Psychology PHD applications - Anthropology background

[m_anth_13]

Hi All,

I graduated a Tier 1 university with a BA & MA of Cultural Anthropology. Now, about 18 months & a boring desk job later I've decided to re-evaluate my career goals and go back to school for psychology. I am researching PHD programs - I enjoy research and academia yet would also like to work as a clinician. 

That being said, I've been digging for programs that are friendly towards my anthropology degrees. I would like to study transpersonal psychology and prefer programs that have an interdisciplinary approach, touching on cross-cultural subjects, religion & spirituality and alternative therapies. It seems like there are very few programs that match this criteria and most are at extremely competitive universities. My question is since I lack psychology credits (I think I have 9 or 12, must double check) in what ways do you feel I must compensate for this on my application? I'm taking the GRE late October - I'm shooting for very high scores, but aside from this, I've been told to reach out to professors I'd like to work with personally in the hopes that they may take an interest in me and this may help my application in some way.

 

I am open to any help, insights, and suggestions that you all may have! Thank you in advance

[spunky]

well... acing the psych subject GRE would be a good place to start. (and by "acing" i mean really really high scores, like top 80th-90th percentile). 

plus how's the good ol' research experience for you? you could start volunteering as an RA if you feel you're lacking on this dept. 

 

[juilletmercredi]

Transpersonal psychology makes it sound like you are leaning towards clinical psychology, and you say that you want to work as a clinician, so that narrows your choices to counseling or clinical. If you want to go clinical, you should know that clinical psychology programs are insanely competitive, and doing the minimum is unlikely to result in admission.

I mention this mostly because you say you have 9-12 credits in psychology, which is 3-4 classes. I would say that is not enough, and you'll want to take 2-3 more courses - more along the lines of at least 15-20 credits in psychology (the equivalent of a minor) to be minimally competitive. But you will be competing with students who have a full major in the field.

Also, I agree with spunky; you need research experience. You won't be competitive for PhD programs without it. If you have some in anthropology, you could perhaps get away with doing a little less in psychology, but you should definitely volunteer in a psychology lab (or work) to get some experience with psychological research methods.

One possible solution is doing a post-baccalaureate program in psychology. They tend to be expensive though! However, I have a friend who did the postbacc in psychology at my graduate institution and is now getting a PhD and is focusing on areas very similar to your interests.

[Guest joshw4288]

The biggest problem with your application will be the perception that you do not know how to think as a psychologist. I have worked with anthropologists on collaborative projects in the past and have been hired by anthropologists to analyze their datasets. Their way of thinking about research design, methodology, theoretical perspective, etc is very different. My suggestion is to make sure you have at least a course in research methods and a course in statistics, preferably a third course in advanced methods or statistics. Second, you need experience doing psychological research. Either obtain an RA job or volunteer as an RA. Make sure you get involved in the whole process from helping design a project, submitting ethics, working with the software (qualtrics, media lab, direct RT etc.), running participants. Too many students RA experiences are far too limited. 90th percentile scores on the psych GRE will certainly help. You really need to be in the high 80's to 90th percentile in other areas of the GRE as well, although being really high in one or two areas will offset a deficiency in other areas. Anecdotally, my quant score was quite low but my high grades in my statistics courses probably offset that when combined with my high percentiles on verbal and analytical writing.