psychowannabee

Interviews already happened.

The admissions committee for your chosen program and the awards committee within that university are often not linked to one another. This means that the awards people do not know whether you did or did not receive an admission at the time that they were reviewing your CGSM application and vice versa. This leads to situations like yours where people's CGSM app might be deemed meritorious by the awards committee but not get an admissions offer.

A friend of mine got an offer from U of A yesterday - thesis. Got a phone call from their PI.

I echo what @SoundofSilence have said. A lot of your plans of "transferring" into a clinical program after a year or two of psy.d and "working on the side" to beef up your research experience are a tad bit unrealistic and simplistic. In reality, those are extremely rare to happen and you can't put all your eggs on tha basket and hope that it works out. Doctoral programs requires a lot of work as you are balancing multiple things at once ( as a student, TA, clinician, researcher, the list goes on). There's a reason why most APA/CPA accredited programs limit their students to working 20 hrs a week outside of their academic duties as it can be extremely difficult to do all of those while prioritizing your research as a doctoral student. As it has been mentioned, doctoral supervisors do look up your past academic history and taking a program (the psy.d) with the sole purpose of leaving it in 2 years as a stepping stone for a phd is a huge red flag. You can imagine what kind of letter of rec you can get from your potential psy.d supervisor if you intended to leave their lab in the first place. The idea of transferring to an insitution is not as easy as you make it seem to be. You will be reassesed just like everyone else (under grad, people with MA), and it doesn't give you an advantage to apply as a previously admitted psy.d student (in fact it might hurt) unless you came out with tangible, quality experience (pubs, etc.). Also, unless you're going to be coming out of a masters thesis after your year 2 in the program, then your "doctoral research experience" doesn't really hold any more value than any other research experience that you gain in a post-bac or an experimental thesis. It seems like your parent does have a big control over how you make your academic decisions. I'll be honest, from the sounds of it, they don't seem to have a good grasp of how competitive this field is (which is understandable, many families of clinical/counselling phd applicant's don't, even mine). "Just get in" to grad school right after undergrad is just an unrealistic expectation for anyone who wants to go into this career trajectory. If you haven't already, I would clearly highlight what it takes to get in. In essence, they are essentially forcing you to make academically unwise decisions and brute-forcing you to programs, despite you needing more experience to actually get in. As harsh as it sounds, the clinical/counselling phd admissions process is like an extreme version of Hunger Games. Your situation is similar to someone getting sent to the games with only an army knife in your pocket (and being expected to win it all and take home the prize) while everyone else you're competing with has a full set of weapon/armoury and years of training . All odds are against your favour. If you want a true opinion. If I were in your case. I would go for a post-bac 1-2 years position or an experimental masters (with a thesis) and milk those experiences as much as possible. Get the most quality research experience that you can so that you become competitive in fully funded PHD programs where you won't have to rely on your parent to fund your education and hold you back from making wise academic decisions.

It's hard to say if it's about your letter without the full context of your application. What kind of research experience do you have? Clinical experience? Awards?

They accepted an offer from a clinical program.

My lab mate have gotten in (don't know when exactly they got the offer) but already rejected their offer for another school.

You always have the option of accepting to save your spot and giving it up later. You do lose out on your deposit but if you have no other option, at least you're not risking not getting in anywhere in the end.

I heard from a friend that U of A course-based offers have until March 15 to accept their offers, so the movements on the list might not happen till 2 weeks from now.

They typically take a combined total (thesis + course) of around 9-10 (idk if it goes higher than that) cohort with about 60-70% of those people from course based. Normally there would be 2-4 thesis students, the rest are course based.

Waitlisted at Calgary - Email from edith

Last year, someone who wast 12th on the waitlist got in. The course base definitely have movements. I would email Marsha and ask for your position on the list, they're very transparent and willing to tell you your position.

This is definitely true. For example, I have a very research background and only 2 helping related experience (Peer support, Clinical field placement). I think my heavy research background + high GPA made up for my lack of volunteer experience. I only applied and interview this cycle at 1 counselling school (Calgary), and the rest were clinical schools. Calgary for example is very social-justice based so if you did not convey any signs of social justice in your statement, they would have likely screened you out.

I would highly suggest getting your application materials (CV, Statements, Transcripts) looked over by current grad students or other applicants who have been recently successful. Not to say this is your case but I have encountered a lot of people who said they have xyz amount of years of both research and volunteer experience then when they show me their CV, the experiences they have is not something that is what these programs are actually looking for or that their research experiences are only doing surface level type of work and not too much depth.

No, the PI they applied to for thesis based called them to let them know they got in to both streams. So this is specific to the PI. I assume everyone else will be hearing from Marsha via email. Nope, we come from a smaller university in Edmonton.