juilletmercredi

Here's the thing about NASP vs. APA: you really need to look at the requirements of the state in which you wish to practice. That's what's going to answer your question about accreditation. When I was considering school psych, I was told to look for doctoral programs that were both APA-accredited and NASP-approved. (NASP does actually approve doctoral level programs in addition to specialist-level programs.) Most NASP-approved doctoral programs are also APA-accredited - there are 64 NASP-approved doctoral-level programs; 53 of them are accredited by the APA (45 as school psychology programs, and 8 others as combined professional programs - usually with clinical or counseling psychology). Given the large overlap, I think the safest bet is to choose a school that is both NASP-approved and APA-accredited, since it appears that there are only 11 programs that don't have both. However, I wouldn't go to a school that was APA-accredited but not NASP-approved, since NASP is the important body in school psych. For example, New York State does not mention NASP or APA when discussing their programs; here's what they say: To be determined to be the equivalent of a New York State program registered as licensure qualifying, a program must be offered by an institution accredited by an accrediting organization acceptable to the Department or recognized by the appropriate civil authorities of the jurisdiction in which the school is located as an acceptable doctoral program in psychology. The program must be designed and conducted by the degree-granting institution to prepare graduates to practice professional psychology independently, and it must be shown to be substantially equivalent to the requirements for the registration of a licensure qualifying doctoral program in psychology in New York State. The program must consist of at least three years of full-time study, or the part-time equivalent, and must include at least 30 semester hours of course work obtained at the doctoral degree-granting institution. Programs located in the United States must be accredited by a regional accrediting body approved by the United States Department of Education or the New York State Board of Regents. This is very confusing. But NYS maintains a list of programs that qualify. Some of them have NASP approval, some of them have APA accreditation, and some of them have both. This leads me to believe that NYS would accept either/or when licensing people who attended out of state programs, as long as the program met their own set of rules about qualifying programs. My home state, Georgia, requires that the program be NASP-approved: Applicants for a Clear Renewable Certificate must complete a NASP-approved training program or submit a copy of a valid NCSP credential. Completion of a Georgia school psychology training program at the sixth year level (Ed.S.) or the seventh year level (Ed.D. or Ph.D.) that is approved by the Georgia State Board of Regents will also meet requirements for the clear renewable certificate. My current state, Pennsylvania, also does not mention any specific professional organization when speaking about licensure - just that they review the coursework and requirements of an individual's out-of-state program before determining whether that person is eligible for licensure. However, the requirements are pretty similar if not identical to the requirements for a NASP-approved program. Another somewhat randomly chosen state (NC) will accept either a NASP or an APA program. Texas will also take either. Ohio doesn't say. California has their own set of requirements, but says that "programs approved by NASP meet these requirements." New Jersey and Hawaii both don't say, but their requirements are identical to the requirements for NASP-approval, so any NASP-approved program will meet the requirements. So based just on a quick perusal, your safest bet is to make sure that you definitely pick a NASP-approved program, because you can be sure that NASP-approved programs meet the requirements in the vast majority of states. I believe that it is easier to get into an APA-accredited predoctoral internship coming from an APA-accredited PhD program, so you might also want to preference those PhD programs with APA accreditation. APA accreditation might be important in some states if you ever want to practice outside of a school setting (say, in a hospital or private practice), since several states restrict the school psychology license to practice within schools. There's also the informal within-field preference - some employers may prefer students who went to APA-accredited programs; some internships may prefer students who attended APA-accredited programs; and if you ever want to teach in an APA-accredited program, the search committees will prefer people who graduated from APA-accredited programs (I have looked through some job ads that specifically required that applicants had a degree from an APA-accredited program). Here's an article on why APA accreditation matters, although it was admittedly written by APA and seems to focus primarily on clinical and counseling: http://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2004/04/accreditation.aspx. (Also, if it matters, I'm a member of APA, and I happen to think that they're a great professional organization.) (You can look up individual states' licensure and certification requirements here: http://www.nasponline.org/certification/state_info_list.aspx). I also want to float two minor details: 1. NASP does not accredit programs. They approve them, but they haven't been appointed as an accrediting body for educational programs. As an NCATE [National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education] SPA [specialized professional association], NASP does not accredit school psychology programs, but identifies approved programs. NCATE accredits units (e.g., Schools of Education), not programs, but does provide "national recognition" status (full or with conditions) to NASP-approved programs in NCATE-accredited units Some websites will erroneously say that their programs are "NASP-accredited," but this is an error. 2. NASP approves doctoral programs and "specialist-level programs." However, in NASP parlance, specialist-level does NOT mean Ed.S., necessarily. In fact, there are many master's programs that are considered specialist-level by NASP because they require the 60 credits et al., and they still lead to licensure (and to national certification, if you wish). Here's what NASP says: Please note: Many programs award a masters degree after completing the 3rd year internship, while other programs award a masters degree after two years of coursework prior to internship. As long as the program is a minimum of 60 credits and requires a minimum of a 1,200 hour internship, these programs are considered specialist equivalents. To simplify hereafter, all specialist and specialist-equivalent programs will be referred to as specialist -level programs. One example is the Ed.M in school psychology at Teachers College Columbia - it is a master's program (Ed.M, not Ed.S) but it still takes 3 years, 69 credits and internship, and is NASP-approved. Another example is the 68-credit MA at Marist College in school psychology. Both programs will result in licensure and certification in NYS, both are specialist-level programs, and both are NASP-approved, but they are not Ed.S. programs. (In addition, both erroneously say on their webpages that they are "NASP-accredited."

The short of it is that I don't think it matters, as long as you get research experience in grad school; and in fact, if you were going to get a master's (and pay for it), I am highly in favor of getting one that you can put to work for you like in school psych. I do want to say that school psychology is not a type of clinical psychology, per se. A master's degree in clinical psychology is completely different, and will not allow you to practice. They're mostly research-based MAs that have as a goal training for PhD programs in the field, and the career options are about the same as an experimental psych MA. A school psychology MA will allow you to practice, if it is a specialist-level program (not necessarily a specialist's degree, just specialist-level) and accredited by NASP. Scientist-practitioner is a model that was developed specifically for PhD programs, so I doubt many master's programs will explicitly describe themselves as such - but it IS true that many master's programs pride themselves upon teaching their students both tenets of research and practice. So yes, you can go to a practice-oriented master's program like school psychology and still learn how to do research while getting licensed to practice. This is especially true if you go to a department in which a PhD is also offered. And so no, getting a master's in a practice field doesn't have to disadvantage you; you just need to make sure that you join someone's lab and do research in grad school.

1. In the U.S. in psychology I still think it is most common for PhD students to come into the program without a master's. Sometimes they have a few years of experience (1-3) between college and grad school, but most will not have a master's. So you don't need to have a master's first, necessarily. The caveat, though, is that you have a foreign bachelor's degree. Many international students do a domestic MA first to prove that they can excel in graduate school before applying successfully to PhD programs. I think you should apply to both kinds and see what happens. 2. If your intention is to practice in the U.S., there are only a few kinds of subfields that will allow you to do counseling work: Clinical psychology, counseling psychology, and school psychology. You need to go to an APA-accredited program, as most states will only allow licensure if you graduate from an APA-accredited program (check out the APA website). If you are interested in neuropsychological assessment and treatment, then you'll want to look for a clinical neuropsychology program; try Division 40 of the APA (they have a list). I would only choose school psychology if you specifically wanted to work with children, and particularly children in schools and how their developmental disorders/issues impacted their education. Cognitive psychology and neuroscience would not allow you to practice as a therapist.

I don't think you'll have an issue, given what you articulated here. Even though your degree is in finance, your background is very clearly in health and you have clear intentions and goals within public health.

This is completely situation specific. I went straight into a PhD (actually the Columbia one VulpesZerda mentioned) program without a master's - straight from undergrad; I graduated in May 2008 and started in September 2008. I was the only one in my cohort who came straight from undergrad, and I think I was one of two who did not have a prior master's (but the other woman who did not had a couple of years of work experience in the field). I just finished the program this August. I finished in 6 years; I finished at the same time or ahead of several of my cohort mates with master's degrees. I also finished at the same time as my cohort mates in my secondary department, even though I literally took twice the coursework and twice the exams they did. I don't think that not having a master's put me at a disadvantage. 1) In my program students without a master's degree got an additional year of fellowship support, so I had 3 years of fellowship, not 2. This was enough for me to finish my coursework and also win another external fellowship, which I used to finish my PhD. This will vary significantly by program, so it's worth asking rather than counting yourself out. I did have to take more coursework than the master's recipients, but I made up for the time in other ways. 2) I did not lack the necessary background knowledge to excel in class discussions and my coursework. I had no difficulties with my coursework whatsoever (what was difficult was the volume of work, not the content) and I actually had a more advanced statistical and methodological background than most of my peers. 3) Yes, you are held to the same standards as those with a master's, but it doesn't always have to be a bad thing. Again, I didn't feel like I was at a disadvantage compared to my peers. I had read a lot of the same theorists they read in grad school - but I read them in undergrad. I had all of the necessary prerequisite knowledge to graduate work in my own field. The only thing I wish I had had was two additional years of work experience that would've helped me shape my research interests a bit earlier; MA holders do benefit from a more in-depth investigation of their research area, which means that they might be able to hit the ground running a bit more in the beginning of their PhD. My classmates already had well-defined areas and vague dissertation ideas. However, I quickly made up for the lost time and - like I said - I finished before some of them anyway. My grades, fellowships, and publication record supports that I wasn't at a terrible disadvantage. 4) My faculty definitely did not respect me less. I was nominated for honors for both my dissertation proposal and my dissertation, and was asked to work on several projects by faculty who'd observed my work in class. And honestly, by the time I had finished my coursework it ceased to matter that I didn't have a prior master's, because now I was caught up theoretically with my classmates anyway. 5) This is true - having a master's does make you more competitive for admission, but I don't think that's a reason not to apply. Ultimately, this is going to be largely based upon your own undergraduate preparation for the degree as well as your personal qualities and the program you apply to. I think that deciding never to admit another BA-prepared student because of one bad experience with a BA-prepared student goes against the very tenets of social science, but programs do have to act in their best interests. My undergraduate preparation was quite good - I read some of the theorists we examined in graduate school in my freshman year of college; my college was very writing-intensive, so I had already written several 20-page seminar papers before I started grad school; I studied abroad, which included a very in-depth class on theory in this particular area (we read Althusser, Lacan, Butler, Derrida, et al. and I thought I would die, lol), and did an independent research project in my specific area of interest; I wrote a senior honors thesis; I had a lot of advanced statistical training through advanced classes and special programs, relative even to many other master's students; and my college was one of the few in that had a public health minor (more are getting one). In my case I feel like I was very well-prepared to begin a PhD program straight out of the gate. Since me there have been a few other people who also begun without master's degrees and as far as I know the program hasn't noticed a significant difference between those who have them and those who do not. There's another person in my same concentration who also came straight out of undergrad (we are the only two people who did that - even most of the people without MAs had some work experience) and she, too, is on track to graduate in 5.5-6 years with praise from faculty.

"Good school but not the top"? What on earth do you mean? UCLA is a top 10 school of public health.

Yeah, I am a big advocate for tactic #2. Don't change your working style; just report on what you've done: "Nothing has changed since this morning, but I'll give you an update when it does." "I haven't finished running the experiment from last night; I expect that it won't be done until Monday." And so forth. You can read his reactions to see how he's taking it. Most people would eventually get the hint or at least unconsciously reduce the behavior, realizing that it's not really getting anywhere. If he's beginning to get annoyed, you can then deduce whether he's got unrealistic expectations about the speed of your work and address this with him during a one-on-one.

It's not really one hundred percent clear to me what the issue is, but it sounds like you've joined a lab and discovered after a month or so that the lab isn't really for you for a variety of reasons. This is not a big deal; it happens all the time. What you need to do is make it depersonalized for your professor. Arrange to meet with her, and sit down and tell her the non-personal reasons - that you thought that the research would be a good fit, but it turns out that the projects you're working on are not really a good fit for your interests. There's no need to bring up any of the other stuff. Most good, rational professors will not hold issues of research fit against you, and will support you in trying to seek out a better-fitting lab.

I'm not sure that this will lead you to where you want to go. Most programs will look at your undergrad and grad GPAs, and some graduate programs don't really care much about your grad GPA. For instance, I have heard that law schools care much more about your undergraduate GPA than any subsequent MA GPAs, so a 3.7 master's GPA won't really help a 2.5 undergrad GPA get into Harvard. I can't say for sure, but I would imagine physical therapy is the same - especially given that an MBA is completely unrelated to the physical therapy degree. Besides, it seems like quite a waste of money to get a master's you don't really want just to try to get into a different program. I chatted with a PT student once because my sister was interested in the field, and she said that many of her classmates - after graduating with a bachelor's - actually returned to school to become certified as a physical therapist's assistant. They worked for a few years in that field, and then applied to their physical therapy programs. It seems to me that that would be a better path than the MBA. You'd get the clinical hours you need and you'd also get close to at least one PT who could write you a letter of recommendation (most PT programs require a letter from at least one PT who has seen you work). If you have the prerequisites, you might also consider getting an accelerated BSN and doing really well that way, and then working as a nurse for a while - perhaps a rehabilitation nurse who works closely with physical therapists. Another option, since you are in NYC, is doing a physicians assistant program. CUNY York and CUNY City College both have bachelor's level PA programs - they take about 2 years and 4 months, but the pay is quite high. I think the PTA route is the best route if you know you want to be a PT, but nursing and PA are both better-paying.

Yes, this is quite common...as others have said, doctoral programs tend to attract the kind of obsessive student who loves talking about their field and their work all day long. It's one of the reasons that few of my close friends in graduate school were other doctoral students. I only hung out with the ones who proved that they could talk about something other than the department/our field when we went out. It also took me quite a while to make lasting friends who I enjoyed hanging with. In the beginning I mostly hung with master's students, because our program was a professional master's program and the students were far less likely to debate the finer points of some esoteric scholarly topic I didn't want to talk about (when we did talk about our field, it was from a professional or policy standpoint, which I enjoyed because I didn't really want to be an academic). After most of my master's friends graduated I actually made friends with a lot of people outside of my school entirely through other channels.

I would venture to say that if you don't know what you want to specialize in, then perhaps you aren't yet ready to apply for graduate school for next fall (fall 2015), particularly for doctoral programs. Most deadlines are coming up between early December and mid-March; PhD deadlines tend to be earlier (before the end of January, usually). At this point you should really have a decent solid (but flexible) list of programs and a good draft of a personal statement. Both of those things require some insight into what it is you might like to do. Furthermore, graduate school really isn't a time to explore new interests per se. It's a time to specialize in a specific field geared towards a specific career or set of careers. Of course there's room to grow within a specific area - but within a specific area. Basically, by the time you start applying to programs you should already identify what kinds of jobs you think you might enjoy and what areas in which you think you might like to specialize, and apply to programs geared towards that. It's a bit late to be doing that, particularly for doctoral programs. (If your goal is an MS program, some of this advice might be less applicable, since the deadlines tend to be later and the programs tend to be less specialized. As a last note - while I am very much in favor of being practical and orienting yourself towards topics and skills that are in-demand...make sure that you are also picking based upon your interests, too. You don't want to get stuck doing something that is very marketable but makes you miserable.

I came here to make the same comment about the adjunct stories. Vojtko’s story is missing a lot of information in it, so it’s unclear why she died alone and why she made so little. She was also 83 years old, but apparently didn’t have Medicare because she “didn’t want charity” and felt that she was owed retirement and benefits - even though she was part-time and it’s usually made clear to adjuncts that they aren’t eligible for benefits. Besides, the articles linked showed that Duquesne TRIED to reach out to her. They referred her to protective services; she refused the help. There’s nothing wrong with adjunct positions per se, if they are used as they were originally intended to be used - which is for working professionals to parlay their practical skills into teaching a class or two on the side. For example, a lot of people at the CDC teach public health classes at nearby Emory and other colleges and universities in Atlanta. An industrial-organizational psychologist might teach a business psychology class; a successful lawyer may adjunct teach at a law school, etc. But adjuncting was never meant to be strung together to try to create a living wage all on its own, and a lot of adjunct stories I see in outlets like Vitae are short on details. But from what’s there, it’s usually clear that the person in question has made a choice to continue to teach as an adjunct and not find alternative employment - because they don’t want to leave academia, because they are unwilling to leave a small geographic area (a disproportionate number of these stories occur in very large desirable cities like New York), or because they like being called “professor,” or whatever other reason it is. I have not yet seen a story where an adjunct says “I tried applying for everything, even non-academic positions, all over the country and nobody will hire me!” Not all the blame falls on faculty, of course; universities are allowing this to happen rather than creating lecturer or teaching-oriented positions with full-time benefits and pay, because it’s cheaper. But I think it does a disservice to the students; I think that both students and faculty would be much happier if more places created senior lecturer positions where faculty were expected to teach 6-8 classes a year, no research requirements (and therefore no expectation of sabbatical or research leave or time to write grants), with a decent full-time salary and benefits. They’d get the benefit of dedicated teachers who have the time to plan out innovative classes, the space to meet with students, and the connection and loyalty to the institution. Buuuuut I think as academics we need to stop seeing adjunct work (as in teaching 3-4 classes a semester and doing nothing else) as an alternative, and stop doing it. If no one is willing to take these crap jobs the universities will have to create better positions in order to get people to teach the classes they need taught. With all that said, I agree - my graduate university highly encouraged non-academics/corporate jobs. In my department taking non-academic research positions with nonprofits, NGOs, and think tanks was very common and not frowned upon - whatever paid the bills and made you happy, although some individual professors would've preferred you to take academic positions. And career services had two dedicated counselors for PhDs and focused on non-academic positions - we had PhD-holding alumni in consulting, marketing, and other corporate fields come back and speak about how to get non-academic jobs and my institution also subscribed to Versatile PhD. Lots of our PhDs went into consulting at the big firms.

If this is your first year, that means you’ve lived in New City for maybe 2 months. Perhaps 3-4 if you moved before the school year started. Give it some time - it takes time to make friends and feel connected to your city; it doesn’t all happen overnight. It’s always difficult to be away from your family at first, especially if you were with them before this. I am one of the biggest advocates of making sure that you are happy outside of your grad school life - your personal life matters, too, and I think that you should be content where you are. With that said, though, given that you’ve only been there for 2 months and given the importance of your program in your future, I think you should consider these things: 1) If your program is great, your advisor is wonderful, and this program has a good track record of placing people into fantastic jobs, do you want to give that up for the temporary gain of living somewhere else? Especially when it’s uncertain whether you can replicate that again? 2) Less flexibility now can mean more later. If you attend a great program in a meh place for 5 years, you might have more choices about where you want to work in the future, because you will be a more competitive applicant. If you are applying out, you will need the support from at least one person in the program - and yes, you need to communicate with your advisor. You don’t want i to be April, you find out that you got in somewhere, and you blindside your advisor with the news that you are planning to leave. Not only that, but other PhD programs will want an assurance from your current program that you are not leaving because you are having trouble with the current program - or about to get kicked out. So you’ll need a recommendation letter from a current professor, ideally your advisor. Also...do you hate the city because you hate the city itself, or do you hate the city because it is far away from your family and you feel miserable without them. The former is a valid issue, but the latter...do you intend to go into academia? Because if you do, the chances that you will end up close by your family are pretty slim.

The alternative is that one day a journal will contact you out of the blue and ask you to review something. That's how I started reviewing journal articles - after I published I would get emails. I have one on my desk right now. There's not a whole lot of "guidance" your PI can give you on this; forming a meeting and sitting down with you for an hour is not necessary. You know enough about the field to give your honest review on a paper and whether it's good or bad, and if you have submitted your own papers you've gotten some feedback on those. 3-4 a week is a lot, though. It's pretty common in my field for PIs to ask their graduate students to do some journal reviews that they can't get to, and some PIs even ask for help reviewing grants (HELP, not doing it yourself) It's a mutually beneficial process. They get help getting through some of the work that's pretty low-reward in the field, and you get experience doing something you're going to have to do for the rest of your career and yes, can put it on your CV. I would not advise approaching your PI and telling him to stop giving you work, because that can backfire in a big way - and he may hesitate to ask you to do anything that could be potentially beneficial and yet extra work. If you have too many and you find that it's interfering with your work, you can meet with your advisor and explain that - and ask that perhaps he give you a few less.

I just looked up GRIP and oh wow, I wish that existed when I was a GRF! I did a non-academic corporate internship in the summer after my third year of grad school. I think after coursework is complete is the best time to do an internship, particularly a research one. You have more skills and will be more useful to the scientists you'll be working with, and you'll be making the transition into comprehensive and dissertation work - the research you do at the summer program might enhance or contribute to that research. It also depends on the length. A 3-month short-term project, usually done over the summer, doesn't have to be done after finishing current projects - they're usually an opportunity to collaborate with different researchers on different projects, and perhaps write some papers with other authors and get enriching experience. A 12-month overseas project is usually done in support of the dissertation, though. Perhaps there's a researcher abroad who has the perfect dissertation project for you and you get the GROW to go work with them on that. I don't think you should just take 12 months off from your program to do unrelated research, unless, of course, you are fine with the idea of delaying your graduation to do that.

Three separate questions, I think: 1) Interview attire for academic jobs should be business formal - a suit, usually in some darker color (black, grey, charcoal, navy, perhaps brown). 2) As for every day wear...professors run the gamut depending on university, department, and personal style. Most commonly I've seen business casual. My grad department was on the slightly more business side of business casual - button-downs, slacks, vests, maybe a blazer but no ties and suits. I'm a postdoc now and my department is much less formal. Most people do like khakis and nice tops; some do jeans and sneakers with button-downs. I am a postdoc and my university does not have a strict dress code. I don't think my advisors even notice what I wear. I tend to be dressier than everyone else anyway, so I wear nice slacks and sweaters/button-downs/dressy tops with shoes or boots. Occasionally, especially on Fridays when I have no meetings, I will dress more down and wear nice jeans with Keds and a nice sweater or top. But there are some postdocs who show up in jeans all the time and nobody really cares. 3) As a TA, I dressed pretty much the same as I did every day - jeans and a nice top, keds or flats. I avoided wearing T-shirts on the days I was teaching, but other than that I didn't give much thought to it. 4) At conferences I am always business casual - slacks or a skirt and a dress top, with dress shoes. I tend to wear lower, chunkier heeled shoes because walking around on carpet all day in heels is uncomfortable. But I also don't wear flats, usually, unless I'm wearing slacks. I get complimented on my conference attire a lot, because again, I tend to be dressier than everyone else (I like dressing up, lol). The conferences I've been at range the gamut and dressiness seems to be inversely related to rank and position within academia - the famous full professors clump around in khakis and Birkenstocks, and the grad students and postdocs looking for jobs are in business casual or sometimes more.

I came here to say just this. The idea that a PhD should be a specialist is a bit overblown - yes, you will be an expert in a specific niche, but that doesn't mean that you won't learn about other things. The first two years of graduate school are really about forming a broad foundation in your field as a whole so that you can communicate with other scholars in the field. For example, I was in two departments in grad school. I'm a social psychologist but I also had to take classes in cognitive psychology and basic neuroscience in graduate school, as well as statistical methods. In public health, I took classes in history, sociology, and anthropology to learn about the underpinnings of my field; I also had to take a class in qualitative research methods, even though I am pretty much exclusively a quantitative researcher. But you know what? When I read a theory paper in public health by an important figure, I can understand it now; and when I read a qual paper that contributes to my area of research, I can understand the methods and know how they got what they got. I'm a postdoc now and, wouldn't you know, cognitive psychology is starting to find a foothold in my area and I'm actually really interested in using some of it to understand my work, so...useful! Plus, as others have pointed out, you need to be able to teach classes in a variety of subfields.

1. This will vary from person to person, but generally research experience is research that you did outside of the requirements of a specific class, something that helped you learn the conventions of scientific practice in your field. Writing a term paper for a senior-level class, in and of itself, is not the kind of research experience that departments are looking for. Turning that paper into a published article, or expanding upon it by doing empirical science with a professor, that's research experience. In your case, the final year research project probably "counts"; the term paper probably doesn't, unless you did it as part of an independent study project; the white paper is debatable. Depends on the content and who's reviewing your application. 2. No, although the closer you get the better. 3. Probably yes for master's programs. Not really for PhD programs.

I would not contact an adjunct faculty member, and I would definitely not specify an adjunct in my statement, for all the reasons fuzzy mentioned.

It is quite possible for a program to be admitting students without a particular professor admitting students. Like let's say you're applying for a computer science department with an information security concentration, and there are 3-4 professors who are actively teaching in that concentration. The department may be taking students (both in IS and other comp sci fields), and the concentration might be taking students, but the professor you really want to work with might be on sabbatical the following year and not taking anyone. That doesn't mean that you won't be considered, though, because ideally you'd list 2-3 professors in your statement who could supervise you and even if Prof X is on sabbatical, Prof Y or Prof Z might also be interested in taking you in. SO yes, you should probably ask, but I don't think it's a waste to apply as long as there are a couple professors in your interest area and at least one of them is taking students in the fall of 2015.

University of Michigan at Dearborn: http://umdearborn.edu/684783/ Penn State's MA in applied clinical psychology has some classes in clinical health psychology: http://harrisburg.psu.edu/programs/master-arts-applied-clinical-psychology#The_Curriculum Appalachian State University's MA program in clinical psych involves preparation in health psychology: http://clinicalpsych.appstate.edu/ William Paterson University has strengths in health psychology: http://www.wpunj.edu/cohss/departments/psychology/graduate.dot I do want to say, though, that I think a broad counseling education should prepare you to counsel individuals in well-being, stress management, and to a certain extent illness management. If you want to diet counseling specifically, you might investigate the possibility of being a registered dietitian. If you are more broadly interested in health issues as related to mental health, you might look into a counseling MA at a university with a school of public health and take some classes there.

I know neuroscientists with PhDs in biology, psychology, neuroscience, biomedical sciences and there are probably some in some other fields too (like biochem). Even at one particular university there may be many choices. For example, at Columbia there's the doctoral program in neurobiology and behavior, which has three Nobel laureates in it - but you could also study neuroscience in the neuro-heavy psychology department (especially if you are interested in social neuroscience or cognitive neuroscience), in biology, probably also in chemistry (one of the three Nobel laureates won his Nobel in chemistry) and even math and/or computer science if you were interested in computational neuroscience. As was already mentioned, what's really important is the work that you do and who you work with.

This is a touchy topic that will vary from department to department. In many departments, academia is the only acceptable answer even if that's unrealistic to expect. In others, research scientist positions in tandem fields (like the federal government or think tanks) is okay but industry (like consulting or market research) is frowned upon. I think that you can hedge your bets/be safe by saying that you'd like a career as an independent researcher in X field ("X field" being your subfield/research area). You don't need to say you want to be a professor. For what it's worth, in my own statement I said that I wanted to be a research scientist at a government agency, but I was applying to a joint public health program and that was a common post-PhD destination (and my departments were quite amenable to non-academic research jobs).

I mean...on the one hand, yes, academic positions are very difficult to find. But on the other hand, the vast majority of doctorally-educated people won't have to live on ramen noodles and potatoes. The BLS reports that the median weekly salary for doctorally-educated people in the U.S. is $1,623 - which is over $81,000 assuming a 50-week work year (2 weeks' vacation). The unemployment rate for the doctorally-educated is 2.2%. The majority of people with PhDs are both employed and making a decent middle-class salary, so the stories of PhD graduates living on meager incomes or in their cars - although true - are a bit exaggerated. The vast majority of PhDs will never have to do that. Yes, income inequality is increasing and yes, it looks like (at least in the United States) there's largely becoming two distinct classes (upper and under) rather than a gradient. But the truth of the matter is that those who earn a PhD are statistically FAR more likely to be in the upper class than the working/underclass, should things get that bad. I also just want to say that I think a lot of people have misconceptions about the salaries offered by non-R1 institutions. I pulled up the AAUP faculty salary survey and randomly searched what Virginia Commonwealth University (a doctoral institution) paid their faculty. Assistant professors averaged $71,000; and that was in the 36th percentile for that level (meaning that 64% of doctoral universities had AP median salaries higher than that). Kennesaw State - a public master's institution in Georgia - averages $57,000 for their assistant professors, and they are in the 25th percentile for master's universities. Charleston Southern University, a random baccalaureate (so the four-year comprehensive) averages $51,900 and they are in the 19th percentile. Sweet Briar is a middling SLAC in Virginia and they average $53,200, which is in the 37th percentile for similar institutions. And Georgia Perimeter, a community college in Georgia, averages $44,000 - which is in the 10th percentile for two-year colleges. (I deliberately picked a bunch of Southern schools because they tend to have lower salaries and I wanted to show how low we can get; the trade-off is that the cost of living in the South is also very low. It's really cheap to live in Charleston or Atlanta compared to, say, New York or San Francisco or even suburban New Jersey or Northern California.) With the exception of the community college (which again, I have to point out is in the 10th percentile, meaning the vast majority of community college professors earn more than that) all of these are above the median household income in the United States. Working at a public four-year comprehensive probably won't ever make you rich, but it's not slavery wages that some professors insinuate is the case. And actually most professors who work at better-paying four-year comprehensives, most master's and the vast majority of doctoral universities will make middle- to upper-middle-class wages. It's not i-banker money, but you knew that already, right?

If they are undergraduates, they are wrong. You need someone to train you in the proper research methods and conventions for your field. Even the geniuses worked under the advisement/supervision of someone else in the early days. Besides, even if you are a genius and your research stands independently, the academic world works on networking (just like everything else). You need someone who has supervised your research to write you a letter of recommendation their peers at your desired programs. As for OP - here is my opinion on the admissions, although others may disagree. 1) 2-3 years as a lab manager is better than an MA. Many, many psychology programs will not accept any credits from an MA or will accept at most a semester, so it doesn't significantly reduce your time to degree. And as someone already pointed out, MAs cost money while manager positions pay you AND lab manager positions are full-time research while MA programs will require other tasks. I also think that professors just look more favorably upon full-time post-college research experience than they do on MAs. So if you need to do something in the interim to improve your applications, looking for an RA or lab manager position is preferable to the MA. 2) I think there are two main schools of people who look down on the PsyD. The first are the hardcore researchers with PhDs who still ascribe to the Boulder model - who believe that good clinicians should be educated as scientist-practitioners. They believe that science informs practice and vice versa, and that a good clinical psychologist will get clinical and scientific training in tandem, the way PhD programs do it. A lot of these professors are also researchers and they value research over other kinds of tasks like service provision and teaching, so the looking down the nose is sort of because PsyD programs focus primarily on clinical work over research. I think you can take their advice with a grain of salt, because their values are simply different. PsyD programs teach you how to be a responsible consumer of research so that you are using the latest evidence-based clinical practice in your work, and that's the kind of research you need to know. You don't necessarily need to know how to run experiments, IMO, to be a good clinical service provider. The other camp is skeptical about PsyDs mainly because of the cost. I have to admit that I am in this camp. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the mean annual wage of clinical, counseling, and school psychologists is $72,710 (the median is $67,760). A salary of $112,000 would put a clinical psychologist in the 90th percentile for this job field. PsyD programs are mostly self-pay. Loyola Maryland, for example, charges $29,000 in tuition in the first two years; by year 4 it has gone down to a bit under $28,000. Just the tuition alone over four years is $114,000. But you will also have to borrow for living expenses, because doctoral programs are designed to be intensive and you can't really work enough to afford living expenses. Even if you lived very frugally on $20,000 a year, that's still $80,000 + $114,000 = $194,000 in debt for a career that will probably pay you around $70-90K/year. That's MD-level debt for a career that pays less than half what the average MD makes. And Loyola Maryland is middling; some PsyD programs are much more expensive. So basically, unless there are some public university PsyD programs that are significantly cheaper, PsyD programs don't really seem to make financial sense - you will go into more debt than you can reasonably expect to repay. The National Health Service Corps program is wonderful and extremely competitive, and my sense is that most of those positions go to physical health providers (physicians, nurses, physician assistants, and other allied health professionals there). You can't really rely on potentially winning one of these post-graduation scholarships because if you don't, you're stuck with the debt. The question is not about whether or not you are paying for a good product; it's whether you are paying for one that you can afford. A BMW is an excellent car, by all accounts. That doesn't matter, though, because I can't afford a BMW, so I made a different choice when it came to purchasing a means for transportation. IMO it is far better to "delay" a few years and get valuable experience to end up with no debt than it is to jump into something because you want to go through fast and end up drowning in debt. And I know it's easy to say on the other side - but really, in the long run those 2-3 extra years will fly. I will say that James Madison's PsyD program is well-respected and offers decent financial aid: a tuition waiver and a $14,500 stipend guaranteed for 3 years. http://www.psyc.jmu.edu/cipsyd/financial.html. I believe the 4th year is spent in internship, and the expectation is that you find a paid one. * Another piece of advice: if you want to be a therapist/clinician primarily and have little interest in research, why not consider doing an MSW and getting licensed as a clinical social worker? I have a few friends that have done this. LCSWs actually provide the bulk of mental health services in the U.S. - I think something like 70%. They get reimbursed by insurance companies and can set up their own practices and such. The difference is that you can go to a public university and earn an MSW for cheaper than you could a PsyD. Even if you went to an expensive private, the MSW would be half the cost because it's half the time. You can also later earn a PhD or a DSW if you really wanted a doctoral degree. I have two friends doing PhDs in social work and another who already has one. There are many teaching opportunities within the field because it's a very specialized degree (schools of social work will often only hire people with a PhD + an MSW and 2 years of social work experience, because that's what's required by their accreditation bodies). You could do direct clinical work, research and teaching, or community org/nonprofit work. There's also the option of a master's in mental health counseling and getting licensed as an LPC, although these regulations vary state by state.