franks98

E/E G/G E/E And a fucking HM. Damn that pisses me off. Oh well, another year of TA'n'. Congrats to all awardees and HMs!

^^^ nevermind. Apparently it's on the homepage; the about page shows last year's numbers.

nevermind. I thought it had been on the about page.

I'm cross-posting this from the NSF GRFP thread: For the GRFP, I think they will just hold funding at last year's level (i.e. 30k/yr, 10.5k institutional support). The nsfgrfp.org website doesn't have the info about the stipend and support increase for FY13 listed anymore, so my guess is that they'll keep the number of awards the same and decrease the award amount. That sucks, but I suppose it's better than thinking that you maybe could have gotten an award if only damn politicians didn't screw everything up.

For the GRFP, I think they will just hold funding at last year's level (i.e. 30k/yr, 10.5k institutional support). The nsfgrfp.org website doesn't have the info about the stipend and support increase for FY13 listed anymore, so my guess is that they'll keep the number of awards the same and decrease the award amount. That sucks, but I suppose it's better than thinking that you maybe could have gotten an award if only damn politicians didn't screw everything up.

You have a lot of schools listed that receive a hundred + highly qualified applicants for 2-4 spots in their program. You have good stats yourself; but I would recommend also finding schools that maybe wouldn't get as many applicants -- many schools like that still have top-notch training and will pay you a descent enough stipend. One thing I recommend is to look at those big names you want to apply to and look at their students who are now faculty at other universities. A lot of times, they may not have the name recognition; but, they may be very productive, funded with junior researcher grants, and in need of students.

Sure thing: Symbolic self-completion in academia: evidence from department web pages and email signature files (Jones, Schmeichel, & Jones, 2008) European Journal of Social Psychology Volume 39, Issue 2,pages 311–316, March 2009 DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.541 If you have institutional database access, PsycInfo would probably get you the article quickly.

Cool. I didn't just make this up. I figured there was a good possibility that I did and that I would now have to do a study on it. I found the study that I was thinking of: "Symbolic self-completion in academia: evidence from department web pages and email signature files" (Jones, Schmeichel, & Jones, 2008). Interestingly (for social psych folks), it comes from the research on terror management theory. The abstract: Symbolic self-completion theory proposes that individuals use symbols of attainment to define themselves as accomplished in self-defining areas and to communicate their accomplishments to others. The goal of the present research was to examine whether individual professors and academic departments strive for symbolic self-completion when communicating through the Internet. We hypothesized that publications, citations, and departmental rankings by the National Research Council (NRC) represent important indicators of attainment for professors, whereas professional titles (i.e., “doctor,” “professor,” or “Ph.D.”) may serve as alternate symbols of attainment. We predicted that a lack of important indicators of attainment would motivate the display of professional titles in web pages and email signature files. In Study 1, academic departments with less prestigious NRC rankings listed more professional titles on their departmental web pages compared to departments with more prestigious rankings. In Studies 2 and 3, professors with lower annual rates of publications and citations displayed more professional titles in their email signatures compared to professors with higher publication and citation rates. These results suggest that self-completion motives help to shape naturalistic Internet communications. The results further suggest that analyses of Internet communications can provide externally valid tests of theories concerned with motivation and self-processes.

Meh. . . I just sign my first name. My first and last show in the person's inbox. I see a lot of people in my program with extensive signatures and I kinda roll my eyes at it -- more so if the person is annoying in general. If it's necessary that someone know something about me, I'll introduce myself as such. I think there was some study done showing the negative correlation between signature length and number of achievements/pubs/notoriety.

Well... I got an honorable mention. While there's no cash, I'm pretty damn happy about it. I'm the only person in social psychology to get on either the HM list or the awards list in all of Texas -- something to be stoked about, I suppose. And, seeing that everyone else in social psych on both lists is from pretty much all the huge name institutions, I feel good about representing a smaller school that's not exactly known to be a power house in psychology (though, in my opinion, we have some real top-notch faculty). I'll really beef up my application next year! A toast to all. Cheers!

If you can handle it, do both. I think schools will be looking for at least one psych methods course. Most will even usually state that if you're applying without a major in psych to make sure that you have had methods and stats. Despite your research experience, it would be quite a gamble putting in apps without methods on your transcript. Being in the UW system myself (not at Madison, though), I think you'll be able to handle the 8 week summer course while doing research with a lab. The 8 week courses go at a nice pace, not too compressed -- in fact, I prefer an 8 week class over the 14 or 17 week ones just 'cause it doesn't drag on for so long. Anyways, that's my opinion. Try to do both. You seem motivated and bright and I don't think you'll have a problem handling the work load. Oh, and as to whether research will make up for lack of a methods course? Again, I wouldn't try this as it may not fly with many schools. Even if you are well taught in the hands-on setting, that then must be communicated not only in your SoP but your LoR writers will also likely have to make mention of it. To me, this is unnecessary space spent explaining a deficiency rather than using it to tell adcomms how awesome you are.

Nice! I'll be in the SCN program working in the Social Cognition lab with Michael Zárate. Yeah, my plan was to head there early August. My partner (aka: my sugar momma) is working on getting a job within the EP school district, so we're looking to buy a house near campus. I'm excited -- ELP seems like a real nice place to spend the next five years.

Thanks! Yeah, I was on the wait-list at KU. They had contacted me just this week asking if I still wanted to be considered and that a spot may be opening up for me. Then two days later I was notified that the funding wasn't there and that they had finalized their decisions (the program director was super nice about it). Unless another professor is still looking to choose off the wait-list, it looks like KU is done with this season. I was told that formal letters will be sent soon. Best o' luck!

[quote name=hello! ' timestamp='1302367670' post='241903] That's true, but my impression is that if the student later takes additional upper division courses in Behavioral Neuro, Cognitive Neuro, Neuropsych, etc. and gets an A, she/he will likely be fine.

Ha! Prior to interviewing at Arizona, my POI there called up my advisor here at my UG school and said that he really liked my application but had concerns about my B in Social Psych that I got when I was a sophomore! He wanted to get reassurance that I could handle a social psych doctoral program. From then on out, my advisor had it in his head that my GPA was weak... it's 3.9, damnit! It was more funny than anything else. Bad grades in stats or methods will hurt you. They'd be a red flag to a lot of POIs and adcomms. If you're going into neuroscience or something along those lines, a bad grade in biopsych definitely ain't helping you.