juilletmercredi

I think gender matters, but I think it's difficult to determine whether gender actually matters in this case. It could be gender-based - that they perceive you as being more "motherly" and more likely to to accept their excuses. There could be other reasons the students are contacting you and not the male TA - he could have a different personality or style in dealing with them. It's unfortunately not possible to know without a student telling you explicitly. I agree, though, that the important part is figuring out some kind of solution to it. Perhaps you should divide the class in half alphabetically and instruct students with last names A-L to talk to the male TA and M-Z to talk to you when they need to submit excuses. I also think that if you're the TA for the class, you probably shouldn't fret about absences more than the professor does. If simple confirmation over email is good enough for him, it's good enough for you. I, personally, am not strict about excuses. I don't favor requiring doctor's notes because it encourages students to go to the doctor when they don't need to; also, going to the doctor costs money and not all students can afford that. Plus there are some illnesses that don't require a doctor's visit. I favor structuring the class in such a way to encourage attendance and discourage absences - like frequent quizzes, group work, making participation part of the grade, etc. Another thing is to give students 3 freebie absences that they can use however they like without an excuse throughout the semester - but anything more than that and their grade drops a letter grade (unless they have documented evidence of serious illness requiring hospitalization, death in the family, or something of that magnitude).

Actually, a lot of Catholic-affiliated universities are quite liberal and the Catholic link that the school has has little influence on the every day functioning of the college. Some examples are Villanova, Providence College, DePaul, Duquesne, and Notre Dame. This is especially true of Catholic Jesuit colleges, which include Boston College, College of the Holy Cross, Fordham, Georgetown, Loyola Chicago, Loyola Marymount, Gonzaga, Santa Clara University, and yes, Marquette. Some of these are very well-reputed colleges with lots of cutting-edge research, scholarship, and teaching, and where the Catholicism is unlikely to affect the every day life of the student. So no, I don't think you're more likely to find a bigoted student at a Catholic institution than an institution with a different or no religious affiliation. It would totally depend on what kind of Catholic institution we were discussing. There are also hundreds of colleges and universities in the country that were begun by religious folks and maintain nominal religious affiliations without being affected by that affiliation. That includes American University, Boston U, Duke, Emory, Brandeis, Kenyon College, DePauw University, Davidson College, and Macalester College. Most of these places are actually pretty liberal places that don't require faith statements from faculty or serve any particular religious mission - their affiliation is primarily historical, and has to do with the way they were founded. It's quite different from working at Liberty, Bob Jones, Brigham Young, or Baylor, or another one of the small Christian colleges that define themselves by their dedication to a religious mission and require things like convocation, a strict honor code, and statements of faith from faculty. That said, I agree that the TA handled this less than artfully, but her advisor dealt a low blow by publicizing it and using her name.

You could also look at doing other aspects of college student affairs, like academic advising, working in the writing center, or working in student affairs. Southwestern Community College is looking for a tenure-track professor of English and they require an MA: https://www.higheredjobs.com/region/details.cfm?JobCode=176025168&Title=Assistant%20Professor%20English

If you don't drive and you want to live walking distance to campus, you're going to want to live downtown. Most downtown apartment buildings cater to, and are dominated by, undergraduates. For example, they often offer per-person rent and sometimes furnish their units with two twin beds in each bedroom. Sometimes they have amenities that sound awesome (fitness center, pool, hang-out rooms, pool tables, etc.) but they're going to be mostly overrun by undergrads who will throw parties. The Allenway is an apartment building a lot of grad students and postdocs move into - it's walking distance to campus and close to all the downtown shops. A friend lived in there and it's nice. $750-850 for a studio, and $910-1005 for a one-bedroom, which I would say is about standard for State College and actually pretty good for downtown. (http://www.allenway.net/about_the_allenway/floor_plans_and_rates). By the time you come HDFS will be split across Henderson, BBH, and the new HHD building that's being built right now, which are all on the south edge of campus closest to downtown, so it'll be a short-ish walk. They don't allow pets, though! The Apartment Store (http://statecollege.apartmentstore.com/pennsylvania) also has listings downtown. A couple people have said they have had bad experiences with them, but they kind of dominate the downtown market along with a few other realtors. I think some of their buildings are reserved for graduate students. Another option is to live relatively close on a bus line. Both Nittany Gardens and Lion's Gate apartments are on Waupelauni Dr, which is served by I think 3 different bus routes. They go downtown but also to area grocery stores and shopping. I think that living there would be a bit more difficult without a car (honestly, I think living in State College in general would be difficult without a car), but it's an option. The rent is about the same as the Allenway, and those complexes are mostly lived in by postdocs and grad students. Toftrees also is served by a bus line that runs reliably and relatively frequently during the day; however, if you are going to live in Toftrees, I would opt for one of the complexes that's actually on Toftrees Avenue (most of them). The CATA buses that run along Toftrees Ave run far more frequently, and earlier and later, than the one bus that runs on Cricklewood Dr (which is where my Toftrees apartment complex is - doesn't bother me because I have a car, but it would be nice to rely on it if I knew I was going downtown to drink or something). Vairo Village and Northbrook Greens are also on that route - Vairo Village is located in/close to a shopping center and is a bit cheaper than Toftrees, and just a short bus ride from the Wal-Mart. Park Forest apartments are also on that route, and Park Forest is walking distance from the Weis.

I lived in upper Manhattan on about $2,200 after taxes, with one roommate. So yes, I would say $3,000 is enough!

Haha, people have already named all of my sources for cheap books from undergrad (Abebooks, Alibiris, Half.com, eBay). You could also try Barnes & Noble. I know, but sometimes they have surprised me by having a book cheaper than Amazon. They also have a marketplace like Amazon does where you can buy used books from sellers, and sometimes someone has a used book you need pretty cheaply.

I'm on the Apple ecosystem so I have an iPad. I had an iPad 2 and now I have an iPad Air. They are pretty durable - I cracked the screen of my iPad 2 into it's second year, but it was stilly totally useable and the crack was actually not that noticeable. I used it for at least a few months after that, then gave it to my husband when I bought an iPad Air and he still uses it. It's about 3 years old, I think. In my opinion, it's not a computer replacement, though. You can get some tasks done on it - word processing, editing presentations and spreadsheets, reading and annotating PDFs, managing your citations/references. But I don't use it for heavy work. I mostly used it to grade student papers on the go, or edit presentations I had already created elsewhere, or to read and annotate papers when I was traveling. I think for some short trips I might consider leaving my laptop home and just bringing the iPad, but I have a MacBook Pro that I used for most of my every day computing tasks, including data analysis, when I was in graduate school. (I now also have an iMac at work in my postdoc that I use for most work tasks; the MacBook Pro is now mostly for fun or to get some work done from home.) I personally would not replace my laptop with even a Surface Pro, although I might get one of those tablet computers like a Lenovo Yoga - if I were interested in switching back to Windows. I haven't had a problem finding apps on the iPad - in fact, the app store for Apple is more expansive than Windows', although Windows' is quickly catching up and has everything that you might need to be productive. Also, you can keep your files and programs synced across devices using cloud storage, which is relatively cheap and stable these days. $6.99 a month with Microsoft gets you the Microsoft Office suite on your tablet and computer and gives you 1 TB of cloud storage. Google Drive and Dropbox also offer relatively cheap cloud storage. (iCloud Drive is too expensive.)

I love Jenna Marbles! I don't want to write another book but here is a bit: -I looked up underemployment, which is a concept I have some issue with - particularly at the PhD level, because 80% of the jobs that require a PhD are in academia - but still. There's a study that measured underemployment in recent college graduates (aged 22-27) using the BLS data. They defined "underemployed" as a job for which more than half the respondents to a BLS O*Net survey said a bachelor's degree was not required to do the job (not whether the job ad they responded to required it, and these were employees, not employers). For BA holders, about 48% of social science majors were underemployed, compared with about 50% of business majors, 43% of science majors, 29% of math and computer majors, and 25% of engineering majors. So it does look like social scientists are more likely to be considered underemployed. However, only 20% of the underemployed work low-wage jobs, defined as unskilled jobs where the wage is less than $25,000 a year (which includes most retail, food service, and bartending jobs). A significant proportion (around 40%) of the underemployed recent college graduates are in what are considered "good non-college jobs" - jobs that technically don't require a bachelor's degree but have average salaries around $45,000 and are career-oriented and skilled. These statistics do not include PhD holders, though. We are not recent college graduates anymore, regardless of age - we now fall into the category of PhD/professional degree holder, or the more general "graduate degree holder." I couldn't find any reliable statistics on how many PhDs are doing low-wage work/unskilled work. The BLS does say that only 22% of "PhD/professional degree holders" are underemployed, though. There are, of course, flaws with every study and measurement. My point was simply that if you get a PhD in social psychology (or anything, really), you are very unlikely to be working as a McDonald's cashier or a Starbucks barista, much less unemployed altogether. It was meant to be encouraging. Sources: http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/current_issues/ci20-1.pdf

There's quite a bit of evidence - both anecdotal and scientific - that shows that the reputation of your program factors a lot into academic placement, and in fact may be the most important part of your placement (more important than publications, even). Here is a recent article in Science Advances about the role of prestige in faculty hiring in three very disparate fields (computer science, business, and history; the point was to display that this is a wide-ranging issue that cuts across academic fields). The authors found that people were much more likely to get faculty positions if they were coming from well-reputed departments; that people rarely went to departments above their own department's level of prestige/reputation; and that the majority of faculty actually came from a small concentration of departments. Here are two more reader-friendly summaries of the findings. Clauset and his colleagues found that only 25 percent of doctoral degree-granting institutions across the country produce 71 to 86 percent of tenure-track faculty, depending on the field. The study also showed that the top 10 schools in each of the fields studied—computer science, business and history—produced between 1.6 and 3 times more faculty than the second tier of 10 schools and between 2.3 and 5.6 times more faculty than the third tier of 10 schools. There was also a recent post that I can't find right now in which someone posted a 2007 study specifically within psychology, about how the placement rates of psychology PhD recipients were associated with a number of factors. While publications definitely mattered, the factor that seemed to matter the most was the prestige/reputation/rank of the department. Honestly, this isn't very different from what anyone in the field would tell you, it just quantifies it/provides some more aggregated evidence for it. But you can also see this by perusing the websites of departments in which you might like to teach and noticing where people got their PhDs. So does ranking matter? Yes, although perhaps not necessarily the precise place on the U.S. News or NRC lists - it's more about the program's reputation amongst scholars that matters. But that can have a big impact on where you find employment later. A lot of people say it's more about the advisor, but the top advisors are more likely to be at the top departments anyway. Of course you do need to be productive, but the top students at the top departments are going to be being productive, too.

I am practical, but cautiously optimistic. Part of it is because I have to be - I'll be on the job market in the fall, and if I think about this pessimistically I'll drive myself nuts. But part of of it is supported by some evidence. I'm a social/health psychologist (went to a hybrid program). Yes, social psychology PhD programs are very competitive - and that feels very uncomfortable on the front end, when applying. But the competitiveness is good in the sense that TXInstrument11 points out - because that's fewer people competing for the same resources in grad school and the same jobs outside it. Probably still too many to sustain a healthy job market, but less than if acceptance rates were higher. On a very broad level, a 2013 Georgetown report found that the unemployment rate for psychology majors with a graduate degree was only 3.6%. The median salary was $61,000. This includes psychology majors with any kind of gradaute degree, but it's pretty promising IMO. Not the riches of Midas, but there are reasonably good chances that I will get a job and make a middle-class income. That unemployment rate is actually not much higher than the unemployment rate for electrical engineers with graduate degrees (3%) or mathematics majors with graduate degrees (2.9%) and it's the same as computer science majors with graduate degrees (3.6%).* Salaries are really where they beat us out. The Survey of Earned Doctorates is another place to look; it's the survey that most universities these days require you to take and the NSF compiles the information. You usually take it at the time that you deposit your dissertation (or at least you did at my university), so you get a sense of what commitments people had at the time that they were really finishing up their program. It seemed rather dismal for psychology - 2,088 out of 3,600 psychology PhD recipients (58%) had a commitment after graduate school. A little over half of those commitments were postdoctoral fellowships; only about 5% of psycholgy PhD recipients went into industry right after graduate school. But then I checked out other fields. Only 50% of engineering PhDs had a definite commitment at graduation (and there's not much variation when you break it out by specific engineering field - about 58% of aerospace engineers, on down to about 50% of electrical engineers). In biology and the biomedical sciences, it's about 50%. In chemistry, it's 54%. Computer science PhDs and math PhDs only fared slightly better than psychology PhDs, at 60% each. In physics and astronomy it was 57%. It doesn't look like the physical/mathematical/computer sciences in general are doing that much better than us in terms of securing employment at graduation. The percentages are slightly higher if you only take into account U.S. citizens and permanent residents (we go to 63%), but don't vary that much in differences - computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, biologists and chemists are still doing about the same as us, and engineering PhDs are actually doing a little worse than us overall, although some subfields (aerospace engineering = 66%) are better than others (materials science engineering = 54%) Actually, the folks doing the best seem to be economists - about 67% of economics PhDs did have a definite commitment at graduation/the time of taking the survey, and that went up to 75% if you counted only U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Again, median base salaries are where the differences are - it's about $61,000 for psychologists, $75,000 for life scientists, $94,700 for physical scientists and $96,000 for engineers. (This is for the employed, not postdocs. Their postdocs make sligtly more but not a whole lot.) The NSF also has data on overall unemployment rates - that is, unemployment for any holder of a PhD, not just recent graduates. Overall, the unemployment rate is very, very low. No major field's rate rose above 5%, even in the deep days of the recession. For 2010, the unemployment rate of doctoral degree holders in psychology was 1.7% - actually lower than the physical sciences (3.5%) and engineering (2.8%), and about the same as mathematics and statistics (1.5%) and computer science (2.2%). Our rates are probably partially deflated by clinical and counseling psychologists, who make up the bulk of psychology PhD recipients in our field, but even without them our rates are probably still quite low. It's true that the academic job market is pretty bad, which is why I always tell my undergrads hoping for a doctoral degree that they should only get one if they would be happy spending 5-10 years pursuing a PhD only to not be a professor, but maybe do something else just as interesting. But PhD recipients get jobs. And they're not all working at Starbucks or McDonald's. Most of them, it appears, are not. The way I see it...I have skills. I write well, present excellently, I can do advanced statistical analysis, I can clearly synthesize huge amounts of information, I can teach myself something new lightning fast. Even if I don't get an academic job, there are a lot of other things that I could successfully do. The chances are good that I will get a job, a job that pays a middle-class wage. Here is a heartening read from Donald Asher. I will bring attention to one thing he does say, though, which I wholeheartedly agree with: For forty years there have been predictions of a mass exodus of faculty, as older faculty retire, and for forty years those predictions have been premature or overstated. There is currently another wave of such pronouncements, but a smart prospective PhD student would be mindful of the history of those forecasts. Professors have literally been saying this since the 1980s. It hasn't come true yet - it probably never well. Ever since the mandatory retirement age was abolished professors can retire whenever they want - some of them never fully retire. And even when they do, the modern university is replacing their tenure lines with adjuncts or non-tenure-track positions. So I don't think the market is going to get markedly bettter in the coming 10-15 years; instead, I think that the modern PhD applicant needs to be well-prepared for the likelihood that she won't be an academic, but there's probably something else interesting that she can do with her degree and still feed herself and her family. *A lot of people think computer science majors have so many more job prospects - it certainly seems that way - but the unemployment rate of recent college grad CS majors (8.7%) is about the same as that of recent college grad psychology majors (9.2%), and they stay similar after experience and after graduate degrees. Salaries are where they beat us. Sources: Georgetown "Hard Times" report PhDs in the labor force Survey of Earned Doctorates

I never saw the Hobbit but that macro cracked me up, lol. TBL, I think you were the one wondering whether a minor in quant would do the same thing re: flexibility for finding work. It definitely can. Like I mentioned I work in a methods & stats center with a bunch of quant psychs. What I didn't go into is that quite a few of them actually have a PhD in developmental psychology with a minor in applied methods (or a master's in applied stats). One just got hired as a methodological professor in a social science department; she's spent years doing quant psych research and co-wrote The book on a widely-used technique. Another was a methodological professor for a few years before returning to the center (for personal reasons). A third just got several interviews for methodological positions and is waiting to hear back. Also if you look at some of the big quant psychs in the field you'd be surprised to find out what some of them have their PhDs in. Todd Little's PhD is in developmental psychology. Patrick J. Curran's PhD is in clinical psychology (he did a postdoc in applied statistics). Kenneth Bollen actually has a PhD in sociology (he minored in math in college). And Andrew Hayes' PhD is in social and personality psychology (from his CV it looks like he started doing quant research towards the end of his PhD or shortly thereafter).

I agree with reading the journal articles to get an idea about what graduate-level/professional-level writing looks like. But if you want advice about how to write (like the process), I recommend How to Write a Lot, by Paul Silva, and The Craft of Research, by Booth, Colomb, and Williams.

I guess at this point, I don't know what it is you're asking. Let's say that you got into a PhD program, and you decided that you needed to know SAS. Most university campuses have some computers with SAS licenses, so you don't need to drop several thousand in order to learn it. I certainly didn't - I went to my university's library computers and taught myself how to use it with a book and some exercises. (I took a class that used SAS as the primary software, but the professor certainly wasn't teaching us how to use it, and honestly he didn't really care what software package we used as long as we did the work. Such is grad school.) Stata is way cheaper, and R is free. At this point I would say that R is the more useful package to learn - moreso than SAS. I actually somewhat disagree that you can learn theology and history on your own time but not SAS. Generally speaking, learning a statistical software package is far easier than learning the kind of critical thinking and analysis skills one learns in discussion-based classes in the liberal arts and sciences. I'd rather teach an undergrad or a first-year grad student how to run correlations in SAS than teach them how to think through the framework of a research paper (I've done both - trust me, the stats package is way easier to teach!) I think that's the point that I'm trying to get at - a PhD program won't be focused on teaching you hard skills, not formally anyway; any hard skills you pick up will be due to deliberate effort on your part to learn them. The dichotomy between academic and non-academic research is somewhat contrived. They do require similar skills and processes; some of the skills and processes they require are quite different though. One quick example - scholarly academic writing is long and cumbersome and theoretical; you have to establish a lot of background and discuss fine-grained details. Non-academic research writing is not at all like that in most fields - it's brief, to the point; the goal is really just to communicate the results and what value they bring to the company, not much else. (Of course there are always exceptions.) The way you interact with your colleagues and teammates also will differ, at least somewhat, between an industry research firm and an academic firm. I learned about these differences through a summer internship in a non-academic place, which is why I think it's valuable. Of course, the statistics were the same - the analytical skills, at their base, were the same. But I did use them in different ways.

Could you write your thesis on the basis of one of the projects? I know that a lot of people hope to get X papers out of their theses/dissertations, but the data and findings are not always kind to us. For example, the standard fantasyland theory in my department is that we'll get 3 solid publications from our doctoral dissertations. I got about 1.5 empirical papers from my dissertation; there is a review paper that I am planning to write that uses elements/inspiration from my dissertation's literature but will need significant work before it's in a publishable state. But...the dissertation's still defended and deposited and I still have my PhD. So I would think right now the important thing is to write up a thesis that you can defend and that will enable you to graduate, and then work on transforming the papers for publication later.

Keep in mind that what is trendy and new in academia changes every 5-10 years, so what might've been the trendy field when Prof A got hired this year may not be the trendy field when you are on the market in 5-6+ years. I do agree, though, that you need to develop some kind of niche specialization - your calling card, so to speak, that makes you unique and desirable. As for the teaching - yes, it totally depends on the kind of college you want to end up at. If your goal is to be a cutting-edge researcher at an R1 institution, your teaching hardly matters at all - you need to do just enough to prove that you can do an adequate job at it, and really focus on researching and publishing (and networking!). If your goal is to go to a place where teaching and research are more balanced - say an R2, some comprehensive master's level universities, elite liberal arts colleges - then you want to develop both your research and your teaching. Then it's okay to sacrifice some publications for more experience teaching, and you definitely want to get a sole instructorship or two in there if you can (although in my field many of the newly hired assistant professors didn't necessarily have one). If your goal is a less well-known teaching college or a regional baccalaureate, then teaching is probably more important than research, and a heavy focus on research might spark questions about why you are applying and whether you will be happy at the university (or try to publish your way out in 1-3 years). A professor job doesn't have to be more about research than teaching. In fact, I would wager that at the vast majority of colleges in the U.S., the professors are doing more teaching than research. Some of them aren't doing any research at all. There are really only (relative to the total pie) a small handful of universities in the U.S. where research is the sole or overwhelming job function, and then a slightly larger handful of places where they are equally balanced. I'm like you, in that I have decided I want an academic career because I love research but also love teaching and mentoring, so to a certain extent I did pursue more opportunities to work with undergraduates over publishing more papers and getting involved in more projects. Your advisor is there to help guide you, of course. Now, I will say that at R1 universities advisors tend to assume that you want to be a professor in the same sense that they are - also at an R1, also primarily doing research - and their advice is going to be totally colored by that. Much of the time, they are going to be at best unable to give you good advice about how to land at a college that's different (and at worse completely unwilling). But you can sort of use them, somewhat, as a compass to help avoid getting "lost" in teaching so to speak.

I think this is a really personal choice. I personally hate studios. I love space - as much space as I can have - I live alone and considered renting a 2-bedroom when I first moved to my postdoc so I could use the second bedroom as my office. (Two-bedrooms in Postdoc Town are only marginally more expensive than one-bedrooms.) I also do not like my spaces all melting into each other - I like having a defined living room where I can bring guests without having to worry about whether my bed is made up or whether I left my pajamas hanging out of my dresser drawer. I also like chilling in my living room. Bedrooms are for sleeping to me, and I am really only in my bedroom now if I am sleeping or changing clothes. I am not built for cities. LOL. That said, my best living situation in graduate school was when I lived in a relatively spacious 2-bedroom apartment that I shared with one roommate - we had an eat-in kitchen, a large living room, and each of us had a very decently-sized bedroom. It was a 20 minute commute on the subway to the main campus, but I didn't care about that - the commute was kind of nice; I could read a book or just let my brain wander before class. My worst living situation was when I lived in a 185-square-foot single room when I worked in residential life. It was directly on the main campus, so I was like 0-5 minutes from anything I needed to do, but it was so tiny that my full-sized bed basically took up the whole place. Second to that was the two-room studio I shared with my husband for two years. It was right behind campus, so everything was a 5-10 minute walk away, but I had no room to entertain guests (they'd have to sit at my kitchen table) and living in only two rooms for two people is kind of hard - if I wanted to be truly alone I would have to leave my apartment. So personally, I would much rather take a 20-30 minute commute to have more space. But my husband loved being able to roll out of the apartment 10 minutes before class started and still be on time, and he didn't want to move further away for more space (I proposed the idea to him). So it kind of depends on your preferences.

My advice is don't assume that the students who are older than you are somehow fundamentally different from you. Don't assume that you are more energetic and lively than the students who are older than you; don't assume that the older students are less likely to go out and have a drink with you or participate in some kind of social event; don't assume that the older students have families and children; don't assume that you will be more productive because you're younger (or because you don't have a spouse or child, if that's the case); don't assume that you are more driven and/or will work harder because you are younger. But also don't assume that you know less, or are less mature or valuable, because you are younger. I knew some seriously hard-working and productive doctoral students with spouses and children. I had some older doctoral friends who could drink you under the table and would stay out later than anyone. I had some older doctoral friends who were on first-name basis with the night shift janitors because they worked in the lab all the damn time. I had older doctoral friends who had spent years in our field working towards their goal of a doctoral degree. Just...don't assume. Make friends with everyone; invite everyone out for drinks or pastries, chat up all of your cohort. Be mature and act like an adult when it comes to interpersonal matters, but be yourself, too. Nobody is really going to care how old you are. The few who bring it up repeatedly actually don't care, either - they bring it up more because of personal insecurities, but it really has nothing to do with your actual age. They'd find a way to be insecure regardless. With that said, the very vast majority of older graduate students are not going to care about how old you are. They might not even know until you say something that makes it clear ("Last year in college..." or "Oh yeah, I remember where I was during 9/11 - I was in the third grade...")

When I was in grad school I had a friend who was getting his PhD in epidemiology and planned to get an MD afterwards. I also knew a woman in my program who had already gotten a JD from a top 10 law school and came to my program to get a PhD in history; she wanted to be a law professor, and apparently, that market is super competitive and it's better if you have both a JD and a PhD. Two PhDs is less heard of - most universities won't accept you to do a second PhD if you already have a first one. I think a PhD + some kind of master's isn't that uncommon; a lot of people add that on for a variety of reasons. Like a lot of public health postdocs take people with PhDs in related fields, and the first year of the postdoc is spent earning the MPH so you can teach at a school of public health (although you could without one, too). In my field a lot of people get a master's in applied statistics, sometimes on the way to the PhD, sometimes after the PhD. It's also not unheard of for people to get an MPP and do policy stuff. However, I'm of the opinion that you usually don't have to get another degree unless you want to do something very specific. Like let's say I want an industry job. If I want, specifically, to be a statistician - then yes, I will need to go get an MA in statistics. Or if I want to go into law, then I will need a JD. But if I just want a industry job in which I can use my skills and that I will enjoy - then I don't really need to get an additional degree. There are plenty of jobs that will take me with my PhD; there are lots of people with PhDs who have left academia and found productive employment in other fields despite not having an MBA or whatnot. Including in the humanities and social sciences. I'm not fundamentally opposed to the idea of earning another degree if I needed to, but it would have to be something I could do part-time or in executive format. I am simply uninterested in being a full-time student ever again. (I suppose I would consider the possibility of a 1-year accelerated full-time master's.)

Someone a few days (weeks?) ago posted a scientific article in which some psychologists looked at job outcomes to see which factors mattered most in hiring. The factor that seemed to matter the most was departmental reputation, followed by the number of publications. The article was published in 2007 but I doubt much has changed since then - people who come from better-reputed programs will, all else being equal, probably have better chances on the job market. It won't just be because of the name, though; it's because of a variety of factors, including the resources and network that faculty at top departments have. The NRC has UChicago's psychology PhD program's S-ranking between 8 and 38 and the R ranking between 7 and 28 - so around the same as Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, Pittsburgh, MIT, and Syracuse. The problem with the NRC's psychology rankings, though, is they lump together subfields and even add some adjunct fields in (like human development and family studies, which is heavily related to psychology but not purely psychology). There's even a communication disorders program in there! Also, at this point the rankings are nearly 10 years old. U.S. News has UChicago in the top 25ish psychology programs - around Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Ohio State, UC-Davis, Brown, Johns Hopkins, Indiana and Virginia. So, at least in about 2005-2007, many faculty members would have ranked UChicago in the top 20-30ish programs in psychology (based on the S-rankings). You don't have to worry what the general public things, because they won't be doing the hiring - just like the general public might not realize that Michigan and UCLA are powerhouse academic research institutions and not just big sports schools. You just need to worry about what faculty thing, and for the most recent rankings for which we have information, most faculty seem to have a pretty good opinion of UChicago. You also might want to try to ferret out where recent alumni of UChicago's PhD program are currently working. Ask a PI of interest where they have placed their most recent students.

Hunter College has a great school of public health. It's more regionally respected than national - so lots of great connections within the NYC and the greater Tri-State area. I'm sure you could take it elsewhere. Lots of focus on community health and urban/minority health issues as well; health disparities et al. And it's super cheap!

UPitt has a great school of public health; it's in the same realm as Columbia, so I wouldn't turn down Pitt just because of the prestige of Columbia. I agree - it's about what you want to do. ID&M sounds more like an epidemiology-type program that leads to jobs as an epidemiologist, whereas HPM is definitely a more management, administration and policy work type degree. So what do you want to do? Do you want to do administrative and management work in health care organizations, or do you want to study infectious diseases?

Anyone else out there interested in the emotional well-being of older adults and the effect of aging on their affective experience? Me! But more recently. I'm a social/health psychologist and most of my research focuses on the intersection between substance use, HIV, and mental health. I'm interested in how substance interacts with poor mental health, and how they both influence HIV risk behavior and the management of HIV. So for older adults, one of my newer interests is aging with HIV - I'm interested in how aging with HIV affects older adults' emotional well-being and mental health and vice versa; how neurocognitive decline might affect the management of HIV disease; how comorbidities due to age (especially cardiovascular disease) may interfere with HIV disease progression; and how social networks and support might mitigate those experiences. I'm also interested in how substance use, mood disorders, and other psychosocial and structural factors (like poverty, race, childrearing, history of physical or sexual abuse, incarceration, etc.) influence sexual risk behavior, adherence to HIV medication, and HIV disease progression in younger adults, too.

I just want to co-sign on everything @spunky said (I love @spunky's enthusiasm for quantitative psychology, lol!). I did my PhD in social psychology but I am currently in a quantitative psychologist postdoctoral program. There are excellent job opportunities, both academic and non-academic, for quantitative psychologists. There are more academic positions than there are graduates, but there are also tons of private and government agencies that desperately need people who know how to do statistics but also know how to interpret them into useful social science information for the masses. That's where you come in! I also want to add that it's quite common for programs to have a quantitative minor - so you could get a PhD in cognitive psychology and minor in quantitative psychology. One example of such a place is UCLA (or you could do the opposite - major in quant, minor in cog psych). Every quant psych program encourages people to develop a substantive interest as well, so you could go to a quant psych program and study primarily cog or cog neuro problems if you wanted to! Still other programs without formal quant programs will allow you to earn a concurrent master's in applied statistics (like Penn State or Yale) or have flexible enough requirements that you could take substantial coursework in statistics and potentially earn a master's in statistics if you wanted to (like Columbia, my own program. My former advisor there is an excellent methodologist, btw. NYU also has a quant minor with a methodologist I know from grad school - great guy). *raises hand* that's me. I am much more of a psychologist with a keen insight and intuition for advanced statistical methods than I am a mathematician who has an interest in psychology. That's partially a result of my training - I went to a social psych program and not a quant psych program, because I didn't know quant psych existed in undergrad - but partially a result of my interests, too. I've noticed this at my postdoctoral fellowship, which is in a research center focused on methodology and statistics that employs a bunch of quantitative psychologists, statisticians, computer scientists, and social/developmental psychologists (and an epidemiologist). There are some of us who are driven to develop statistical models because of an abiding interest in the theoretical statistics itself, and they need substantive scholars to bring applied problems to them that they can use to test the statistical methods they develop. There are others of us (including myself) who have substantive questions that we want to answer, and so we work on teams to develop the methods because we need a method to answer the questions in which we're interested. Of course, it's not so black and white - I do have some theoretical interests in statistics and methods (and I love equations and Greek letters, lol) and some of the more mathematical folks do have substantive interests in certain fields; everyone at our center does drug abuse research, for example, because it's funded by NIDA. You can take either path, but it's more lucrative to take the path in which you have more theoretical knowledge and are a statistician with a keen interest in psychology who can develop methods. It's because there are fewer of you, and there are more opportunities to do data science in the non-academic world. But...you should also follow your interests!

I got my PhD from Columbia's SMS department. It's an excellent department, lots of research experiences both at the university and at other colleges and universities in New York, plus nonprofits and NGOs in New York. Great theoretical education in the coursework. Excellent preparation for a doctoral program if that's what you want. Honestly, all of those departments are great. You can get into a great doctoral program from any of them. Emory, Columbia, Michigan, and UCLA have the best reputations - but Pitt and Boston U are great places too, with lots of research going on.

Shadowing clinicians is actually quite common for clinical psychology applicants, and I would recommend this as well. Collecting data from clinical populations is research experience, not clinical experience. A lot of people volunteer at hospitals and psychiatric clinics and inpatient drug treatment centers for this. It's quite easy to do without personal connections; I did this in college and I wasn't even interested in clinical psychology. Many hospitals have formal volunteering programs. I'm going to buck the trend a little, too, and suggest that you take some foundational coursework in psychology. I'm not in clinical psychology, but in my program we did have a few people who didn't major in psychology in undergrad (a couple math majors and one philosophy major, maybe some others). The thing that differentiated them is that they took some foundational psychology coursework - at least 5-7 classes in the field. I doubt my program would've admitted anyone who had no psychological coursework, and we actually had a pretty decent behavioral economics contingent. Graduate coursework assumes you have some undergraduate foundation in the field.