Category Archives: Graduate School

The thought of teaching can be daunting, especially given the many tasks and responsibilities we are already juggling as graduate students. Here, I provide an argument about why it is a worthwhile endeavor. In addition to being an important line to add to your CV, teaching allows you to learn many different skills that are broadly applicable across a wide range of settings extending beyond the classroom.

What does teaching as a graduate student look like?

There are a variety of teaching roles that a graduate student may hold, which is influenced by the funding structure of each program.

Teaching Assistant (TA)

Graduate students often serve as TAs. This involves assisting the lead instructor, typically a faculty member, with a class taught at the undergraduate or graduate level. TA responsibilities can range from more behind-the-scenes work, such as grading assignments and proctoring exams, to instructing, such as leading lab sections of classes. In the latter role, you are typically responsible for a smaller group of students and present material that has been created by the instructor. The amount of independence granted to a TA in an instructing role varies between professors.

Lead Instructor

Further into one’s graduate career, there are sometimes opportunities to be lead instructors for undergraduate courses depending on the funding structure of your program. These classes are often psychology courses such as Abnormal Psychology or Cognitive Psychology. In this role, the graduate student is the primary instructor with full responsibility over a class. This role includes more creative leeway in terms of the material being presented and they often have their own TA assigned to them.

Guest Lecturer

Regardless of one’s TA or instructor status, there are nearly always opportunities to serve as a guest lecturer. This may include presenting on a topic that is interesting to you and relevant to a course that is already being taught, or it may be presenting on material that already exists. This is a wonderful opportunity to get one’s feet wet with lecturing.

Lecturer/Instructor

If your program does not include teaching opportunities for students, there are often opportunities to serve as instructors, and get paid, at local community colleges that mainly emphasize teaching (as opposed to research). This often needs to be approved by your department but offers a chance to gain a deeper teaching experience and potentially generate some income.

What skills can be gained from Teaching?

There are a variety of skills that can be gained from teaching, including:

Public Speaking

Teaching is essentially public speaking. You are presenting material weekly front of an audience. Getting more exposure can do wonders for increasing your comfort level and confidence in front of an audience. While this is often an intimidating prospect, tips for public speaking may be found here.

Effective Communication

In a teaching role, you must learn how to effectively communicate information in a concise and coherent manner. This is an invaluable skill that takes time to learn.

Organization and System Management

Teaching requires you to be organized and manage many moving pieces, including the students themselves. For example, you will learn how to juggle preparing lecture material, responding to student inquiries, and staying on top of grading and updating virtual grading platforms, all while maintaining professional boundaries with students (which is a whole other topic for another blog post).

Sure, but what if I have no desire to pursue an academic career? These skills and experiences have a wide range of applicability across professions beyond academia. For example, clinical roles often require supervision or mentoring of trainees and conducting case presentations in front of larger groups. In policy or consulting positions, being able to effectively communicate complicated information is a necessity. Industry positions, typically require project presentations and team/system management.

How do I pursue these teaching opportunities?

Funding opportunities may exist within your program to serve as an instructor. Speak with your department head to see if these opportunities exist and verbally express your interest in doing so.
Identify TA opportunities that include instructing lab sections and express your interest in these roles.
Reach out to other instructors and ask if there are any opportunities for you to guest lecture. Be open to presenting on existing content and express interest in generating original, but relevant, material.
Browse local colleges to see if there are open lecturer positions. These often require a master’s degree, so they may be worth pursuing farther into your graduate career.

Overall, the skills that you gain by teaching in graduate school are applicable across a wide range of contexts. This critical experience also provides you with an opportunity to discuss another facet of your skill set in interviews for internship, post-docs, and/or in post-grad life. In addition to having practical benefits, teaching can also be an incredibly rewarding experience.

Reflections on #APA2024 from APAGS Leaders, Volunteers, and First Time Attendees

Didn’t make it to APA 2024 in Seattle this year? Make sure to join us next year in Denver, CO! It is never too early to start planning — consider submitting a program proposal for a poster or session to APAGS. There may be a chance for you to receive a registration waiver as a first author of an accepted program or poster. Look for information on the APAGS Call for Proposals coming out in the Fall.

Here are some reflections from our APAGS members about their time at APA2024.

Karla Giron, APAGS Ambassador

“Browsing through Browsing through the convention agenda days before it started, I was excited at the thought of meeting like-minded individuals, seeing plenty of innovative research ideas, and being surrounded by the buzz of energy from the APA convention. This would be my first time in Seattle and my first time attending an APA convention!”

Some of my Convention highlights:

Erasure and Consequences: The Hidden Toll of Marginalized Psychologists’ Exclusion

A Critical Conversation led by Dr. Konjit Page from Fielding Graduate University in which Dr. Page discussed her experience taking and teaching the History & Systems course required of clinical/counseling psychology programs. She notes that the curriculum is largely outdated and omits the impact of psychologists from marginalized communities. Omitting these individuals hinders the development of psychologists, inhibits growth within the field of psychology, and fails to address the needs of BIPOC communities.With these concerns in mind, Dr. Page restructured her course to center BIPOC psychologists from the last 20 years who have made significant contributions to the field.

Grant Writing for Graduate Students: Identifying Opportunities and Crafting Competitive Applications

This session provided advice on how to apply for grants as a graduate student. This session was so packed that attendees were standing to the side and even sitting on the floor. I believe this speaks to the importance of grant funding availability to graduate students!

Some helpful tips I gathered from the session:

Do not limit yourself to psychology grants, as many other grants may fit your specific research interests. Search also for similar topics, like mental health, or specific methodologies that apply to your research.
Utilize search engines to your advantage – search for program announcements (PAs) and requests for proposals (RFPs)
Look at the CVs of people you admire and see what grants they have received!
The APAGS Psychological Science Research Grant (PSRG) is a great opportunity for funding! – https://www.apa.org/about/awards/apags-science?tab=1

Some other activities/events that inspired me:

Volunteering for Division 17’s Liberation Lounge
Attending Division 44 poster sessions
A symposium on documenting immigrant trauma and another on advancing social equity in psychological science.
Meet Your Leaders events were a great opportunity to meet other psychology graduate students outside of my home program and learn about student leadership opportunities.
And off course I also strolled through the Solutions Center – an enormous space filled with booths, books, activities, and all kinds of giveaways.

I had a great experience at the 2024 APA Convention and will be looking forward to APA 2025 in Denver, CO!

Matt Hutnyan, APAGS Science Committee Member

“In August, I attended the APA annual convention for the first time. It was an excellent opportunity to meet leaders in our field, learn about advancements in psychological science, share research and professional knowledge, and connect with many peers who are engaged in inspiring research, advocacy, and clinical work.”

Some highlights included hearing from keynote speakers on important topics such as loneliness and artificial intelligence, engaging in conversations with early career psychologists, and enjoying the beautiful Pacific Northwest landscape and the city of Seattle.

Sitting in my hotel room after a long three days, I jotted down a few takeaways from my experience to share with the APAGS community:

1. Diversify your itinerary. As is true in investing, diversifying your itinerary is key to a successful convention experience. APA offers a wide variety of programming — opportunities to hear about cutting edge research, network with other students, professionals, and community members, build skills, engage in critical conversations, and so on. For those who are research-oriented like me, it can be tempting to focus on keynotes, symposia, and poster sessions. I also talked with folks who were most excited to socialize and engage in informal networking and professional development opportunities. Balance is key. Although I went into APA most excited for specific divisional events and talks focused on research and clinical practice, I thoroughly enjoyed social hours and learned a lot at informal discussions about professional issues in psychology.

2. Don’t overcommit. When APA publishes the full program, it can be overwhelming. There are hundreds of events. With so much programming, it can be easy as an eager first-time attendee to fill every hour of the day. The initial draft of my itinerary, for example, had me in a chair from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. on the first day of the convention. As I quickly realized, convention is tiring. By noon, I was ready for a break. Actively listening, talking, presenting posters and papers, and walking around all day can take a toll physically and emotionally. It’s crucial to build in time to relax, eat, have a coffee break, go for a walk, connect with friends, browse the exhibitor and APA booths, and to explore the city. I would recommend anchoring your schedule around your presentation(s) if you have any and choosing a few nonnegotiable sessions each day that excite you the most. Let the rest of your schedule be flexible and build in time for yourself.

3. Take a chance. The thought of engaging with hundreds of people can be overwhelming for most of us. Creating balance in your itinerary and space for yourself to rest, relax, and reflect may reduce stress and anxiety that you might experience during the convention. It is also important to believe in yourself and to take chances with the goal of making the most of your time. Introducing yourself to someone new, asking for someone’s email, going to a session outside of your primary area of study, or asking a question during a presentation may be daunting. Exploring discomfort with these sorts of actions may be helpful and engaging in them can create unexpected connections and opportunities. For example, I attended a speed-mentoring event hosted by a division that I’m not a member of. I was nervous and didn’t know what to expect. I even considered not attending at the last-minute. To my surprise, I had mutual connections with some of the mentors, learned a ton about career development, and met leading professionals I wouldn’t have otherwise. Stepping outside of your comfort zone can create exciting opportunities, especially in the context of APA where there are so many people to meet and so much to learn.

APA 2025 will be here before you know it. I look forward to another great convention next year in Denver (August 7-9), and I hope to see you there!

Data Sharing and Code Commenting: Best Practices for Graduate Students

Scientific computing has become increasingly important in psychological science research. However, proper data management and techniques related to analytic workflow are rarely directly taught to graduate students. This short piece highlights a few best practices for data sharing and code commenting that can be incorporated as a graduate student to facilitate data reproducibility and replicability.

Why Should I Share My Data and Code?

Based on concerns of poor self-correction in psychological science (Klein et al., 2018; Open Science Collaboration, 2015), much attention has been drawn to the replicability crisis, also known as the “credibility revolution” (Vazaire, 2018). Accordingly, the open science movement has strengthened the scientific community’s expectation of access to key components of research (e.g., protocols, resources, data, and analysis software code) in order to assess, validate, and replicate prior research (Ioannidis, 2012). Data sharing is one of several key practices research organizations and major funders have begun to mandate (Houtkoop et al., 2018). Despite this, data sharing remains quite rare in the psychological sciences, due to two primary reasons:

1) a lack of knowledge on how to get started
2) researchers are unaware of the benefits of data sharing or may not be confident in the quality of their data

Here, we will be focusing on the latter concern, however, for specific guidelines on how to prepare and share your data, see Klein et al. (2018).

Benefits of Data and Code Sharing

When a researcher makes their data and code widely available, they are, in effect, endorsing:

analytic reproducibility (i.e., statistical analyses that can be re-run to detect unintended errors or bias and verify the logic and sequence of data analysis steps; Hardwicke et al., 2018, Wilson et al., 2017)
analytic robustness (i.e., alternative analytic decisions that may be used to verify results)
analytic replication (i.e., replication of the same analytic steps with new data to investigate generalizability; Houtkoop, 2018)

Importance of Code Commenting

Data sharing should be, however, the bare minimum. Above and beyond this, making your data management and analysis code publicly available, requires that the code be readable (i.e., understandable) and reproducible. There are some basic scientific computing practices that ensure research is not just reproducible, but also efficient, transparent, and accessible in the future (Cruwell et al., 2019). As an example, one way to ensure analytic code can be easily understood, is to provide a detailed, commented version of the code. When you have to come back to modify or review the code you wrote weeks, months, or even years ago, will you be able to remember what you did and what that code means? Even more important, will other people be able to understand what you did? Within an open science framework, it’s essential for other people to be able to easily interpret your code for data quality checks and reproducibility. Although incorporating code comments may seem tedious at the time, the long run benefits afforded to your future self, your peers, your co-authors, and other researchers in the field cannot be understated.

How to Comment your Code

Now that we covered the why, let’s talk about the what. Here are some concrete steps to take when addressing your code (adapted from Wilson et al., 2017). First, create a commented-out section, i.e., the “header”, at the top of your code. Here, create an overview of your project to self-reference. List the project title, filename, the co-authors, a description of the purpose (e.g., initialization, data cleaning, analysis) and any dependencies including required input data files, software version, and calendar date.

Then insert a table of contents that describes the sections of the code. An example table of contents can include:

1) Loading in Data and Libraries
2) Descriptive Statistics
3) Preliminary Analysis
4) Main Analysis for Aim 1
5) Main Analysis for Aim 2
5) Sensitivity Analysis
6) Tables

Adjust this based on your project, your aims, and your workflow. It might also be helpful to include a list of all the variable names and a brief description of each variable in the dataset at the top of the code.

Next, it’s important to record all the steps used to process the data. Find out how to make a comment in the code in the software you are using (e.g., SAS, R). Place a brief explanatory comment at the start of a data step or analytic move.

***An example of commented out code in SAS:

/* Load in Library */
libname gradPSYCH 'N/project/APAGS/data';

/* Designate data */
data APAGS; set gradPSYCH.AGAPS; run;

/* See Contents of Data File */
proc contents data=APAGS; run;

If you carefully comment chunks of functionally-related code, i.e., writing out what you are doing and why, other researchers, and your future self, will be able to easily reproduce your data steps.

Final Thoughts

As a scientist, being committed to open science means engaging in responsible data management techniques, embracing transparency, and preparing your data for a reproducible research workflow. Publicly sharing data as well as a well-organized, carefully commented data management and analytic code that enables other researchers to engage in analytic reproducibility, analytic robustness, and analytic replication is a good start. Overall, these practices will also improve your personal research efficiency and external credibility.

References

Crüwell, S., van Doorn, J., Etz, A., Makel, M. C., Moshontz, H., Niebaum, J. C., Orben, A., Parsons, S., & Schulte-Mecklenbeck, M. (2019). Seven easy steps to open science: An annotated reading list. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 227(4), 237-248. https://doi.org/10.1027/2151-2604/a000387
Hardwicke, T. E., Mathur, M. B., MacDonald, K. E., Nilsonne, G., Banks, G. C., Kidwell, M., … Frank, M. C. (2018, March 19). Data availability, reusability, and analytic reproducibility: Evaluating the impact of a mandatory open data policy at the journal Cognition. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.180448
Houtkoop BL, Chambers C, Macleod M, Bishop DVM, Nichols TE, Wagenmakers E-J. (2018). Data Sharing in Psychology: A Survey on Barriers and Preconditions. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science.;1(1):70-85. doi:10.1177/2515245917751886
Ioannidis, J. P. (2012). Why science is not necessarily self-correcting. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(6), 645-654.
Klein, O., Hardwicke, T. E., Aust, F., Breuer, J., Danielsson, H., Mohr, A. H., Ijzerman, H., Nilsonne, G., Vanpaemel, W., & Frank, M. C. (2018). A Practical Guide for Transparency in Psychological Science. Collabra: Psychology, 4(1), 20. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.158
Open Science Collaboration. Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science.Science349,aac4716(2015).DOI:10.1126/science.aac4716
Vazire S. (2018). Implications of the Credibility Revolution for Productivity, Creativity, and Progress. Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 13(4), 411–417. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617751884
Wilson, G., Bryan, J., Cranston, K., Kitzes, J., Nederbragt, L., & Teal, T. K. (2017). Good enough practices in scientific computing. PLOS Computational Biology, 13(6), e1005510. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005510

gradPSYCH Blog

APA's Food for Thought for Psychology Students

Category Archives: Graduate School

Behind the Scenes: My Transformative Journey as an APAGS Intern

Introducing the TPS 2026 Special Issues!

Teaching as a Graduate Student

Reflections on #APA2024 from APAGS Leaders, Volunteers, and First Time Attendees