I/O MS Prospect - Evaluate Me

[lt1196]

Hey, first time poster here. Lovely cafe you have; I'm particularly fond of the blue shag carpet you've decided to install.

I'm interested in applying to some master's programs in I/O for Fall 2013. For my girlfriend's sake, I plan to remain in Texas, or at least in the south - neither of which are anything too special, but that's neither here nor there.

Allow me to tell you what I have to show for myself, and if you are so inclined, feel free to tell me where you believe I stand as a potential applicant. Any additional advice I am offered will be received thoughtfully, and please offer it generously, because graduate school applications and admissions are among a great many things about which I am still hopelessly naïve. I will happily give any further information about myself that you may find useful, but for now I'll just list those things which seem to me to be most relevant.

I am a senior at Texas State University. It is my sixth college to attend; I have transferred repeatedly for various reasons, none of which involved my murdering another person. I major in both Psychology and Philosophy, with GPA's of 3.75 and 3.7 respectively. My overall GPA is 3.25. It is so woefully low in large part because of the gravity of the grades from my final semester at the University of Texas: 15 hours of F's. Just so you don't have to go and run the numbers yourselves, I will save you the time and inform you that the gravity of scores like those is unrelenting. That was about 3 years ago. Since then, I've been doing quite well, grade-wise. I did not know what I would be most interested in pursuing professionally or academically after college until about six months ago. I read a bit on I/O, and found that it seems to suit me more than I had initially assessed, and conversely, an internship experience through the school proved that clinical or health psychology is notably less gratifying than I had predicted it would be. It's a shame that the internship was in working with patients of traumatic brain injury rather than something related to industry, but perhaps you will let me know if it still has any potential to bolster my standing nevertheless. I will be assisting a professor with some research that will be tangentially relevant to but not characteristically 'I/O' this Fall. She expects it to be published with my name humbly upon a footnote somewhere before I must turn in my application. She, the professor who selected me for the internship, my supervisor during the internship, and a respectable Philosophy professor of whom I've grown very fond over this past year will write my letters of recommendations, and I believe they will sparkle.

I haven't taken the GRE yet. I just started studying yesterday. My "pre-study mock-test base-line" score was 1280, and I will surely improve it. Let us say that the GRE score I will have to show is whatever score is equal to '1350.' I won't score lower than '5' on the Analytical Writing section, so let us assume that 5 is my score.

Where do you think I fit into the distribution?

Edited July 17, 2012 by lt1196

[iopsych]

you will be fine getting into a master program.

[lt1196]

A master program of good repute?

[lt1196]

Incidentally, there is only one master program of good repute in this great state, unless I am mistaken. I do know that the other three have very low standards (one of them accepted 33/35 applicants in 2011, another requires an overall GPA of 2.5 OR 2.75 in your major for the last two years. The third I haven't even heard of (St. Mary's) and last, but emphatically not least, is UTA. I have no realistic opinion about whether or not I would get in there. I do have an opinion that I would get in to approximately 0 doctoral programs, but I am not certain of that either. There are a number of great doctoral programs in Texas - but that is precisely the problem.

Would someone kindly confirm or challenge my suspicion that I am wise to push thoughts about being accepted into any doctoral program out of my mind?

[iopsych]

If you have any research experience, or can get any research experience before you apply you would be competitive for doctoral programs.

I had a 3.45 overall GPA 3.6 Psychology

1280 GRE 720 Quant. 560 Verb.

1 year of research experience

and I got into 4 PhD programs out of 8 that I applied to (all fully funded).

So if you can get research experience (does not need to be I/O specific, just to show you have done research and understand what it entails) I think you may have a shot at some good PhD programs, especially if you can pull off a 1350ish on the GRE.

I don't think Texas A&M and OU are out of the question with those #s.

Edited July 20, 2012 by iopsych

[lt1196]

I am dumbfounded. The research I will be doing actually is going to be more closely related to I/0 than I thought. It will be related to a 3200+ sample survey my prof wrote up assessing factors most likely to contribute to high school teachers' quitting.

Thank you so much...

[lt1196]

Update: on ETS' website there is mock-test software that can be downloaded. This seems to mimic the GRE exactly. I wanted to study a little bit before taking one of them (there are two), so the test wouldn't be wasted, because a fresh mock-test is the best practice anyone can get. It was the first time for me to be exposed to the new format - I had been studying from my brother's old 2008 book.

Anyway, I've been studying GRE stuff for about a week, and I decided to satisfy my eagerness with some justification like "if I take it now, the improvement in the future will be greater," or some similar bullshit. I was pleasantly surprised when a score of 160/162 V/Q popped up. That makes 600-610 verbal, 770 quantitative. What is more, and this is my favorite part of the whole thing, I made a ridiculous error on question 3 of verbal section 1, and was clicking on the right answer with 4 seconds left, but it wouldn't change. Since missing 1 of the first 5 is a real score killer, I suppose that it would have bumped me up to 1400. 1400 was my goal all along...

...I'm rambling because this is the last tentative, quantitative variable for my application, and the one last chance I have to make an otherwise-mediocre transcript stand out.

[Helen0327]

If you have any research experience, or can get any research experience before you apply you would be competitive for doctoral programs.

I had a 3.45 overall GPA 3.6 Psychology

1280 GRE 720 Quant. 560 Verb.

1 year of research experience

and I got into 4 PhD programs out of 8 that I applied to (all fully funded).

So if you can get research experience (does not need to be I/O specific, just to show you have done research and understand what it entails) I think you may have a shot at some good PhD programs, especially if you can pull off a 1350ish on the GRE.

I don't think Texas A&M and OU are out of the question with those #s.

[Helen0327]

If you have any research experience, or can get any research experience before you apply you would be competitive for doctoral programs.

I had a 3.45 overall GPA 3.6 Psychology

1280 GRE 720 Quant. 560 Verb.

1 year of research experience

and I got into 4 PhD programs out of 8 that I applied to (all fully funded).

So if you can get research experience (does not need to be I/O specific, just to show you have done research and understand what it entails) I think you may have a shot at some good PhD programs, especially if you can pull off a 1350ish on the GRE.

I don't think Texas A&M and OU are out of the question with those #s.

Hi! Have you done a honor/independent project? I have't done any of that! I am working in 2 labs, but I am very worried that I won't get into PhD programs.