where my best chances were. In order to complete undergrad on schedule, I had to take pretty heavy course loads in the sciences. 20 credits and 2 jobs held concurrently (as well as a lack of real interest in physiology) ended up with me getting exhausted and doing poorly all year. The result was a GPA drop from 3.7 to 3.3. After this, I decided to just stick to psychology (my original plan) and not to follow my parents' advice. Anyway this really isn't about me, it's about you. You can still get into a Ph.D grad program. What is your final GPA going to be? From my reading, anything above a 3.5 will not afford you a great competitive advantage in most schools*. Even a 3.0 can get you into lower tier programs**. GPA (and GRE scores) serve more as a screen to junk out unworthy applicants. After that, your letters of recommendation, statement of purpose, and relevant experiences (research, teaching) that hold more weight. My advice to you is to use your remaining time to get into an I/O lab and get all the experience you can. Take all the I/O classes you can. Try to develop your research interests, so that you will have something to talk about in your statement of purpose (along with all that research experience). Your time in the lab will also give you some good recommendations. Check out the SIOP website for program listings to find admission information about I/O programs and faculty research interests that match with your own. Do well on the GRE. You can also explain why your GPA was so low in your statement of purpose. That's what I did. http://www.siop.org/gtp/gtplookup.asp *Except ultra competitive schools, but even for them I think that a very high GPA (say 4.0) will afford you no great advantage over another applicant with a slightly lower GPA (say 3.8). ** Though a 3.0 is the BARE minimum. Below that your are pretty much screwed. I think a 2.7 will get you into some Masters programs.

Hi! Good luck with your applications. Which programs are you applying to?

I hope that the above is true. Less competition + more TA monies = a good time for me.

I don't think that this forum as a whole is representative of grad applicants in general. We are the bare few who are pedantic enough to register and post in this grad community, let alone find it on the swathes of crap available on the internet. From my reading, most grad school applicants are people who don't even bother to research the schools they are applying to outside of some basic rankings information (Hey! Newsweek says that this school is good for Psychology! Clinical is the same as Cognitive Neuroscience isn't it? Hurrr.), let alone bother looking at faculty they want to work with and putting in effort to contact them. In some ways I don't blame them. It's hard to put together a good application while trying to deal with finals, research, and other undergrad stuff. I'm not too intimidated because I did my research and I know the averages for the schools I'm applying to. I made sure I was close to or above what they usually accepted. I made sure I had faculty who shared my research interests and took the time to contact them in advance. If this website was representative of grad applicants, then I only have one person applying to schools in my sub field, and there are only two overlapping schools.

Our troubled economic times has gotten me to thinking about how this might impact my grad school admission prospects. I'm not too worried about the surge of applications grad schools recieve, since it takes a lot of preperation to be a serious contender for a doctoral program. What does concern concern me are fewer funded slots and less stipend money. Can anyone in the know tell me how grad schools are impacted by a bad economy? Are there special funds put aside to ensure that they schools have quality grad students to teach classes and do research?

Definitely name faculty whose work interests you. It can do way more good than harm. Use a formal title (Dr. So and So). While you will eventually be on a first name basis with these people, you are not yet. Don't listen to Ferrero, he threadshits on everything. I bet he's either a bitter grad student who thinks it's funny to mess with applicants or a hyper competitive prick who hopes his comments will "weed out the competition."

This is only the case when a school has rolling admissions. I applied really early specifically because I thought it would confer a huge advantage, only to discover that all the programs I was applying for reviewed all of their applications at the same time, after the deadline. There might be some axillary benefits to applying early, such as more time to fix any problems that might arise or the chance that the admissions committee might look at the applications in periodic batches in order to decrease the crush of work after the deadline. I don't believe these offer a huge advantage that you should be worried about.

Portland's application was the most archaic of all the programs I am applying too. It's entirely paper based, no online component at all. I submitted my GRE scores to the school of graduate studies (since ETS does that by default) and sent the rest of my materials to the psychology department, as the form requested. The grad school told me that many applicants do this, you should just email them a reminder to forward it to the appropriat department. I contacted nearly all of my programs to verify that they recieved everything and followed up with them if anything needed to be resent. I say nearly because some schools were really slow about getting back to me and since they were not top picks I decided not to exert the effort. I ended up recieving letters from these programs much later saying they had my documentation. My top picks are Wayne State (excellent faculty match and funding), Wright State University (same reasons), and Purdue (the guy I want to work with is studying some damn cool stuff). I also like Central Michigan even though it's in the middle of nowhere because of great faculty fit and they're all tenured, this unlikely to leave me hanging. The wait until February is too long! I want to be accepted now and have peace of mind.

My interests are in performance prediction, selection, job analysis, and workplace justice. Who do you want to work with at PSU? I contacted Drs. Truxillo and James. Only Truxillo replied. He was polite, but he wouldn't let me talk to any of his grad students (which an admission advisor relative of mine has told me is suspicious). It was the coldest reception I received from all of my prospective programs. All the other potential advisors I contacted were friendly and helpful. Outside of that, Truxillo only does something vaguely related to what I want to do anyway, so PSU is one of my last choices. If it comes down to you or me, I hope you get into that program. I saw that you also want to apply GWU. It's a good school and I hope I get in. They're set to receive some new faculty too. Hopefully they share some of my interests if my prospective advisor decides to leave.

While I not an expert on grad school admission, I have read quite a bit about it. This topic is interesting to me as we are in the same field. My situation is in a way the opposite of yours. I have a relatively low GPA (3.34) and a decent GRE score (1310) for the schools I am applying to. Your score will hurt the most at programs that automatically junk anyone below a certain score. Even if they say there are no minimums, some schools get so many applicants that they make cuts almost immediatly. A grad student at Wright State told me that a min of 1200 GRE will get your application looked at. Once you get passed that, things you actually did (research, conferences, teaching, publications) weigh more heavily. Your credentials are good otherwise. Don't worry too much about and explain the reason for your score in your SOP. That's what I did.