I screwed up my final year of undergraduate bigtime :(

[RonPaul]

Hi Everyone, 

I have posted here before, but it hasn't been for a while. This might be a bit of a long post, but I really could use some advice from people who either made mistakes during their undergraduate degree or know of people who did. 

So, I have completed my undergraduate degree (sociology and psychology) with an honours thesis in 5 years. For the first four years of my degree, I was absolutely on fire. Every semester my GPA would range from 4.2/4.3 to a perfect 4.3/4.3. I was getting mostly A+'s each year with the odd A, my writing was excellent, my relationships with my professors were excellent, and I had numerous solid research experiences throughout my degree working as a Research Assistant. I was so excited to begin my final year, write a killer thesis, and get set myself up beautifully for a great future and a spot at a good graduate school here in Canada. But things went very south.

My mental health began mildly declining, and I started to burn out a bit. This was expected to some extent, and I knew I just needed to get through one more year and kill it. But then I was deeply betrayed by my long-term significant other and best friend since childhood. I found out they had been sleeping together for nearly a year behind my back and this absolutely obliterated me. They were my to closest--and only--allies. To have them betray me like that while I was already feeling a bit down, and then to have spent the year in the same small town seeing the two of them together only to find out they were dating and moving in together was, well, horrible. I was so heartbroken, lonely, and miserable all year. I couldn't sleep, eating was hard, and I completely bombed my final year and the thesis I was so excited about. I ended up getting mostly B's (which was terrible given that my worst mark was an A- in one class in first year), and on my all-important thesis with my superstar professor I got a C-. 

I worked so hard to get to the point that I was at, and to have it all fall to pieces is devastating and so anxiety inducing for my future. I have since began turning things around though. I found a serving job, I live at home with my mom, I got a personal trainer, I am eating better, and generally taking better care of myself. I desperately want to build myself back up again over the next few years in order to get back to where I was and get into a school/clinical psychology program in Canada, but I don't know what to do about my horrible thesis and final year marks. They are not an indication of my abilities, only a dark time in my life. I also know that I could have handled that situation better and that other people manage to do fine in school in spite of their struggles, but I simply did not accomplish this. 

I am thinking about moving to Halifax this summer to live on my own and work as a server. They have a few schools there with psychology departments (and even a school psychology department at one of the schools), so maybe I should either take some courses or talk to the profs there and try to get some volunteering opportunities? I'm just not sure what direction I should go in now, but it's so important to me to get into graduate school eventually. Because I did so well the other four years of my program, my GPA is still pretty high.

Has anyone had a similar experience with trying to recover from a serious mistake in their academic life? If so, what would you suggest I do? Thanks to everyone for taking the time to read this, in whatever forum you came across it.  

 

 

[PsychHopeful2020]

I am so sorry, that gutted me to read  

But, I think graduate programs will understand that you are human. If I were you, I would take several years before applying and either do a master's or work full-time in a lab. This experience, along with publications and strong letter of recommendations, will totally trump that bad year. 

To go a step further, I would have one of your trusted mentors mention in a LOR that you went through a personal crisis and learned from it or mention it yourself (I know most PhD applications in the US have a section to explain anything strange on your application). I don't think you have to go into the specifics, but mentioning that something devastating happened would probably help explain. This is another reason I would wait to apply - you will have genuine distance and clarity. You will then be able to say that through this personal crisis, you learned x lessons (something like, how to use appropriate coping mechanisms, manage stress, and persevere in the face of adversity) and how you would do things differently.

Based on common interview questions and my personal experience with PIs and clinical psych professors at top tier schools (which is all the evidence I have to draw on) I believe that they see you as a human and will be more interested in what you learned from your mistakes than having only graduate students who have never made any.

Also as a personal note - you would have to be a robot to seriously go through something like that and have it not affect you. If that happened to me, I would have bombed that last year too. Be kind to yourself and have faith that everything happens for a reason - maybe that disruption was so that you would have a reason to get more experience that will lead to you discovering your dream program. Plus, you'll definitely meet someone better for you than that ex!

Edited January 20, 2020 by PsychHopeful2020

[PsyDuck90]

Have you tried applying to programs before? Even with your final year grades, if your other stats are good and you have good research experience, I don't think that would absolutely tank you. Or maybe you can do a masters to show that you are capable of graduate level work.