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Has Anyone Been Accepted Into a Clinical Psychology PhD program with no posters, conferences, or publications?


psychedoncafe

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I would love to hear from the people who have been accepted into Clinical Psychology PhD programs without having had any posters, publications, senior thesis projects done, honors thesis, or conferences. I am applying this year 2019 before December 1st into Clinical Psychology PhD programs in the United States. My STATS: I have a 4.0, I need to take the GRE, I'm in 2 labs as a research assistant, I also am getting paid part time as an RA in one of the labs, volunteer at a hospital, and have done a clinical summer program before. Thanks in advance guys, let me know what some of your stats were if you don't mind. Graduating in the Fall with  BA in Psychology going straight into the PhD, not trying to take a gap year. Thanks! :)

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Yes this is possible and I bet if you searched the forums you'd find posts about it.  I did well in undergrad, but was not trying to be an honor's student and didn't do a senior thesis.  Afterward I pursued a different career path for several years before my interests shifted and grad school became necessary.  I did well enough on the GRE to meet minimum cutoffs for the Master's programs that I was looking at and went on to do well in the program I chose.  Here I gained a little more research experience by volunteering in one lab, but didn't publish any articles or present a poster at a conference.   After that I was accepted into a fully funded Clinical Psych PhD and it wasn't because I had better stats than the other applicants because I didn't.  It was a combination of having acceptable stats, research interests, career goals, and fit within the department.

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Yes, me.

You can read my feedback for future applicants, plus info about my personal experiences,  here: 

 

Edited by Psyche007
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I had no posters/pubs and a terrible undergrad GPA. I got my Masters with a good GPA and had 2 years of research experience in two different labs, good letters of rec, my GRE scores were like 161 (Verbal) and 156 (Quant). Didn't get a ton of interviews but got accepted into a fully funded program. This was a few yrs ago. 

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Depends on the program you apply to. At the top ranked schools (i.e. 1-50), most professors won't even consider students who apply straight out of undergrad. They value applied research experience above all. So depending on what you do in your two research labs, it is possible to get in somewhere with no publications/posters, but you will need to apply to lots of schools to increase your chances of getting an interview. My undergrad GPA was low, and so was my quant GRE score, but I got interviews at top programs because of my post-bac research experience. I also had 5 publications and 2 posters. 

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