spunky

this is a little bit vague because it depends on many things: which lab you're applying to work in, who is the PI, the area of study, your role within research, whether or not you get a publication out of it, etc... like if you work in a nameless university that has a nameless lab and all you do is run participants well.. yeah, you're not gonna get much *oomph* on that CV of yours to get into a good school. but if you're working in a well-known lab with a well-known PI and you end up getting some sort of authorship in a published paper, i'm sure that would make you a really good candidate. just as with most things in life, the answer to this one is a big *it depends*. although there is one sure thing here: having the experience of working in a lab is better than not having the experience, regardless of the lab/research/your role/etc.

THIS. research experience can make or break an application, particularly in competitive areas like clinical psych.

i was not personally in that situation when i started graduate school but i do know two people who fall under your 2nd category. both are using graduate school as a way out some pretty difficult living conditions in their home countries. although from experience as an immigrant i know you're not supposed to do that, at least in Canada. Immigration Canada doesn't really like it when you claim 'A' but you're really aiming for 'B'. i think we touched on this issue somewhere back a few months ago but the consensus i read was also that the U.S. doesn't really like it when you use a student visa as a stepping stone to obtain permanent residency.

didn't you ask the same question here? and i think consensus was that Adler falls in the category of "degree mill"/low rep school. don't really know anything about Roosevelt, sorry.

i might not be the best to answer this, but i always thought from my friends who are in clinical psych and those who are in counselling that the advantage came down to whose services are covered by insurance and whose are not? i know there is a distinction like that here in BC. but even if that were not the case.... the waiting list to see a psychiatrist even for a quick diagnosis/assessment is pretty long because there are not as many psychiatrists as there are clinical psychologists. so even if they primarily took the role of diagnosis/assessment, i'm sure clinical psychologists will find themselves quite busy (and employed!)

this suggestion is WAY too rational and sensible to be implemented. we recommend rejection

in my experience it is becoming a HUGE deal for everything. because academic positions and post-docs are becoming very competitive, hiring committees are assessing a lot of scholarly work based on things like impact factors of the journals you publish in or your H-index as a scholar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index). from conferences and friends who are pounding the pavement to get hired i've heard... well, somewhat weird comments. stuff like if you publish in journals with impact factors below 1, those publications are essentially ignored by hiring committees/grant reviewers. now, if you look at how impact factors are calculated you'll notice that one of their implications is the demarcation of your area of research. for instance, if i see an impact factor of 0.358 the easiest conclusion to jump to is that it is not a very prestigious journal. HOWEVER, if i know you're in Humanistic Psychology and Humanistic Psychology is not an area as big as, say, mainstream Social Psychology then i would interpret it as "well, it's not like the journal is not prestigious. it is just like the area is small". however, the bias of low impact factor = crappy journal is far too common nowadays so i always aim for journals with at least an impact factor more than 1. if you have a lookie-look at the IS Web of Knowledge they provide a good break-down of journals by area, their impact factors and other interesting statistics. one that is becoming popular is a type of cross-area citation index. like say if you publish in a very prestigious journal (like the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) and articles in said journal are cited in other journals from areas not directly related to Social Psych (like Psychiatry or Counselling, etc.) then it makes the journal look better as opposed to journals that are only citied within the same area of knowledge. as you can imagine, the worst case scenario is when a journal derives most of its citations from itself. yeah... it's all becoming a numbers game nowadays!

well, i do a lot of work in the Department of Educational & Counselling Psychology & Special Ed @UBC and i think it's a pretty cool program. still, i'd be a little bit suspicious about that claim of "i'd have an advantage because i'm a guy". i'd focus more on other aspects of your application because getting in is pretty darn competitive, but i can ask.

emphasis on this. i did it for my Master's (and a friend of mine is doing it also for her PhD) and you just have to set aside maybe a day or two during the week (most likely weekends) to commit to do nothing but dissertation work/revisions. but i would say i find it to be the rule rather than the exception for people to land a job before their PhDs are done.

i've always felt that up here in Canada we would benefit quite a bit if the Carnegie Foundation gave us some love and did some R1/R2 rankings of our unis. from experience in conferences and professional settings in the U.S. i've had people ask me more than once whether my uni would be an R1 or R2. i always say an R1, of course but i could see how making it official would make stuff like applying for jobs or post-docs a lot easier. you know, having a common metric and stuff...

GIVE ME ACADEMIA OR GIVE ME DEATH!!!!!!

well, to be super honest with you most "personality tests" based on non-verbal cues or behaviours (including projective tests) have mostly been discredited and tend to fall within the realm of quack science. i know there have been some interesting advnaces in neuroscience and cognitive psychology in terms of detecting certain traits (like the brainwave P300 when people are lying or the implicit association test for stereotype endorsement). but as far as saying there's a reliable, cohesive theoretical body of literature that relates non-verbal behaviour to mental processes, well... the jury is still out there. as a methodologist/psychometrician i could foresee that the attempt of building such a test would be sufficiently insormountable and expensive that maybe it's not worthwhile to undertake it (yet). i feel like we need to understand a lot more about the brain-behaviour relationship before any serious attempts can be undertaken. maybe you could post your question in the Psychology sub-forum and get the input from more people? i can only provide input as far as my abilities in psychometrics go. perhaps personality/social psychologist types would be able to chime in with more interesting insights.

but if my "dad's friends" (or insert some sort of equivalent here) are the ones doing the hiring for non-academic jobs? :/ as ugly as it sounds, i know from firsthand experience that Simon Fraser University (SFU) has the reputation of being the place you apply for if you don't get into UBC (i was in a SFU program and transferred). i do agree with you, they're at the forefront of a lot of research (in my area, for example, they are one of the few universities that actually offers an Actuarial Sciences program). but whenever i've dealt with private industry, corporate type jobs there's this conception of UBC > SFU. balancing non-academic VS academic job expectations can be hard...

what about projective psychological tests? there's a "standardized" (notice the " ") stimuli and people react to it... or something like that.

the REAL question is though... how come, in Canada, we only get to have 3 prestigious institutions? IS EVERYTHING ELSE CHOPPED LIVER?!!??!?!?

thankz peeps. i think it is probably an area-specific thing because (although rare) i do find that most people into quant do have, at the very least, one or two solo publications. i guess since we don't have to go through the process of recruiting research participants or dealing with ethics committees and things like that (or even needing to interact with... you know, humans) it is expected that people in my area should be able to do research by themselves. oh well... i guess one more thing to add to the checklist *sigh*

uhm... fake it 'till you make it? in about half of the research jobs i applied for i knew i was not qualified for them. yet i always said i was an expert in whatever they wanted me to be an expert on and, once i landed the job, i would hit the books/Google HARD to master those skills. getting a job out there is not easy and i don't think most of us have the time to second-guess ourselves at the risk of end up missing out on important opportunities. given your experience, i'd say you at least have the skills to learn whatever extra things any job position expects from you. so take a deep breath, keep calm and carry on ;-)

So....I have kind of a professional-type question for when you go out to apply for (academic) jobs, particularly tenure-track positions in Psych. In my department candidates are interviewing for a tenure-track position and one criticism I hear people in the hiring committee are making is that many candidates do not have publications where they are sole authors. They have publications where they are the leading author (some in high-impact journals) but apparently not many are solo authors in them. Now, I have heard before that it's important for us to publish with many different people and not just with your adivsor or within your lab so you can demonstrate versatility. And that you should also aim for 1st or 2nd authorship... but does anyone know if sole authorship is becoming a thing now to get hired? Has anyone heard of this before?

we have a campus here in my city (they're actually located like a block from where i live, heh). http://www.adler.edu/page/areas-of-study/vancouver sadly, the general sentiment (at least from the people in Canadian programs i've spoken with) is something like this is the kind of place you go to when you can't make into a "real" clinical program. maybe it's just a Canadian bias?

if you're not getting the responses that you want have you considered using Amazon's Mechanical Turk? it's not free, but you can get a lot of data easily.

this is something that i actually do a lot and that i totally think is valid. like you start off gathering info from the program and then it's up to you to do your own research. it usually provides you with a much more realistic story. well... technically, they are *still* professors, right? from your posts it seemed to me that you had fallen head over heels for the R2 program you got invited to. i honestly would consider just going there and start working on become employable from day 1. you never know what the future holds

even though this is solid advice i sometimes feel it could work against you. like.... in all seriousness, which prof or department head is gonna level with you and say something like "to be honest, most of our graduates end up underemployed in some nameless call centre in the mid west". it's in their best interest to only tell you about their most successful students so you get the impression that it is a good program... even if they only get 1 success story out of every 10 not-so-successful stories.

sorry, i guess my comment was out for more general "industry-type" jobs but i just noticed that you're specifically inquiring about research jobs, just outside of a traditional academic setting (e.g. university). then yeah, i totally agree with you. sometimes the pettiness of people in places like that irks me because they seem to marry the worst of both industry and academic jobs. the prestige of your university suddenly becomes a thing, the prestige of your lab is also relevant, whether your advisor is well known or not... sigh. i only once worked in a place like that (a research company that's somehow indirectly connected to my uni) and it.was.HELL. still, let's just assess the situation objectively. you're in an R2 university now. can you transfer to an R1 university with all the goodies and perks of where you are? if yes, go. if no (which is the most likely possibility) i guess you're gonna have to work twice as hard to make up for the lack of academic "pedigree" so that's more conferences to go to, more networking, tackling on more ambitious projects... basically just make yourself a candidate that's too good to say not to. like a molten lava cake!

i've always been under the impression that if you're not interested in an academic job, then the kind of opportunities you will have access to are mostly be limited to things like how well can you network, how much previous experience you have, etc. you know, regular 'job' stuff. i find it difficult to believe that any person in a non-academic setting will look at your CV and say "oh yes, this candidate is a member of such and such lab with publications in such and such high-impact factor journals". or at least that has been my experience in my musings with jobs in the "real world" (<--- stoopid "real world" jobs, the only reason i don't hate your jobs is that they pay well.. )

this sounds so alien to me... ... in Canada you get a full work permit with your student visa. even as an undergrad you get it... :/