Stacking up against psych PhD prereqs — will my bio deliver?

[whitmanic]

Hi all,

Not sure why it's taken me this long to crowdsource my grad school questions. I was a College Confidential rat in high school, and I think it marginally paid off. It's been 3.5 years since I've been enrolled in/swaddled by an academic institution, though, and my knowledge about grad school app best practices is pretty fragmentary.

I'm interested in both the cognitive psychology and clinical psychology tracks — more on that dilemma in another post — and am debating whether to apply to master's programs (contingent on funding) or go straight for the PhD programs I've been eyeing.

As I see it, the upsides to master's first are:

- A chance to beef up on coursework
- A chance to kick the cognitive/research vs. clinical decision down the road, and learn more to help me make it

While the downsides are:

- Funding sources are much rarer, I can't afford anything out of pocket, and I'm allergic to debt
- Might deprive me of the freedom to pursue the research opportunities I need to keep multiple PhD routes open

—

Here's my deal: I was a humanities major at Harvard with a minor in Mind, Brain, and Behavior — but far from the full complement of psychology coursework that a lot of programs, MA and PhD alike, seem to expect. I've devoted a lot of time to reading and living cognitive psych and linguistics literature over the last few years, and have a pretty strong sense that I will be happy studying the mind (and maybe its relationship to wellbeing in a clinical sense) for the long haul.

I traveled extensively after graduation, and then spent a year and a half as a business generalist at an early-stage tech startup—a role I quit earlier this year to start pursuing cognitive science research. This June, I started a remote research assistantship for a friend who's a cognitive science postdoc, and last month, I got a research assistantship at a lab at Harvard. I just took the GRE, and got a 170 V 167 M.

Some people have told me that some of these fundamentals mean that I shouldn't be afraid of the course and research requirements I see on a lot of program sites. My question is whether people familiar with the field think I can make a case at the PhD-level (or hell, even at the MA-level; I'm not sure about anything) without some of the traditional essentials. Looking forward to hearing your take.

 

Edited November 14, 2017 by whitmanic
Readability