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Mr. Tea

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About Mr. Tea

  • Birthday 02/01/1984

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  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Ann Arbor, Michigan
  • Interests
    Culture, motivation, goals, empathy
  • Application Season
    Already Attending
  • Program
    Social psychology

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  1. Calling the administrative staff first is a fantastic idea. If that attempt is unsuccessful, then I would say that in my opinion yes it is definitely worth the risk. My advice would be to assume silence as a neutral response and not take it personally. If the silence is a negative response then the POI is probably going to be a pain in the ass to work with. I don't imagine that many successful academic careers start with a faculty mentor who is a complete jerk and can't try to understand the applicant's reasonable point of view.
  2. I agree that entering all names in your letter could make it seem like you are unfocused, even if it's true. Choose the two or three with whom you would most like to work and briefly mention why your interests fit with their research. You may end up working with all five professors eventually, or you may discover that the professors who you do not mention are a better fit after you get to know them and their current research in greater depth, but you don't need to state that in your statement of purpose. Just try to express that the program as a whole will help you reach your research and career goals.
  3. For any job or school you apply to, the organization or school wants to know your levels of ability and motivation. In the academic statement of purpose you get to demonstrate your ability by discussing how your past experiences have equipped you with skills that will allow you to succeed in graduate school and as a professional psychologist (e.g., research experiences, conference presentations, or whatever else may apply), and you get to demonstrate your motivation by discussing your career goals (e.g., research interests) and why the program is a good fit for you. The academic statement of purpose will be important but drier, which is just fine. In the personal statement you have the option of demonstrating your ability by telling a story about other areas where you have had success in life, but overall I think the most important thing is to demonstrate your motivation by sharing an experience that helped you discover that you want to pursue a career in psychology. I suggest that you tell a story about one general experience (i.e., don't give a comprehensive personal history). Was there something about your military experience that led you to want to pursue a psychology career? Was there something about the differences in local political systems in the places you've lived? Think of the personal statement as personable (note: not sloppy) rather than "fluffy." You're letting the selection committee get to know you as a person and giving them a break from the other parts of the application process. Your military experience and multi-country living experiences sound like great content for any diversity statement. "Diversity" can really refer to anything about your life history that makes you stand out. That part of any application is tough to write, so I recommend searching online to see how others have approached it. I found that was helpful last year when I was applying.
  4. The way I approached this was to use the academic statement of purpose to describe past relevant experience, research interests, and why X's program is a great fit for me, and to use the personal statement to illustrate my motivation to embark on a career in my field. For the latter I told a story about working at a specialty loose leaf tea shop. Get creative. Applying to: Stanford Princeton U Chicago U of Illinois U Virginia U Michigan Northwestern Ohio State WUSTL
  5. Here's another important question: If this POI tells you not to contact, doesn't update info on his site, and gets pissed at you for asking, how much is it worth entering into a 5+ year professional relationship with him? Opinions will diverge, and I know it can be intimidating when you've had zero contact and are excited at the possibility of working with someone whose work you respect, but my opinion is that you should send a quick email saying that you noticed on his site that he was accepting students last year and wanted to check and see if he is also accepting students this year as well (this serves a second function as a non-critical way to remind him to update the site).
  6. 3.45 GPA is fine if your GREs are good. I don't know about clinical/counseling programs but research experience and dissemination (conference posters, publications if possible) are helpful in other programs.
  7. Sometimes "recruitment weekends" are informal interview weekends. For one school I received a call from a prof telling me that I was accepted prior to their recruitment weekend. For another, there were over a dozen of us invited to a "recruitment weekend" and the school ended up giving offers to four prospective students. For another, I had a visitation weekend (couldn't make official recruitment) but it seemed more like they intended to give me an offer before I arrived (I withdrew my application before this happened because I heard back from my top choice). Pre-acceptance interviews are becoming more common because there is generally less funding available and a large pool of talented applicants, but they aren't universal. As a general note, and to put it bluntly, don't be arrogant and don't be an asshole. Everyone or almost everyone who is invited to an interview weekend is highly qualified. My strong impression is that an important part of the interview process is to find out which of the qualified people are assholes who no one wants to work with for 5+ years.
  8. Stanford had a $125 application fee last year. They were the most expensive by $35.
  9. Are the conferences in April for psych-related research? If so and if you have an accepted presentation then mention it on your CV as "to be presented at the XXth annual conference for XYZ psych organization"
  10. I would say that you have to know almost no stats when you start your PhD. Your first year you will take a stats course that will get you up to speed. If you have a hard time with math/stats then this will probably be your hardest course, but that is true of many bright and motivated graduate students.
  11. I did not take it. I'm not sure if anyone else in my cohort took it. My general impression is that it may help if you come from a non-psych background (to show whether you are familiar with the field), but otherwise you should not bother.
  12. I'll add my support for what a number of other people are saying - if you have non-PhD experiences that can help solidify your long-term desires, do that instead of applying. If you are changing your mind frequently about what you want to do, then as another responder said, that may be a good sign that you should not go for PhD programs at this point in time. People are generally supportive of it when you take time to figure out exactly what you want to do.
  13. I think you have been selectively exposed to PhD horror stories, but your concerns don't strike me as representative of the typical grad school experience. First, when you are determining which route you should take, you need to think about your long-term career goals. What do you want to wake up every morning and do for the rest of your life? Graduate school is a means to an end, not the end itself. If you think that you can succeed as a professional in the field after grad school, then you can succeed in grad school. Managing your time in grad school is a challenge because your work is more ambiguous than it is as an undergraduate and there is always something that you could be doing. Some people choose to lock themselves away from everyone else and work 24/7. Many others have a happy and successful career as a graduate student working hard and playing hard. Read The Anticreativity Letters by Richard Nisbett for an idea about how not to do grad school (it dispels some myths about what grad school is supposed to be like) here http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nisbett/anticreat.pdf. With regard to the comment about going into clinical practice rather than academia following PhD - let me reframe this issue. I am under the impression that many people who go into applied psychology fields have little interest in research, which is a shame - not because everyone should go into academia, but because in order to effectively apply psychology, you need to understand research methods. You need to understand how to make sure that the methods of treatment that you are using or trying to create are effective. I am unfamiliar with how PsyD programs operate, so I won't knock them; however, you will learn research methods in a PhD program. Furthermore, if you ever want to work at a university then there are options to do that while maintaining a private clinical practice (many of the professors in my Master's program did that). In summary, getting a PhD in psychology is stressful - so are many other things in life that you have to work hard for (e.g., engineering programs, to play off of the first responder). For most things worth pursuing in life, you can adopt the sports motto "No pain, no gain." You just have to decide if the thing that you want to work hard for is a career as a psychologist. Then you can decide which means (PhD program, PsyD program) will best equip you to achieve your goals for that career.
  14. This really depends on your long term goals. I have to say that I am very skeptical that completing an online Master's in psychology is valuable unless they provide research or applied experience somehow.
  15. Illinois State University, where I went for my Master's program, has a number of funded Master's programs. They provide you with a full tuition waiver, however, you still have to pay general fees and for health insurance (the latter is pretty cheap, but it's an expense). You generally receive a TA position that requires 10 hours of work per week and gives you a stipend of $400/month. It's not a lot, so I took out loans as well (or you could try to get two GA positions or a part time job elsewhere).
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