Publications / Poster Advice

[cafec0nleche]

Hi All!

I have my MS in Psychology, but am trying to make myself look more desirable for clinical PhD and PsyD programs.  Are there any recommendations to how best reach out and request to help on papers (in hopes to be published) or to make a poster?

Edited April 27, 2017 by cafec0nleche

[JoePianist]

Unless you're aiming for extremely, extremely competitive programs like UCLA or Harvard, you're not expected to have publications under your belt when applying for doctoate Clinical Psychology programs. Rather, I'd recommend you to focus more on working in a Psychology research lab as a paid employee and networking with faculty and graduate students in psychology labs and at research conferences related to your specific interests 

[cafec0nleche]

4 hours ago, JoePianist said:

Unless you're aiming for extremely, extremely competitive programs like UCLA or Harvard, you're not expected to have publications under your belt when applying for doctoate Clinical Psychology programs. Rather, I'd recommend you to focus more on working in a Psychology research lab as a paid employee and networking with faculty and graduate students in psychology labs and at research conferences related to your specific interests 

Sure... except my GRE's are only 50th percentile and I have some experience working as an RA in labs, but not enough.  Clinical psych PhD programs are arguably more difficult to get into than med school... so the more publications / posters you have the better your odds.

[eternallyephemeral]

You need to either work or volunteer in a lab so you can get these things, and they often take a lot of time.

If your GREs are only 50th percentile, I would highly recommend studying a ton and doing them again, in addition to working/volunteering as an RA to get posters and publications. The GRE tests how well you can learn how to do the test, and anyone can learn how the test tries to trick you and the strategies to answer questions quickly and accurately.

Since you know how difficult clinical psych PhDs can be to get in, then you can make an accurate assessment of what your chances are now, and what they would be with higher GREs, a poster or a publication, etc. Unless you have an extremely high GPA, high GREs, research (with at least posters) as well as clinical experience, and sometimes a masters, consider your chances slim. You can improve them, but there is obviously only so much one can do to change their chances. I don't mean to be depressing, but as you know, the reality of getting into these program can be quite demoralizing.

[wrighna]

Yeah, I second @eternallyephemeral. A lot of programs will do a first-round sweep and remove people solely based on GREs/GPA. That super sucks, but when they're getting thousands of applications for a handful of positions, they use heuristics that might mean they miss out on awesome people who aren't great test-takers or who have viable reasons for lower GPA. 

I'm not sure where you are in your education, but if you're still in undergrad, look into completing an honors thesis with a lab. I ended up publishing my thesis work, both as conference posters and as first author in a peer reviewed journal. If you're not in school any more, I don't think it will be fruitful to approach a lab saying, "I'm trying to get publications, please take me on." They'll want you to be of help/service to them, and after building a relationship and demonstrating your research and writing abilities, you may have an opportunity to become a co-author. Another idea I had (that might not be feasible, but no judgement in brainstorming!) is if you have a faculty member mentor who likes you and is invested in your doing well, you probably could be a little more open with them about really wanting to write something up / create a poster and they might take you up on that. Sometimes labs will have old datasets that could still be generative, but there is no one who wants to / has time to do the work to analyze data and write it up. 

[eternallyephemeral]

3 hours ago, wrighna said:

Yeah, I second @eternallyephemeral. A lot of programs will do a first-round sweep and remove people solely based on GREs/GPA. That super sucks, but when they're getting thousands of applications for a handful of positions, they use heuristics that might mean they miss out on awesome people who aren't great test-takers or who have viable reasons for lower GPA. 

I totally agree, and I know how much these heuristics suck, OP. My SO is brilliant and amazing but took a winding route in school and has a lot of math test anxiety. He was rejected from a ton of places for these reasons, so they do lose out on great people (I'm not just saying this because I'm biased haha).

Just in case OP thinks we're / I am cold-hearted about this. It's a problem, but they do have limited resources so they do what they can.

[dancedementia]

19 hours ago, wrighna said:

I ended up publishing my thesis work, both as conference posters and as first author in a peer reviewed journal.

That's awesome! I'm constantly astonished by individuals who are able to publish undergrad work in a journal. Did you get a ton of help from your PI or were you largely left to your own devices re: publishing?

[wrighna]

On 5/1/2017 at 9:45 AM, dancedementia said:

That's awesome! I'm constantly astonished by individuals who are able to publish undergrad work in a journal. Did you get a ton of help from your PI or were you largely left to your own devices re: publishing?

I basically did it on my own, most of the help came from the grad student who was my mini-mentor for the project. I was really jazzed to get it published, so I just kinda powered through. I will say that I didn't end up needing to change much to submit, mostly cut down to the page limit of the journal. If your methods are fairly sound, I think publishing is do-able-- especially if you submit to a more niche journal that is really tailored to the specific topic your project covers.

Just anecdotally, I think most people don't end up publishing undergrad stuff because they move onto something else and it doesn't stay at the top of the priority list. :/

[Chowder]

Sorry to hijack this thread, but I have a relevant question: what if the publication/poster is not related to clinical work? Would it still be looked at positively?

Also:

On 2017-05-04 at 6:28 AM, wrighna said:

Just anecdotally, I think most people don't end up publishing undergrad stuff because they move onto something else and it doesn't stay at the top of the priority list. :/

That's what happened after I finished my undergrad. My supervisor had encouraged me to publish my thesis, but I was busy with a move and so didn't get a chance to do so. Is it ever too late? (I did turn my Master's thesis into a poster presentation, but sometimes I think I should have aimed for a journal article. Alas.)

[eternallyephemeral]

8 hours ago, Chowder said:

Sorry to hijack this thread, but I have a relevant question: what if the publication/poster is not related to clinical work? Would it still be looked at positively?

Also:

That's what happened after I finished my undergrad. My supervisor had encouraged me to publish my thesis, but I was busy with a move and so didn't get a chance to do so. Is it ever too late? (I did turn my Master's thesis into a poster presentation, but sometimes I think I should have aimed for a journal article. Alas.)

It's definitely never too late, someone in my lab is turning their undergrad thesis into a paper, and they just defended their PhD.

If it's not related, it's still better than nothing! I had a completely unrelated, fourth author publication and various posters, none of which were related to the field I was applying for. Profs constantly mentioned that it was great I already got a publication and they saw that I could be industrious and work hard, even if the content wasn't the same.

You can always turn a poster presentation into a paper later! That's the most common approach tbh.

[orange turtle]

11 hours ago, eternallyephemeral said:

It's definitely never too late, someone in my lab is turning their undergrad thesis into a paper, and they just defended their PhD.

I can second the definitely not too late part. I published my undergrad thesis 7 years after my undergrad :-)

Edited May 8, 2017 by orange turtle