Stellar Social Programs

[omalley]

I was wondering if everyone could help me out with their opinions. Which university offers the best PHD Social Program? I am making a list of schools to apply to this Fall. I am applying to Clinical also however, I have already comprised that list.

Thanks.............

[msphdhopeful]

I think you should focus more on the research match with the faculty rather than which program is the "best". In fact, the best social programs would be the ones who have faculty with a great research match with you. Good Luck!

[MacDuff]

I agree with the above poster about focusing your search on the best research fit. If you tell us a little bit about your area of interest (e.g., judgment & decision-making, intergroup processes) you may be able to receive some more specific suggestions for about programs to look at. Also, do speak with your current advisers/mentors as they are often able to share inside information about programs that those of us on this board (i.e., students) do not yet know.

Best of luck!

[Tams]

My best tip for finding the right programs is reading articles that you like and then looking up their authors. More than likely, they are professors, often at amazing programs. I was going crazy trying to find interest matches (to the point of questioning whether I should even do psychology grad school), until I found ONE interesting article that was like a gold mine...from finding the author, co-author, some of the reference articles, then their other research and collaborators, I opened a whole new world of Social Psych I had no idea about. Before you know it, you will have more programs than you can shake a stick at!

Nobody can really tell you what programs are best for you. Just remember that fit is absolutely key.

[ChivPowers]

All of the above posters absolutely have the right idea. You should look for the best person to mentor you in your pursuit of understanding some social phenomenon. You could get incredible graduate training anywhere so long as you rise to the occasion and take advantage of your resources.. and conversely, you could be at a Tier I research institution and end up having crappy training because you didn't put in the effort.

So yea, it's about the advisors, the resources, and your motivation -- not so much what the Princeton Review has to say about a program...

In the same vein, you could end up working with a super big-wig in the field in an "amazing program" but then never get any real face time and ultimately have projects that suffer because your mentor is too busy for you.

That all said, GOOD LUCK!

[lewin]

While I agree with the above posters about looking for a good advisor, there's something to be said for applying to top programs too. Here's one such list:

http://www.socialpsychology.org/gsocial.htm

[socialpsych]

Princeton not in the top 32? Really? Not buying it...

[lewin]

Princeton not in the top 32? Really? Not buying it...

Its absence is a bit unusual, I agree.

[jlloyd87]

Its absence is a bit unusual, I agree.

It is weird, but the list is based solely on quality. The USNEWS lists consider reputation for half of the equation they use.

[digits2006]

I think it's weird that you just want to apply to the top programs and not just find programs that fit well with your interests.

[socialpsych]

I think it's weird that you just want to apply to the top programs and not just find programs that fit well with your interests.

Using a list of top programs the way the OP proposes -- simply applying to all of them because they're top programs -- might be "weird," but it's a good idea to have a list out there as a jumping-off point. I can only speak for myself, but I was not working from any centralized list of strong programs when I started checking out faculty webpages, and I ended up polling some professors and grad students and essentially coming up with my own list. Before you can evaluate research fit, you have to know what is out there!

[digits2006]

I guess since im not quailified for any of the top programs, i didnt search that way. I used my lit review and googling to find programs that researched exactly what I wanted to study.

[Anita]

Through trial and error I developed a strategy that's a mix of rankings and research interest match. All I did was going down the NRC ranking, visiting the social psychology graduate program website of each school (quickest way to do this is typing "[name of school] psy grad" into the Firefox address bar, e.g. "unc psy grad," press Enter, and let FF's "I'm feeling lucky" feature do the rest. Try it ). Then I read the faculty research interests, if the school was nice enough to put a list together. If they have a personal website with a publication list, I skim the paper titles to see if I care about their work. If there's no research interest list or homepage (yes UMich I'm looking at you), I went on PsycINFO and looked up the faculty's name. If someone sparks my interest, I enter their name, email, homepage URL and research interests into an Excel spreadsheet. I also download a recent paper or two and scan the abstract, sometimes the whole thing if it's something I'm super curious about. This helps when 1. writing the prof, 2. writing the SOP, 3. learning what's going on in the field in general

I do this in batches, for 20-30 schools having the same, nearest deadline (I was lucky enough to have a kind friend compile a list of deadlines for me). When I'm done with the batch, I check to see which school has more than one potential advisor, or just one advisor I'm crazy about. I send an email to each interesting faculty at these schools to the effect of "I'm nuts about your work. Are you taking in a new lab elf next year?" When they get back and say yes, I enter "yes" in another column in said spreadsheet. When enough people have responded, I can see which schools have enough available POIs to make it worth applying, by tallying up the "yes" column.

Then I fire up another sheet in the same Excel file, with the name of the schools I want to apply to in one column. Next to it, I record the URLs of the application instructions page, the URL of the online app, deadline, app fee and whether it can be waived (sadly, answer is no for most schools), whether they require the GRE subject test (because I didn't take it), whether they require the TOEFL (because I'm international), contact info of the department/admission committee, and any notes.

I don't deny that this method took an insane amount of time (not to mention it's dorky as hell ). But grad school research takes up an insane amount of time no matter what, and IMHO this is the most organized and painless way to go about things. Once I got the system down, it went very smoothly, with less stress than "Yay! I love this guy's work!" moments.

Also, I accumulated a lot of papers along the way by people I want to work with. I save them all in a folder after naming them in this format: [school name] [prof name] [identifying keywords]. This makes tracking down papers when the time comes to write SOPs a lot easier.

That said, please, please, please start early, like August or so. I started in October, didn't get the system down until November, and suffered from lots of "Did I miss anything?" anxiety along the way.

[jlloyd87]

Through trial and error I developed a strategy that's a mix of rankings and research interest match. All I did was going down the NRC ranking, visiting the social psychology graduate program website of each school (quickest way to do this is typing "[name of school] psy grad" into the Firefox address bar, e.g. "unc psy grad," press Enter, and let FF's "I'm feeling lucky" feature do the rest. Try it ). Then I read the faculty research interests, if the school was nice enough to put a list together. If they have a personal website with a publication list, I skim the paper titles to see if I care about their work. If there's no research interest list or homepage (yes UMich I'm looking at you), I went on PsycINFO and looked up the faculty's name. If someone sparks my interest, I enter their name, email, homepage URL and research interests into an Excel spreadsheet. I also download a recent paper or two and scan the abstract, sometimes the whole thing if it's something I'm super curious about. This helps when 1. writing the prof, 2. writing the SOP, 3. learning what's going on in the field in general

I do this in batches, for 20-30 schools having the same, nearest deadline (I was lucky enough to have a kind friend compile a list of deadlines for me). When I'm done with the batch, I check to see which school has more than one potential advisor, or just one advisor I'm crazy about. I send an email to each interesting faculty at these schools to the effect of "I'm nuts about your work. Are you taking in a new lab elf next year?" When they get back and say yes, I enter "yes" in another column in said spreadsheet. When enough people have responded, I can see which schools have enough available POIs to make it worth applying, by tallying up the "yes" column.

Then I fire up another sheet in the same Excel file, with the name of the schools I want to apply to in one column. Next to it, I record the URLs of the application instructions page, the URL of the online app, deadline, app fee and whether it can be waived (sadly, answer is no for most schools), whether they require the GRE subject test (because I didn't take it), whether they require the TOEFL (because I'm international), contact info of the department/admission committee, and any notes.

I don't deny that this method took an insane amount of time (not to mention it's dorky as hell ). But grad school research takes up an insane amount of time no matter what, and IMHO this is the most organized and painless way to go about things. Once I got the system down, it went very smoothly, with less stress than "Yay! I love this guy's work!" moments.

Also, I accumulated a lot of papers along the way by people I want to work with. I save them all in a folder after naming them in this format: [school name] [prof name] [identifying keywords]. This makes tracking down papers when the time comes to write SOPs a lot easier.

That said, please, please, please start early, like August or so. I started in October, didn't get the system down until November, and suffered from lots of "Did I miss anything?" anxiety along the way.

That is far more work than I was willing to do... I will admit that I went through just about every school on the NRC list (except 1-40 b/c I doubt I would stand a chance of applying to Harvard) and if I couldn't find somebody interested in close relationships I would mark them off my list. I would then make sure that prof was taking on a new student and that was my list. I picked the top 6 based on my interest in the person's work and my interest in the town the school is located.

I agree about starting early. Most of my deadlines have passed, but I couldn't imagine rushing trying to get everything in before the deadline. Although, all the schools have already told me that since it takes so long to get all the applications organized that there is no real worry about the deadline.

[Anita]

There's also a far easier (I believe) way to go about things, which is to get a textbook (say on close relationships), flip to the references and look up everyone who's cited three times or more. Also, the Social Psychology Network has a database of researcher that you can search by interest (including CR). I went through all that pain because, one, my research interests are too all over the place for that approach and two, in psychology language, I'm one of those "maximizers" who can't rest without examining all their options. I would get too tired to look at another prof's website, and then I'd be like, "What if the next guy's work is REALLY FUN? Huh?" I seem to recall from my Social Cognition class that maximizers tend to be less happy than their more easygoing "satisficing" brothers, so yeah, sucks to be me, but I just can't help it

[jlloyd87]

That is really insane. I saw a guy that I was really interested in graduated from WUSTL and he had been publishing ALOT in close relationships. Unfortunately, he hadn't published anything recently.

[a.arcane]

That is far more work than I was willing to do... I will admit that I went through just about every school on the NRC list (except 1-40 b/c I doubt I would stand a chance of applying to Harvard) and if I couldn't find somebody interested in close relationships I would mark them off my list. I would then make sure that prof was taking on a new student and that was my list. I picked the top 6 based on my interest in the person's work and my interest in the town the school is located.

I agree about starting early. Most of my deadlines have passed, but I couldn't imagine rushing trying to get everything in before the deadline. Although, all the schools have already told me that since it takes so long to get all the applications organized that there is no real worry about the deadline.

You guys are my people. ...I started with lit searches in July to find current publications in my field of interest. Then, since I was sure I wouldn't get into the top ranked schools, I went to the gurus in my field and looked for their recent graduates. Those recent graduates went to top-ranked schools but get tenure track positions at slightly lower ranked schools. Then I turned to lists- I used the APA Guide to Graduate Study, just flipped to the appendix, made an excel spreadsheet, and started systematically visiting every program.

However one thing I noticed which I think is very important is that the APA guide doesn't list what isn't in a Psychology Dept. exclusively. For example, University of Nevada, Reno has a social psychology program but it's interdisciplinary with psychology and sociology professors. I only know about the program because I looked up the author from an article I like. Similarly, the NRC rankings don't list DePaul's social psych program. Technically-it's experimental psychology, but with different areas of focus. Who knows how many of these rogue programs go unnoticed because of listing issues?