Category Archives: Graduate School

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 She notes that the curriculum is largely outdated and omits the impact of psychologists from marginalized communities.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

Announcing the 2024 APAGS PSRG Grant Winners!

Every year, graduate students apply for $1,000 worth of funding to provide support for their psychological research endeavors through the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students (APAGS) Psychological Science Research Grant (PSRG). This year, we are proud to provide $12,000 of funding in $1,000 increments: $9,000 awarded to student researchers with an additional $3,000 awarded to innovative research dedicated to topics on diversity and inclusion. I am incredibly excited to announce the winners of our 2024 PSRG Grant applications!

Here are PSRG winners for the general category:

Christopher Gomez aims to investigate the relationship between exposure to community violence and experiences of peer conflict among Latino youth and how these experiences are related to changes in daily negative affect and peer conflict. Additionally, this study seeks to explore the mediating role of daily negative affect and peer conflict on the relationship between community violence exposure and school engagement.

Jill Smokoski proposes a mixed-methods study which aims to provide an overview of associations between racial trauma symptomology and key aspects of parenting. Qualitative interviewing will be used to allow for a greater understanding of how caregivers’ experiences of racial trauma shape their parenting beliefs and behaviors.

Jenna Stadheim plans to understand the experience of young adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and/or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) when enrolled in college by elucidating how symptoms are expressed and change over a year of college. Further, Jenna aims to compare these individuals’ experiences with substance use when compared to peers without ASD or ADHD.

Kevin Summers seeks to highlight the impact of racial and ethnic identity on inaccurately identifying children and adolescents as older than they really are, or “adultification.” Kevin plans to identify the identify the primary modalities in which the adultification of children might occur, while investigating the boundaries of adultification across racial and ethnic identities and age.

Sarah Dolan proposes a study to investigate the relationship between eating disorder symptoms and motivation for reward in women with and without loss-of-control eating. Sarah aims to test whether individuals with self-reported symptoms of an eating disorder differ significantly in their responses on tasks in the presence of food versus monetary rewards when compared to other populations.

Meghan Evans aims to understand the relationship between former foster youths’ current resilience and the perceived cultural humility and trauma-informed parenting of their poster parents. Meghan seeks to shed light on the importance of incorporating culturally humble and trauma-informed parenting approaches in foster parent training.

Celine Lu and co-PI Wendy Chu seek to examine the impact of an applicant’s intersectional race and mental health disclosures on graduate school admissions decisions. This team also aims to understand factors in evaluating applicants who disclose such details in their application paperwork and explore how faculty-level variables influence graduate admission decisions.

Elyssa Barrick proposes a study to establish the role of theory of mind in omniscience errors, or errors about another person’s knowledge. Additionally, Elyssa aims to investigate omniscience errors in individuals with autism spectrum disorder to further identify the strengths and weaknesses of theory of mind ability.

Zainab Shabbir seeks to understand the role of phenotypical characteristics on self-categorization choices among multiracial individuals. This study aims to further understand ethnic-racial identity development in multiracial individuals.

Here are the three diversity grant winners:

Qingyi Zhang proposes a grounded theory study to investigate the experiences of mattering and anti-mattering among Chinese international students in the United States. In doing so, this study aims to identify interpersonal experiences that enhance or deter Chinese international students’ feelings of mattering and anti-mattering, along with how these experiences are influenced by cultural factors and are associated with psychological well-being and sense of belonging.

Bek Urban aims to fill an existing gap in current literature by working to understand eating pathology in the trans, nonbinary, genderqueer and otherwise gender expansive (TNB) community. To do so, Bek plans to validate a new scale to measure the multifaceted nature of eating pathology in this population.

Adrienne Jankowski plans to evaluate the use of specific attention-based tests for the potential utilization as cognitive performance validity testing. Further, Adrienne aims to evaluate potential invariances to racial and ethnic language differences when completing the task.


As always, thank you to all the PSRG reviewers and the members of the APAGS Science Committee for dedicating their time and efforts to reviewing proposals and identifying winners. Be on the lookout for information on next year’s application process if you are interested in applying for future funding!

Tackling Student Debt: Loan Repayment Options for Psychologists to Explore

By Megha Nagaswami, MA

You’ve worked hard to learn new skills, take classes, and gain experience for your future career in psychology. With graduation from a master’s or doctoral program in the U.S. comes new opportunities, excitement, and … worry about repaying your loans. Student loans can seem like a daunting obstacle to overcome, especially as a brand new graduate. What you may not know is that there are many federal programs designed to help support recent graduates in psychology. Keep reading to learn more about these loan repayment options!

Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF)

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program benefits psychologists who work for qualified public service providers. For those who meet the employment criteria, the remaining balance of their student loan is forgiven after making 10 years of qualifying payments. Since the program began in 2007, a total of $10 billion in loans have been forgiven for 175,000 individuals. There are many eligible qualified public service providers, such as government groups and certain non-profit organizations.

Heads up! In October 2022, the Limited PSLF Waiver Opportunity expired. As of October 31, 2022, certain types of payments or loan types will no longer be counted towards PSLF repayments. However, additional changes, providing more flexibilities for PSLF eligibility, went into effect in July 2023. More information about the specific changes to PSLF policy can be found here and here.

NIH Loan Repayment Programs (LRPs)

The NIH LRP is designed to help scientists with doctoral-level degrees pursue careers in research. Through the program, psychologists can have up to $50,000 of their student loans forgiven each year for two years (up to $100,000). In exchange, you must commit to at least two years of research. You can apply to the LRP as an independent researcher or a mentored researcher.

Health Resources and Services Administration Loan Repayment Programs

HRSA has a number of loan repayment programs that include behavioral health professions such psychologists. Several of them are through the National Health Service Corps, under which health service psychologists are an eligible professional.

The links below include all of the loan repayment programs for which behavioral health professions are eligible.

Learn more about managing student debt through other APA resources:

About the author: Megha Nagaswami, M.A., is a doctoral student in clinical psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has been a member of the APAGS Advocacy Coordinating Team (ACT) since 2022. Please contact Megha if you have any questions about this blog post or about the Advocacy Coordinating Team. 

Meet the 2023 JSF Winners!

One of the many incredible resources provided through the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students (APAGS) Science Committee is access to funding to support student research. Every year, the APAGS Science Committee and Psi Chi work together to provide financial support to research-oriented graduate students in psychology programs (either in their first year or first semester of their second year) through the Junior Scientist Fellowship (JSF). This year, we are proud to announce that 16 students were awarded $1,000 in grant funding to support their psychological research endeavors from a pool of 42 applicants. Below are the recipients and their research topics.

Ann Bernhardt (Texas A&M University) plans to study the impact of ADHD and anxiety on diagnostic identification and college-level performance. Ann’s research aims to reframe anxiety as a compensatory tool to help students increase their self-efficacy and college success.

Marley Billman Miller (Auburn University) aims to assess how food insecurity influences stress levels in racial/ethnic minority women in rural populations. Findings from this study may impact our understanding of populations who experience adverse health outcomes related to food insecurity.

Rachel Brough (University of Denver) strives to continue previous research on the influence of affective and motivational states on cognitive control. Specifically, Rachel plans to investigate the relationship between uncertainty and an increased need for control.

Jonathan Doriscar (Northwestern University) will investigate the factors contributing to systemic racism and prejudice reduction. Jonathan’s work aims to bridge psychological research with societal change.

Eli Halbreich (Texas Tech University) will investigate the role of companion animals as social support for LGBTQIA+ youth and young adults. Eli’s research aims to understand the relationship between companion animals, coping with stress, and physical activity.

Elizabeth Kruse (University of Rochester) plans to evaluate the degree to which people can suppress the area of the brain allocated to focus their attention. Elizabeth hopes to use this research to inform interventions for improved cognitive performance.

Brandon Martin (Kent State University aims to understand how stigma related to weight and body image in men informs our understanding of men’s health. Brandon’s research will address a gap in existing research on weight management and stigma, which has previously focused on women.

Renee McCauley (George Mason University) strives to understand how speaking with an accent impacts an applicant’s likelihood of being hired in job interviews, and how gender further informs this relationship. Renee hopes to improve our understanding of gender and accented speech as this intersection of identities has been underrepresented in the research to date.

Maggie McCracken (University of Utah) plans to further research the interaction between multisensory cues, focusing on the benefits of auditory cues when performing tasks which require the perception of distance. Maggie hopes to investigate if the presence of sound will improve the performance on distance perception tasks for people who are visually impaired.

Charlie McDonald (Binghamton University – SUNY) aims to identify the mechanism of dissociation, or the disruption of consciousness, emotions, and other cognitive functions. Charlie hopes to use virtual and augmented reality to inform the development of treatments for dissociation.

Margaret Powers (University of Louisville) aims to examine the relationship between abstract thinking skills and understanding or engaging with information about systemic racism. Margaret further aims to incorporate the results of this study into anti-racist work in explaining systemic racism to racially privileged groups.

Krutika Rathod (University of Maine) plans to continue researching the mechanisms associating substance use, specifically regarding cannabis, to socioeconomic adversity. This research will continue to advance the fund of knowledge on the social determinants of substance use in rural communities.

Joseph Slade (Oregon State University) strives to investigate the degree to which students retain information when using artificial intelligence (AI) databases, such as ChatGPT. Joseph’s study will not only focus on the depth of student engagement with course material as they use AI to complete tasks but will also investigate the impact of learning when students believe information was generated by AI versus humans.

Nikhila Udupa (Florida State University) aims to develop and validate a measure used to examine the uncontrollability of suicidal thought. Nikhila hopes to further examine the association between uncontrollability of suicidal thought and other control-related constructs.

Marie Wild (Cornell University) will examine the impact of relocating older adults to a senior living facility on their emotion regulation abilities. This research will advance our understanding of how aging impacts our emotion regulation behaviors and inform interventions aiding in the adjustment of relocation in older adults.

Alireza Zareian Jahromi (Fordham University) aims to conduct a longitudinal study to investigate the mental health outcomes of Iranian people living in the United States following sociopolitical events in Iran. This research further aims to understand the impact of emotion regulation strategies, acculturation, and perceived social support on mental health outcomes following these sociopolitical events.

Congratulations to our winners and thank you to all who participated in the 2023 JSF process! The APAGS Science committee and Psi Chi are committed to supporting research-oriented graduate students by promoting their work in psychological sciences. Participating in the JSF allows students to gain experience in grant writing, ultimately preparing them to apply for further funding and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Additional thanks to the APAGS reviewers for their time reviewing applications and providing valuable feedback to each applicant!

Posted by Sarah Kohnen, an APAGS Science Committee member and counseling psychology doctoral student at Chatham University. Feel free to reach out to Sarah with any questions you may have!