spunky

i believe this is a condition commonly referred to as "being human"

may i interest you in one of the classics, Casella & Berger's Statistical Inference?
 
it's a pretty awesome book

Sorry not sorry Cookie, you're just wrong.    Most of us here frequently try to limit or omit details on our programs to maintain an air of professionalism even while dealing with uncomfortable situations.
 
I am just thankful that this professor and I can have that solid professional relationship now that I am out of her class.
It was a lesson learned on my part, and I'm guess I'm happy I learned it early on in my graduate career. Yay learning? Haha

She graded everything last minute even though we turned in all of our assignments much earlier so I know that was her guise to lower my grade based upon her mood. Thankfully, I had the good sense to check my transcript before sending out an email and saw that she bumped it to an A. I'm incredibly happy that my university is on a flat grading system so all As look the same.
 
Thank you both for the quick feedback! I've read in other posts about horrific professors and how political grad school can be. Unfortunately, it turns out my program is no different. 

I decided to check my grades this morning and saw that one professor (who is unprofessional and has made it clear that she does not like me) is dangling my grade at an [redacted]%. I am in this class with one other graduate student and we taught most of her classes for her (don't get me started on that), led discussions, and the course is in my area of interest...so there is no doubt that I did A work all semester.
 
I know she is doing this to mess with me, but I do not know how to approach her via email. I have scholarships and assistantships on the line so I need straight As. Either I convince her to bump me [up by redacted]% now (which is honestly the very least I earned) or I am most certainly disputing this grade with the department and any deans necessary. I am in such shock at how unprofessional she is and that I was stupid enough to want her to be my adviser. 
 
Any suggestions? (Grades are due tomorrow so I need to contact her ASAP.) 

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! save yourself while you still have time!!! 

"math just really bores me and it has been tough to stay focused and motivated in my math courses"
 
I hate to yell but.... THEN WHY DO YOU WANT TO DO A PHD IN POLITICAL SCIENCE!!!!!!!! 
 
You will be in math courses. Yes they will be methods courses but it is math. Thats what you will be doing. Moreover, your research will be with math. MATH MATH MATH MATH MATH NUMBERS NUMBERS NUMBERS NUMBERS. Thats mostly what we do. All day. Every Day. Coding in R. MATHMATHMATHMATHMATHYMATH. 
 
Go open the ASPR. What do you see? MATH!

hello. today i received this email (supposedly from SAGE publishing) about an article i submitted and got published during the summer. i dunno what to make of it... it sounds fishy to me so i wanna see if other people have received something similar (i'll remove some parts to conceal personal info/stuff):
 
the part that makes me think this is a fake is that they call my article a "highly read" one. the fact of the matter is that it's a somewhat technical article and i would only expect maybe... i dunno, 1 or 2 people to care about it? plus i think fake journals tend to use those loaded terms to catch the attention of unsuspecting new authors.
 
has anyone else got an email like this?
 
We’re writing to you now as representatives of Video Editorial and with the consent of the Journals publishing team at SAGE Publications.

SAGE is on the verge of launching subject Video Collections for the worldwide library market in support of higher education and research. Commercial launch for the first phase of these Collections will be in April 2015, and these Video products will be made available via SAGE’s already established SAGE Knowledge product. 
One major stream of content for each Video Collection are videos summarizing highly-read published journal articles, which will be incredibly useful research cases for students in your field. 

Given your expertise in this field, we’re writing to enquire if you would like to produce a video for our Media & Communication Video Collection.  We notice that you were the lead author of a highly-read article entitled A Cautionary Note on the Use of the Vale and Maurelli Method to Generate Multivariate, Nonnormal Data for Simulation Purposes published in Educational and Psychological Measurement. Might you be interested in creating a brief, 5-10-minute video summarizing some of the key aspects of this article for students and researchers?  


We’re looking to have supplied video to SAGE by XXX at the latest, so we’d be very grateful if you would confirm your interest as soon as possible. Please feel free to ask if you have any questions! 

Thank you so much in advance for your involvement; we look forward to hearing from you and hope that this email precipitates interest in SAGE Video!  

Yours sincerely,

Michael Carmichael & Rachael LeBlond

Video Editorial Department
SAGE Publications Inc.

graduate school, all the way.
 
i went to a freakin' small liberal arts college in the middle of freakin' nowhere in the 'Bible Belt of Canada'. i met people there who literally had never left their hometown. EVER.
 
i remember the first day in a Sociology 101 class the prof was explaining some social myths like how what we call a 'traditional family' is a relatively new invention or that people lived longer before (which is a lie, given the advances we have in medicine today). then this girl raises her hand and says "oh, but long ago people used to
live like 100s of years!" the prof was like "oh really... like where? or who?" and the girl said "like Methuselah", took out her bible and quoted it. my first week of classes. my 2nd week in Canada. it was like the twilight zone.

For me, I only applied to schools that 1) fit my research and 2) was within my geographic location. When deciding on my schools, research and mentor fit was my number 1 priority. That being said, I never considered the question of funding at all and looking back, I do think that it is important to keep it into consideration. 
 
Unlike undergrad (which I chose based on school ranking), I chose this program because I thought I would be happiest going to school here for the next 7 years. The program objectives as well as the career trajectories of graduates of this program matched my own career goals. 
 
I also think a large part depends on the age you are at. If you are older, you may have more ties to a specific area- whereas if you are a fresh grad, you may be more keen on the idea of living somewhere new and exploring. 
 
Best of luck! 

FUNDING.
 
there's no point in accepting an offer from an awesome program if you'll be in financial slavery for the next few decades of your life. 

i'm not sure why having these classes would be considered a hindrance. i also have a BSc in a 'hard science' and moved to psychology/education. if i go to a class/discussion where it feels like the level is gonna be low i immediately think "hellooooo GPA booster!" plus you know it's the one class where you don't actually have to do much to ace it and allocate that time to do research or play minecraft or just do something else. if you feel you're not getting much from the discussion, then just use that time to do more research yourself. you'll be amazed at what you can accomplish when you're getting credit for a graduate class that requires minimal effort!

i'm not sure why having these classes would be considered a hindrance. i also have a BSc in a 'hard science' and moved to psychology/education. if i go to a class/discussion where it feels like the level is gonna be low i immediately think "hellooooo GPA booster!" plus you know it's the one class where you don't actually have to do much to ace it and allocate that time to do research or play minecraft or just do something else. if you feel you're not getting much from the discussion, then just use that time to do more research yourself. you'll be amazed at what you can accomplish when you're getting credit for a graduate class that requires minimal effort!

aw... thanks! i'm all about keepin' it real here!
 
speaking of  "keepin' it real"... the evidence is starting to point towards the fact the email *might* be legit. i'm on my way to become  an online sensation! i'll be like...like... like the Alex from Target of Psychometrics!

I gave you a +1 for the frank introspection about the popular appeal of your own work

hello. today i received this email (supposedly from SAGE publishing) about an article i submitted and got published during the summer. i dunno what to make of it... it sounds fishy to me so i wanna see if other people have received something similar (i'll remove some parts to conceal personal info/stuff):
 
the part that makes me think this is a fake is that they call my article a "highly read" one. the fact of the matter is that it's a somewhat technical article and i would only expect maybe... i dunno, 1 or 2 people to care about it? plus i think fake journals tend to use those loaded terms to catch the attention of unsuspecting new authors.
 
has anyone else got an email like this?
 
We’re writing to you now as representatives of Video Editorial and with the consent of the Journals publishing team at SAGE Publications.

SAGE is on the verge of launching subject Video Collections for the worldwide library market in support of higher education and research. Commercial launch for the first phase of these Collections will be in April 2015, and these Video products will be made available via SAGE’s already established SAGE Knowledge product. 
One major stream of content for each Video Collection are videos summarizing highly-read published journal articles, which will be incredibly useful research cases for students in your field. 

Given your expertise in this field, we’re writing to enquire if you would like to produce a video for our Media & Communication Video Collection.  We notice that you were the lead author of a highly-read article entitled A Cautionary Note on the Use of the Vale and Maurelli Method to Generate Multivariate, Nonnormal Data for Simulation Purposes published in Educational and Psychological Measurement. Might you be interested in creating a brief, 5-10-minute video summarizing some of the key aspects of this article for students and researchers?  


We’re looking to have supplied video to SAGE by XXX at the latest, so we’d be very grateful if you would confirm your interest as soon as possible. Please feel free to ask if you have any questions! 

Thank you so much in advance for your involvement; we look forward to hearing from you and hope that this email precipitates interest in SAGE Video!  

Yours sincerely,

Michael Carmichael & Rachael LeBlond

Video Editorial Department
SAGE Publications Inc.

nothing to add. just really wanted to emphasize this. 

this is the 3rd question about methods/statistics in psychology that we've got in this forum. i think we should open shop here as a free, hands-on statistical consulting...thingy.

i like this plan! i especially like the fact that you're willing to review your regression knowledge. understanding regression in and out is very important because there are many "regression ideas" in the more advanced methods that you will learn (we were actually talking about something similar here ). i feel like sometimes people learn their methods by "going through the motions", so to speak, without stopping to actually  think what exactly they are doing. and the biggest strength you'll have as a quant is that you'll be able to take any standard method that you know and adapt it to any type of data you're faced with. the analysis of real-life data is usually a lot more complicated (and interesting) than what you learn in your courses, but if you have a solid understanding of the theory behind the methods, then it becomes a lot easier.
 
 
 
i... will have to defer this question to people from other areas. i know people in Social/Personality can be pretty savvy methodologists as well. many cannot run experiments due to the nature of their subject of study so they rely on pretty sophisticated statistics to establish "causal" (notice the " "  please) claims about their data (cue in Judea Pearl and the Neyman-Rubin causal model).
 
as a quant, however, it *is* sort of important that you're able to land your ideas about complex statistical methodologies in more applied settings so being proficient in a more 'substantive' (as opposed to purely methodological) area is ideal. mine is education/econ (particularly how they relate to the labour market) but yours can be anything you like. 

well.. it depends on what you mean by "fairly proficient". i've been using R for almost a decade and i still hesitate to call myself "proficient" in it because of all the new stuff and undiscovered thingies i keep on finding about it. i mean i was not kidding when i said you *had* to learn R. SAS or STATA are pretty powerful and useful as well. R i just... well, it's quickly becoming *the* standard statistical programming environment (or as the NYTimes called it the "lingua franca" of data analysts http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 ) but i guess if you feel more comfortable with SAS nobody's gonna throw a fit about it. you just reduce the potential pool of users who might find your stuff useful but they may see it in SAS and say "oh darn, i'll just wait for someone to translate it into R". or something like that. as you can imagine, the more programming languages you're 'fluent' in, the more influential as a scholar you can be because you can reach more people. 
 
if you have time to kill until gradschool i would not only encourage you to learn R but maybe to have a deeper look at areas where Quant Psych people work. Structural Equation Modeling/Item Response Theory are two VERY big ones and the software of choice for those (and most latent variable analyses) is Mplus, which is a lot simpler (but also a lot LESS flexible) than R. R still cannot do everything Mplus does but it's getting there through the use of the packages 'lavaan' and 'OpenMX'. although you'd probably be expected to be proficient in Mplus as well (i personally don't like it but i can use it without any major hassle). 
 
in terms of resources i'm usually a little low on those because i've found that there really is no better way to learn R than forcing yourself to use it and struggle with it. like the other guy in my program started by taking all his basic statistics homeworks and assignments (all done in SPSS) and re-doing them all in R just googling one thing at a time (e.g. 'how to do a t-test in R?' 'how do to an ANOVA in R?') he told me the first assignment took him about 3 hours (one of which was just figuring out how to read-in the data). but then the next assignment took him less... and less... and less until he became sufficiently comfortable with it to be able to keep on doing all his future assignments in R. i know people really like Andy Field's "Discover Statistics with R" (or something like that, i don't know the exact name) because of how chatty and down-to-earth it is. so maybe you can have a look at it and see whether you like it? but, in all honesty, Google is probably your best resource and you just ask google everything you want to do. since R has exploded in popularity, there are plenty of tutorials and blogs and youtube videos that teach you a lot of the basics.

sure it is. maybe your prof is doing this so you can see the connection because Psychology has a tradition of teaching ANOVA and Regression as if they were separate things (cue in Cronbach's 1957 article on the 2 disciplines of scientific psychology) but the emphasis on teaching methods courses has lately been on helping students see the connections (like ANOVA is a special type of multiple regression, the general linear model is a specific instance of the generalIZED linear models and they're all specific instances of structural equation models which is itself a family of techniques under the umbrella of latent variable models). 
 
anyhoo, just make sure you code your things correctly (remember you always need one code less because one of the levels of the factor becomes the reference) and you're good to go. 

what about something like a program in applied statistics/psychometrics from something like an education or a psychology department? it mixes and matches social sciences with a quantitative bent and with the increase in standardized testing across the world, we're an in-demand profession. i haven't even finished my PhD and i routinely get a few job offers every semester about positions related to this, particularly testing companies like ETS (you know, the guys who brought you the TOEFL, SAT, etc.) or universities to do some teaching in research methods. i sometimes even get emails from the same people because they go for months without qualified people applying! we happen to be a rare species with a rare set of skills. 
 
here's a list of programs from the APA website of universities (in the U.S.) who have this kind of program. there're also a few in Canada, but there aren't many (like only 3-4 in the biggest universities)
 
http://www.apa.org/research/tools/quantitative/?item=5

Just a quick update, I found a very informative book about careers in psychology in the US in a book called "Careers in Psychology: Opportunities in a changing world", by Tara Kuther and Robert Morgan (2012).
 
This book is a good starting point to anyone who wants to pursue a career in psychology, to anyone who practised psychology in another country and wants to know the specificities of psychology in the US or to anyone who wants to change a career. The information is divided by area (clinical, developmental, social, health, sports, etc. psychologies) and degree (major, bachelor, masters, doctorate) as well as information of some job titles and descriptions, further readings, websites and salaries.

You will not get into any Ph.D. programs without research experience, so save your money.  Not to mention, Ph.D. programs, even in clinical, are predominantly research-based - so if you don't like research (and as you are unwilling to take two years off to do research, I assume you do not), you will not have a very good time.
 
I'm not sure if PsyD programs require research experience; they are less competitive, but given the number of applicants to grad schools these days, I wouldn't be surprised if they do. 
 
If you want to be a psychologist so badly, why not take time off?  Programs will still be there in two years, and you will have saved more money (which you'll need to pay for the expensive PsyD programs) and will have a much better chance of getting in somewhere. 

i wrote a paragraph, read this and decided it pretty much summarized everything i had said. 
 
so... ditto that.