Behavioral

If you go fairly fancy and use a syphon-method to extract coffee, there's virtually 0 bitterness left -- cold or hot.

Seems like you made your way from reddit! I know you hold some reservations about marketing/business in general, but you have to realize that they share a surprising amount of overlap with psychology research. To be blunt, marketing is essentially separated into two main disciplines: quantitative marketing (economic modeling) and behavioral marketing (consumer psychology, JDM, etc.). Many marketing professors still publish very regularly in top psychology journals (JPSP, Psych Bulletin, etc.) and arguably two of the most influential marketing professors of our time were both classically trained in psychology before going on to marketing (Dan Ariely and John Lynch). Also, many successful applicants to behavioral marketing Ph.D. programs only hold a psychology degree and many don't have any econ/business coursework (I had 0 marketing/business courses under my belt, though I was a joint math/econ major). Your not being experienced in either shouldn't pose much of a problem for business Ph.D. admission if your numbers and research experience are up to par. Aside from that, marketing programs have much more lucrative career prospects (2011 placement/starting salary report: http://docsig.org/WWW2011Final.pdf); industry consulting opportunities are much easier to obtain with a business doctorate; there's no post-doc before professorship; median time to completion for a Ph.D. is only 5 years; business-Ph.D. attrition rate is something like 20%; graduate financial package is quite generous ($32k/year fellowship at Kellogg, and higher at places like Stanford GSB); and there's the ability to be faculty in either or both marketing and psychology departments. I don't mean to sound like some advertisement, but you should at least consider marketing programs. As someone who was a double major in psychology and joint math/econ (and even got into a couple of econ Ph.D. programs this year), I couldn't disagree more. There are a handful of professors finally including bounded rationality/incomplete information to the microecon/game theory literature, but it still seems that the overwhelming majority of the discipline is still contentious of any psychology/JDM encroachment. I jumped ship to marketing because I still take a good amount of coursework with the econ students at NU and can direct my research which is more inclined to our psychology/marketing departments. Economics is great training for someone looking to model decision making dynamics, but the discipline lacks qualitative depth for my liking right now. Booth actually seems to have mainly quantitative marketing faculty that due heavily focus on game theory/formal modeling. You're definitely spot on about Kellogg and Fuqua--both have a good number of faculty that have dual-positions in the marketing and psychology departments.

Definitely not an authority, but after reading through (notice 'through') over 400 articles in the last month, I've started mainly reading abstracts and discussions at a fairly quick place, and for those that sound interesting/relevant to my research, I earmark them for a later, more thorough read. In terms of re-reading, I make sure to highlight various theories leading up to the creation of the study, the hypotheses, main manipulations, and main findings. I typically write any criticisms/improvements/ideas for followups in the margins (or annotation box if reading on computer or iPad). Besides that, I don't try to drown myself in highlighting too much, or taking too many notes. The truth of the matter is that I won't be reading through a lot of my markings anyway--I just need to get the gist of the information and begin tying it to other trends, patterns, and theories that I already have a solid foundation on.

Really don't mean to discredit SMU in any way, but if that dude is as great as he says he is, don't you think he'd be going to a brand name university for his JD/MBA?

Evanston is a college town. There are restaurants, bars, and shopping. If you're used to metropolitan life, it's not that. Whether or not the commute to and from Chicago is worth it is up to you. I'm foregoing it for at least the first few years so that I can spend more time on campus focusing on coursework; after that, I'll probably be living in one of the North-Chicago neighborhoods.

Nothing I need is exclusively offered by MS, so I used Open Office primarily (with a whole bunch of GoogleDoc intermediary actions) during undergrad. I mainly exported all my documents to PDF anyway, so compatibility wasn't an issue. For the most part, I never exported to .pptx and just kept it nice and simple with .ppt and never had a problem. I believe I get MS Office (Professional?) free during grad school, so we'll see.

I only know of Wake Forest, and I don't even know if they're continuing to fully fund their students (they did a couple years back with tuition remission and a marginal stipend).

Ask yourself, what does having a dual-degree enable you to do that a PhD doesn't? Trying to pidgeonhole yourself into finding a program that has a specific dual-degree program isn't going to be optimal, especially when you have only pinpointed three extremely competitive programs in psychology. Edit: And MPP/MPA programs typically require work experience to be a strong candidate. Dual-degree programs typically work on the assumption that you will be admitted to both departments/schools independent of each other before starting a joint program.

If you mean race, gender, SES, etc., there is little to no evidence that priority for such populations exist in doctoral admissions. There are more funding sources available to 'minority' students, but this is contingent on your being accepted somewhere first.

As a SoCal boy, I completely place all my confidence in Rainbow sandals. After 'breaking them in', nothing can really beat their comfort.

Anytime! I was unlucky enough to get it when it was still $4, but it's paid dividends. I have both GoodReader and Noterize and see myself using Noterize a lot more nowadays.

Bump Fyi: Noterize for iPad is now Free (as of today at least), down from its previous price of $3.99. It offers great PDF highlight/annotate support and even audio recording for lectures.

Instead of copy+pasting the text: http://www.reddit.com/r/GetMotivated/comments/iez1l/are_there_any_stories_of_how_you_changed_yourself/c23avdj

Sunny San Diego/La Jolla to... Chicago Hmmm....

If you can afford to pay a 10% down payment, but get offered 3%, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. The reason the housing market failed was because of banks opening up mortgages to sub-prime debtors (i.e., people who could BARELY afford the payments).

That sounds great! $10K is a good start on a house and you still have time since the housing market is still bottoming out. I'm still unsure as to whether I'm going to try to buy a house (to rent out) during grad school or not, or if it's a little too risky a position to be in; we might never have this type of opportunity to buy houses at these mortgage rates, but at the same time, only having our stipend to cover months where we might not have tenants is extremely risky. Anyway, yeah. Best of luck at becoming a tutor. There was a former doctoral student that is making (I believe the university newspaper calculated it a few years back) over $100k after overhead tutoring UCSD undergrads. If you can fill a high-demand service for a niche market, you can be extremely successful. You can check out Erik Kyner here: http://www.theecontutor.com/

Thanks; really appreciate it! And yeah -- actually balanced two jobs: worked FT as a branding consultant and worked per-diem (which turned out to be on average 12-15 hours/week) as a research statistician that I did from home or at the office on flex-schedule (including weekends), which paid a nice wage. Also, I've been a PT professional photographer for a couple years now and last year I photographed about a wedding a month--I made anywhere from $1500-$3200 per wedding, and given my relatively fast workflow, I could process an entire shoot and design an album in 8-12 hours. Needless to say, I had a lot on my plate this past year, but it's all worked itself out. I actually lived with a roommate (first time since freshman dorms), which helped a lot with living costs (I was used to paying around $900-$950/month for rent/utilities for a single bedroom in a shared apartment, and it was more like $500 total with a roommate). And besides that, I was getting quite a bit of money as an undergraduate my last two years (FAFSA with very low EFC + public tuition + a couple of extraneous research grants + working 25 hours/week + photographing weddings on the side), which helped me save some money, which I then dumped towards my loans around the end of my grace period right before I started accruing interest.

I was around $21k in debt after undergrad, but I've just about paid it all off after a year of working full-time post-graduation. Hopefully by Fall, I'll be close to $0, but since I quit my job so that I could enjoy my summer, I'm not sure if it's wise to try and pay off that extra $5k right now before I start seeing my monthly stipends (I have a good amount of savings and a few CDs about to mature, but I'm also expecting moving and furnishing costs in my new city to claim a lot of my cash, so I might just slowly pay off the $5k+interest throughout the first few years of my Ph.D.). I'm expecting to have $0 debt accrued through my doctoral studies. I'm single, get free health insurance, cook for myself most of the time (though I do love eating out), and (besides first year where I'm living as close to campus as possible) housing costs are fairly reasonable if I'm flexible about where I live. If I ever end up taking money out, it'd have to be for some emergency since I've been accustomed to handling finances pretty well (even when I splurge and spoil myself with clothes, gadgets, or food, I make sure I'm living well within my means and have adequate income to justify my purchases).

^^^ What lewin00 said In terms of cross-department relation, YMMV. At Kellogg, the two work in concert with each other it seems, as the behavioral marketing students take most of the same coursework as the psych students and are encouraged to collaborate with psych professors if they're interested.

I have both and really don't regret having a Kindle even though its duties can technically be done by an iPad. I only read PDFs on my iPad if absolutely necessary.

I was actually taken out by the grad students 7/7 of the interviews I got this year. No professors around made the conversations really central to how the students really felt about the program. The food and drinks weren't bad either!

Similarly, you can try contacting these people and see where they would recommend

Just throwing it out there that many decision theorists (i.e., not doing research on business-only/market-only phenomena) tend to be housed in marketing programs. If you look at journals like Judgment and Decision Making and Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, you'll see a large proportion of the authors are from business schools. Heck, the ability to do theoretical JDM research is what made me even consider marketing in the first place. It's not uncommon to see a marketing professor also be a psychology professor (and vice-versa): Take one of my grad advisors for example: http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/Faculty/Directory/Brendl_Miguel.aspx#research - he got all of his degrees in psychology and still does mostly basic research on JDM, but he's in a marketing department http://psy2.ucsd.edu/~mckenzie/ - one of my undergraduate mentors; he's the one who told me about marketing programs in the first place, and that they're the hotbed of JDM research (not psychology) http://leeds.colorado.edu/lynch#biography - Dan Ariely's former advisor, APA fellow, former ACR (Assoc. for Consumer Research) president, and all-around revered JDM researcher (also trained in psychology, but made famous in marketing) And heck, even the most famous person in marketing was a psychologist first - http://www.dibs.duke.edu/research/profiles/64-dan-ariely

And same with me. I apologize for sounding overly negative and for the low-blow earlier. Emotions can get the best of us even when we try to remain civil.

Same. I think we both deserve to spend a little more time away from the computer for the time being haha