Advice on Pre-PhD Masters (Psychology)?

[nabbca]

Hi all, 

I am a student planning on applying to graduate programs this fall and could use some advice. I am planning on (one day) applying to PhD programs in Psychology, unfortunately my undergraduate GPA is not very good so I'm fairly certain that I will not be admitted to any if I applied this upcoming cycle. However, to help, I am planning to apply to Masters programs in order to supplement the poor undergraduate GPA, as well boost my application come time to apply for PhD programs. My question is this: would it be more beneficial to apply to Masters programs related to psychology (e.g. psychology, neuroscience, etc.) or to apply to a program in a field such as Statistics/Data Analysis, that will surely benefit me in conducting research later in my career. I have some coding experience (Matlab) as a result of working in a Neuroscience research lab, and have taken a couple statistics courses at my university and done well in both. 

I'm just looking for a little guidance, as I haven't gotten the chance to talk to my faculty advisor about any of this yet, I wanted to come to her with an idea of what could be good for me. 

Thanks for the help!

[Noegenesis]

7 hours ago, nabbca said:

Hi all, 

I am a student planning on applying to graduate programs this fall and could use some advice. I am planning on (one day) applying to PhD programs in Psychology, unfortunately my undergraduate GPA is not very good so I'm fairly certain that I will not be admitted to any if I applied this upcoming cycle. However, to help, I am planning to apply to Masters programs in order to supplement the poor undergraduate GPA, as well boost my application come time to apply for PhD programs. My question is this: would it be more beneficial to apply to Masters programs related to psychology (e.g. psychology, neuroscience, etc.) or to apply to a program in a field such as Statistics/Data Analysis, that will surely benefit me in conducting research later in my career. I have some coding experience (Matlab) as a result of working in a Neuroscience research lab, and have taken a couple statistics courses at my university and done well in both.  

I'm just looking for a little guidance, as I haven't gotten the chance to talk to my faculty advisor about any of this yet, I wanted to come to her with an idea of what could be good for me. 

Thanks for the help!

A master's will certainly help your application. I would just add that there are tons of resources for learning statistics/data analysis online (Coursera, EdX, Datacamp, etc.), but you cannot gain research experience online. Thus, finding a graduate degree that would add to your CVs "research experiences" and tie to your PhD research interests should be your foremost priority. Hope this helps!

[miffle]

I agree with @Noegenesis. Another important thing to consider, especially if your end goal is a PhD program, is funding. The advice I got while looking into "pre-doctoral" masters program is to limit the amount of debt that I would potentially go into. I have no idea about the typical funding situation for statistics/data analysis programs, but I do know that for research-oriented or thesis-based psychology programs, there's usually some sort of funding available to students (albeit often merit-based). There's a thread or two on gradcafe talking about psychology masters programs that have historically offered tuition remission and stipends to their students, so I would definitely use that to inform your list of schools. 

Another thing to consider is what kind of PhD you plan on applying to, and what you want to do afterwards. After rereading your post, I get the sense that you might be interested in having a quant focus along with your preferred content area (dev/soc/cog/etc). If this is the case, then I can see an additional purpose to applying for statistics masters programs as you can use them as a stepping stone into a quant-heavy PhD or even a career in statistics. However, if your consideration of statistics masters is just to learn data analysis techniques for your content area research (and you plan on applying for a content area psychology PhD), I think the courses you get in a psychology masters program (and online resources) should be sufficient.