gellert

Congratulations!

For first year grad students, when submitting enrollment verification, is the PDF you can download through the National Student Clearinghouse or from your Registrar's webpage sufficient (when combined with, say, a screenshot of courses from your online student center)? We don't have unofficial transcripts available at my university. Guidelines say enrollment verification = okay, and it's best if it shows your courses so the readers can see what you're taking (this verification does not have that information). I'm just not really sure what this entails exactly.

Don't submit a PS that is over the required maximum wordcount. It shows you cannot follow directions, or think that you deserve more room than other applicants got. Always follow instructions! You will have to follow guidelines (IRB, etc) in graduate school very strictly; might as well start now.

Depends. What are your DVs?

I applied last year for social psych Ph.D. and am now attending my top choice program. If any of y'all have questions about the application process, feel free to ask me here or PM me! Good luck, everyone.

Katie, you can send it to me if you like. Just PM me.

You will not get into any Ph.D. programs without research experience, so save your money. Not to mention, Ph.D. programs, even in clinical, are predominantly research-based - so if you don't like research (and as you are unwilling to take two years off to do research, I assume you do not), you will not have a very good time. I'm not sure if PsyD programs require research experience; they are less competitive, but given the number of applicants to grad schools these days, I wouldn't be surprised if they do. If you want to be a psychologist so badly, why not take time off? Programs will still be there in two years, and you will have saved more money (which you'll need to pay for the expensive PsyD programs) and will have a much better chance of getting in somewhere.

I use google calendars for scheduling participants, scheduling RAs, classes, meetings, social events, etc. I use a giant dry erase academic year wall calendar to keep track of long-term goals/deadlines. I was inspired by fuzzylogician and downloaded workflowy and started using it -- that's been a serious lifesaver, especially combined with the 'reminder' app on my macbook and the 'desktop reminder' program on my Dell desktop.

Actually, I think that sense of not living up to my own expectations is rooted in the fact that I don't feel busy enough. Some days I'm absolutely swamped, but other days I just end up reading the literature and wondering if there's more I ought to be doing. Anyone else feel this way? My first year project is well underway, and I know grad school is 50% lit review, but even so, I worry.

It's going pretty well! I'm working on my first year project and on submitting a major grant. Everyone in my cohort is great, as well. The only thing I worry about is that I won't live up to my own expectations. Weird sort of imposter syndrome, I guess.

Might take a week off to visit my sister in a nearby-ish state, but mostly I hope to catch up on reading and maybe apply for a few grants. We'll see! If I visit my sister, though, I'll probably skip going home for Thanksgiving just so I'm not taking too much time off. It's a balancing act.

The thing with GRE is that it can't get you in, but it can keep you out. As long as you meet the cutoff score for being considered, it's fine. The only time being far above that cutoff starts to matter is when you're competing for graduate college-level fellowships. That said, if your scores are below the averages for incoming students, I would retake. Aim for the average score, but don't worry about being too much above that. Either way, if you have good research experience and LORs, those are much more important than GRE!

I hope this isn't out of line to say, but if you're interested primarily in clinical practice, why would you want to expose vulnerable patients to a technique (psychodynamics) that is known to be ineffective? If they are paying you, they deserve to receive empirically-supported treatment. Surely your patients' health should be valued here.

I was also quite sick last week, and all through the weekend! I was starting to wonder if I was allergic to something in my building.... Glad to see I'm not alone.

Who's in?

Got an HM last year, trying again this year. Figure I'll revise last year's proposal since obviously I was doing SOMETHING right (just not quite right enough). Hoping that being able to explicitly reference the resources I have available at my current school will help.

Also University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Boston University off the top of my head from friends' clinical applications.

I love running, cycling, and strength training. I'm training for a marathon right now so that's eating up most of my workout time. I don't have a gym membership atm so I can't get back into strength training until the school year starts, but I've been cycling on my running rest days which is sooo much easier on the joints!

How about being a dietician and working with patients with eating disorders? I also third the suggestions above about taking some time off post-undergrad and working in research, or otherwise in a field you're interested in, and seeing how you like it. If you decide to pursue further education, this will also look good on your application.

I just bought my mom's old 1997 Lexus SE2000. It's ancient, but hey, a car's a car, and she wasn't going to be able to offload it on anyone but me, so I got it for fairly cheap, too. 100k+ miles.

I would do it in the late summer, when professors are probably back from any vacations but haven't yet started classes. I don't think there's necessarily a "best" time, though; I'd just say late summer through October. As far as how knowledgeable you should be, I heard somewhere that you shouldn't contact anyone unless you've read at least a few of their papers, and I think that's fairly solid advice.

Edit because I think I misread your post the first time. The below commenters are quite right. You should consider your motivations for going to grad school, which will be a very research-intense experience. You're going to be "working at a lab or something" for 5-7 years in grad school, anyway. Go ahead and do it now to make sure that's what you actually want to be doing for the next big chunk of your life before you start worrying about letters you may decide you don't actually need.

Yes! I swear by it.

I'm using a 13" macbook air and it's been perfect in terms of screen size and portability. Maybe it'd be nice to have a larger screen, but really I'm not all that bothered, since as I've never had anything larger than 13" I don't know what I'm missing.

Hard boiled eggs in applesauce, hell yeah. That's eggs in a sauce, right ss2player?