Category Archives: Advice

Building collaborations in graduate school

One of the easiest ways to increase your productivity in graduate school is to collaborate. By collaborating, you can maintain a pipeline of papers. But as a graduate student, it may be hard to know who to approach for collaborations and how to approach them. You also have to be cautious about keeping your mentor in the loop and happy.

The possibilities on who to collaborate with are endless!

You can reach out to people you have worked with in the past (e.g., people you have worked with as an undergraduate or people for whom you were a research coordinator). You can ask them to add a variable to one of their protocols (as long as it doesn’t create too much additional work for them).
Alternatively, you can tell them that you wish to increase your productivity and ask them if there’s anything you can help them out with.
I have also sent emails to people I have met at conferences, and they have been very receptive to collaboration. On one of these occasions, I mentioned something that they talked about at the conference and told them that I would really like to be involved with it.
Other times, I have told these contacts that I am really interested in their research and that I would like to be involved with it in any way that I could.

In my experience it has been important to keep my mentor aware of any collaborations. You do not want your mentor finding out about the side projects you have been working on through other sources. Most mentors will be fine with collaborations as long as they don’t cause you to slack off on your graduate school duties and on the work you have been doing with your mentor.

In what ways have you struck up a collaboration? Please share your ideas.

Editor’s note: This post was written by Sophia Fitzgerald, a student in a clinical psychology PhD program. Follow her blog at http://clinicalpsychphd.wordpress.com.

Top Division Programs for Students at Convention

Although APAGS will be sure to keep you busy with our lineup of fantastic programming and events at our upcoming Convention in DC, we are also providing you a redux of other sessions out there to help you make the most of your time and make tough decisions. For the third year in a row, we have assembled and sorted a list of top student-focused programs sent to us by APA’s many Divisions as well as the Science Student Council (SSC). Sessions are sorted by the following subjects:

Public Interest / Practice / Healthcare
Research / Academic
Diversity Focus
Professional Development
Social / Networking Event

Please download this PDF: Top Division Programs for Students 2014. Limited printed copies will also be available at the APAGS Booth at the Convention Center. See you in DC!

Research – Get Involved!

Getting involved in research is an important and often necessary way to get prepared for graduate school in psychology. Research opportunities are usually available as long as you know where to look. Every year numerous students ask me questions about research opportunities – I hope this helps our blog readers better understand how to navigate this process.

Where to look for research opportunities

A great place to begin looking is your academic department’s website. I always encourage my students to read the faculty members’ profiles on our department’s website. This will help you get an idea of the research interests of your faculty. Decide which faculty members’ interests best match your interests. Then email the faculty member asking if you can meet with them to discuss their research and ways you might be able to get involved. Some faculty members will let you know they are not currently accepting any new students to their labs, other faculty members might not have research teams but might be willing to collaborate on a project with you. Some will immediately invite you to the next research team meeting, and some will schedule a meeting for you to come in and discuss your interests and determine your fit to the team.

If for some reason you are not able to join a research team with one of your department’s faculty, don’t hesitate to look outside of your department. I have a large research team of 15 students and half of these students are not from my department. If you plan to pursue research opportunities outside of your department you would do so similarly to how I’ve described looking for research opportunities in your department: think about fields of study you are interested in, go to that department’s website to read about faculty research interests, and then email faculty members.

Why finding research experience is important

Research is very important to the field of psychology. Psychologists are consumers of research, as our clinical work is influenced by research findings. Psychologists are also researchers, as research is the force that propels the field forward. Considering that research is important to the field, it is an important aspect of graduate training. If you plan to apply to graduate school in psychology, research experience helps graduate programs assess your preparedness for graduate training. Your involvement on a research team demonstrates your authentic interest in research and it suggests that you have more advanced skills than students who do not have research team experience. When reviewing doctoral applications for admission to the doctoral program I work in, I am always evaluating the applicant’s previous research experience.

So now that you know that getting involved in research is an important thing to do, you might be wondering what you will be getting yourself into. Being an active member on a research team can be very rewarding (I promise!).

First, something that should not be discounted, you gain exposure to the research process. I have found that some students have misconceptions about what research is and conclude that they are not interested in research because of this misinformation. In reality, research is very exciting, intellectually stimulating, and a strong vehicle for promoting social justice (get involved to find out how)!
Secondly, you can gain training and firsthand experience on how to conduct a research study from start to finish. You learn how to design a study (e.g., create research questions and hypotheses, select measures, review literature, etc.). You can gain experience in data collection, data entry, data analyses, manuscript writing, grant writing, and presenting research in public forums and at professional conferences.

If you are an undergraduate…Fundamentally, participation on a research team provides exposure to the research process. Having a history of participation in research gives you a strong background for entrance to graduate school. Participation on a research team also provides a way to network with professors. These professors will be great candidates to write letters of recommendation for graduate school or future employment.

If you are a master’s student…Research experience will be helpful when you conduct your own independent research (i.e., master’s thesis). Research team experience also helps you compete for entry in doctoral programs that have a scientist-practitioner model of training. Admissions to doctoral level graduate programs typically involve an assessment of your research interests and skills. Applicants are typically asked to talk about their research experience, and what they did specifically on past research teams. Participation in research with professors other than your advisor is a great way to learn alternate views of what research looks like, and is a great way to ensure strong letters of recommendation for future endeavors.

If you are a doctoral student…Research experience prepares you for your doctoral thesis, and helps an advanced student learn how to go about assembling her own research team to gather dissertation data. Research experience also helps in the realm of professional development by giving doctoral students the opportunity to present research at professional conferences and participate in the publication of manuscripts in scholarly journals. Research team experience prepares the soon-to-be-academic for assembly of their own research team once tenure track employment begins (there is life after grad-school)!

My hope is that you are thinking about research and how you can (need) to get involved. Involvement in research is critical in shaping the next generation of researchers – you!

Editor’s note: This post was written by Shannon Chavez-Korell, PhD; Assistant Professor, Counseling Psychology; University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. It originally appeared on the Multicultural Mentoring blog by the Society of Clinical Psychology’s Section on the Clinical Psychology of Ethnic Minorities. (APA Division 12, Section 6). It is reposted here with generous permission. Over time, you will see all eight original posts on gradPSYCH Blog.

The Academic Hunger Games: Are the Odds in Your Favor?

One of my favorite movies of 2013 was Catching Fire, the film adaptation of the second book of the Hunger Games trilogy. Reflecting on this movie, I started to think about how graduate school could be seen as an academic version of the Hunger Games. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie or read the book, here’s a quick summary (please note there are spoilers throughout the column):

The Hunger Games are set in a dystopian future of the US (named Panem), where a central Capitol District has maintained power over 12 districts (e.g. states) that rebelled against the Capitol 75 years ago.
Districts have limited resources and people are kept starving and poor.
As a punishment to the districts for rebelling against the Capitol, each year the districts must provide one male and female teenager, known as tributes, to compete in the “Hunger Games”, which is a televised battle in which they fight to the death.
The last surviving tribute is the victor, who earns riches, a luxurious new home in their district, and becomes a mentor to future tributes from his/her district.
The books are told from the perspective of Katniss Everdeen, a teenage tribute and eventual co-victor (along with Peeta Mellark) from District 12, the poorest district of Panem. Her key to success was her excellence in archery, a skill she developed so she could hunt to feed her family.

At first glance, this sounds very different from graduate school. However, there may be more than meets the eye. There is growing evidence that there are not enough tenure track positions for all the doctorates being produced. Among all fields of study (including psychology), fewer graduates are landing tenure track positions. Universities are replacing more tenure track positions with adjunct instructors.

While harsh, the academic universe is not quite as bad as the world in the Hunger Games. The prize many victorious doctoral students want for surviving the rigors of graduate school is a tenure track position. While there are not enough faculty positions for every graduate, the ratio is probably better than 1 in 24, the odds in the Hunger Games.

So what can you do to improve your odds in the academic Hunger Games? Here are my thoughts:

Ally with your colleagues. Katniss survived both Hunger Games by building alliances with fellow tributes. How can you build alliances in graduate school? One way might be to develop collaborative projects with fellow students. Funding agencies are putting more preference to collaborative, large scale projects, and developing those relationships early in training can help you. In addition, you might be able to generate more publications by collaborating with colleagues.
Learn helpful skills. By being a great archer, Katniss was able to fend for herself in the Hunger Games and ultimately win. How can this apply to graduate study? Think about what skills could help you land your dream academic job. Departments are always looking for someone to teach statistics and research methods; getting experience in this while in graduate school could put the odds in your favor of landing a tenure track position. Other skills might include interdisciplinary knowledge or cutting edge research techniques (such as fMRI). Think about what skills you want to learn that could set yourself apart in a job application, and make a plan to learn those skills!
Advocate for more resources. One difference from the Hunger Games is that in the academic games we have the capacity to advocate for change. Increased funding for science research at the federal level and increased funding for public universities at the state level could change the playing field for doctoral education. You can make a change by responding to action alerts from APA and other psychology organizations.
Create an alternative path to victory. Finally, you don’t have to play the game the way we are expected to. In the first book, Katniss and Peeta refused to play the game as told, and were able to survive after threatening to kill themselves (which would deprive the games of a victor). Professors train us to become future faculty and some put down alternative career paths. However, if you don’t want to play the academic Hunger Games, your doctoral training gives you options that can take you out of the arena. For some, that is going into health service psychology (getting licensed and practicing). For others, it could mean nontraditional careers. The Odd Jobs column in gradPSYCH features psychologists in unique job settings, such as Cirque du Soleil, the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries, or Wikimedia Foundation. With a doctorate in psychology, you have a skill set that can take you out of the arena and onto a different path. You don’t have to play the game that is presented in front of you!

Although graduate school may be tough and grueling, your future doesn’t have to be as hopeless as those in the Hunger Games. So build your skill set, cultivate alliances, and as they say in the Hunger Games, “May the odds be ever in your favor!”

Writing for publication: Lessons from the trenches

Not too long ago I had a conversation with a recent PhD. graduate about career issues and the struggles we go through to get established in the competitive environment that is academic psychology. Having climbed a steep learning curve myself as a junior faculty, I’ve always enjoyed passing on the lessons I’ve acquired along the way. As is the case with many young PhDs and junior faculty in general, this young colleague described extremely common struggles with writing for publication and the accompanying pressures that we feel to produce when it seems that everyone around us is lapping us with their published work. After talking with this young colleague, I thought it would be useful to share some of the lessons I have learned about professional academic writing. My hope is that it will help other colleagues who, like me, have encountered many writing frustrations and have begun to feel as if they have lost their way.

I think the key issues plaguing writing productivity among junior faculty and new professionals fall in six areas.

They are:

(1) lack of confidence about writing

(2) lack of knowledge of one’s personal rhythm/preferences with respect to writing

(3) lack of skill in writing for publication in scientific journals

(4) lack of familiarity and experience with the peer review process

(5) time management struggles and….

(6) lack of an extensive professional network.

I’ll address writing confidence and writing knowledge/skills in depth. I will also provide the names of resources I have found helpful along the way.

Becoming a Professional Writer
Lack of knowledge about how to write for publication in academic journals and other outlets is a common barrier to publishing for junior faculty. In my journey and those of my young colleagues, I learned that several issues with respect to the young scholar’s identity as a writer must be addressed. This will lay the foundation for the novice writer to develop the thick skin needed to endure the peer review process and to make it work for her. Learning about the peer review process can be mastered, but only after the writer has resolved some of the other issues first involving confidence and knowledge of personal rhythm and preferences as they relate to the writing process. Until these underlying issues are identified and addressed, academic publishing will always be a frightening, demoralizing process that derails many an academic career. I think that many young scholars struggle with publishing because of fear of rejection, not due to lack of capacity to learn the skills needed to publish successfully.

Young academics must first recognize that being an academic means being a professional writer. This idea was first presented to me in a book called, The Craft of Research by Wayne Booth, Gregory Columb, and Joseph Williams. It seems like an obvious point to me in retrospect, but hindsight is always 20-20. I don’t think everyone views it that way at the time they decide to pursue a doctoral degree. I certainly did not. If you fundamentally do not enjoy writing, academia may not be for you. This may seem like a harsh statement, but in my opinion you must derive some intrinsic joy from the challenges of writing or it is not worth some of the sacrifices. There are many wonderful ways to be happy in your career. Why spend your days doing something you hate?

If you know that academia is indeed for you and you simply need some help figuring out how to be a productive writer, spend some time identifying your attitudes about writing. Write them down. Are they generally positive or negative? Also spend some time thinking about the experiences that have shaped your attitudes about writing. Do you dread the writing process? Or do you dread the critical feedback on your writing from colleagues, mentors, and the peer-review process? Or is it both?

As cognitive-behavioral theory tells us, attitudes about writing can be changed once they are made explicit. If you are struggling with your writing productivity, it can be helpful to sit down and disentangle any negative beliefs that may impede your writing efforts as manifested through procrastination, writer’s block, and other common writing challenges. There are many myths that surround successful writing that may infect your writing experiences and productivity. Robert Boice addresses many of these issues and provides exercises for young academics to address them in his book, Advice for New Faculty Members.

One critical habit to successful writing is finding and sticking to a regular time to write in your schedule. Make it a regular, preferably daily, appointment in your date book. Do not give that time away to other demands on your time. In his book, The Art of Writing for Publication, Dr. Kenneth T. Henson advises writers to keep the tools of a serious writer nearby in all of the places where you write regularly. The obvious tools are a dictionary, thesaurus, any reference material, and your trusty APA manual.

Have a good writing handbook available that addresses each stage of the writing process, including outlining, paragraphing, revising, and proper usage of grammar and punctuation. Such a handbook will help you break down writing projects into manageable pieces and also help you respond to feedback you receive from your mentors and colleagues about ways to improve your writing and to edit your own work. Having these tools on hand will also reduce loss of precious time actually writing by eliminating the need to hunt them down during every writing session.

Revising Prose by Richard A. Lanham helps writers deal with the structure of the writing on the page so that it is clear and pleasing to the reader. It helps writers evaluate whether the sentences and paragraphs in the work address a single idea clearly and successfully. Why is this an important resource? Have you ever been asked to review a manuscript or grade a paper littered with 2-sentence or page-long paragraphs? These types of writing problems are always a signal to reviewers that the authors are inexperienced. Professional scientific writing must be technically accurate and meet the standards of polished professional writing of any published work. The more polished your initial manuscripts are when you submit them, the more likely reviewers are to take seriously the scientific findings you wish to convey in your document. Poor writing mechanics irritate reviewers almost immediately and undermine the persuasiveness of your work, no matter how exciting your research findings may be. It requires more work for the reviewer to wade through a poorly constructed document to figure out what you did and what you want to say about it. Given the time pressures reviewers are under, poor writing can aggravate reviewers and, in some cases, lead them to critique your work more harshly. Revising Prose will help you to evaluate your writing systematically in prior to submission and in response to critical feedback.

The Guide to Publishing in Psychology Journals by Robert J. Sternberg is an excellent volume on professional writing for psychologists. Sternberg invited several prolific academic psychologists to write a chapter addressing each type of product an author might produce (e.g., empirical journal articles, book chapters, review papers) along with strategies for documenting your research, writing for your audience (e.g., reviewers), and handling the revise-resubmit process. I found the chapters on writing introductions to journal articles and on writing compelling results sections extremely useful as I made my way up the publication learning curve. I refer to the Guide regularly and assign chapters to students working on various writing projects.

Developing Writer’s Confidence
Many students and young PhDs find writing aversive because of negative and/or erroneous beliefs about writing and a tendency to engage in negative self-talk during the writing process. In talking to others and reflecting on my own experiences, writing confidence is the biggest hurdle to clear for young PhDs (or students) who are serious about publishing their research. As one of my major professors said to me during my earlier struggles, writing confidence comes in part from believing that you have “something to say to the field.” You have interesting, innovative ideas and findings that you want to contribute to the field and have them shape the way the field evolves.

Writing confidence can also come from gauging the support and interest you receive about your work when you present it at various conferences. Think about it for a moment. You know when you’ve generated meaningful findings. The audience is excited about your work. You receive great feedback and interesting questions about your presentation. Members of your audience encourage you to publish your findings. You feel energized by the presentation and know you’ve connected with your audience. This feedback is authentic—it is a preliminary peer review process that helps you gauge the relevance of your work. Trust that feedback, sit down at your computer, and write. Turn that conference paper or poster into a manuscript. Try not to focus on issues related to publication at this stage. Just write. And keep writing until the paper is done. (Now there are issues related to selection of journal outlets that have to be considered, but the unsure writer needs to simply gain confidence that he can express his research findings clearly and persuasively first.)

As you deepen your knowledge about the mechanics of writing and revising your work, you will become more confident about your writing. This will help you figure out how to revise the early drafts of your paper and respond to critical feedback about your written work. With experience, you will be able to tell if: (a) your ideas or findings are compelling but need clearer, compelling writing to communicate them, (b) your research ideas need more work or development, or (c) whether someone is simply hostile to your work no matter how strong the findings are or how well you explain them in your writing. In any of these cases, the feedback will probably sting, but hopefully not for long. And hopefully, it won’t keep you from moving forward with the necessary revisions in the appropriate areas when you have a chance to process the feedback with a clear head.

Life as tenure-track faculty member can be a significant challenge because of the pressures to produce a fairly large amount of published work in a short period of time. In order to develop as a professional writer, you have to be regularly engaged in the writing process. Write regularly and submit your work for review. Over time, you will figure out your strengths and weaknesses as a writer and improve on these using tools such as the ones I am outlining here. Rejection can be scary, but take a deep breath and submit your work anyway. You will learn more quickly and meet success earlier if you fully engage the process. As any published author will tell you, there are fewer sweeter professional rewards than seeing your name and scholarly work in print.

There is so much I could say about the writing process, but I hope there is something useful here that will help you move forward.

Happy writing!
[Editor’s note: This post was written Mia Smith Bynum, PhD; Associate Professor of Family Science; School of Public Health; University of Maryland. It originally appeared on the Multicultural Mentoring blog by the Society of Clinical Psychology’s Section on the Clinical Psychology of Ethnic Minorities. (APA Division 12, Section 6). It is reposted here with generous permission. Over time, you will see all eight original posts on gradPSYCH Blog.]