Category Archives: Graduate School

Now that you’ve submitted your internship application…

For many students training to be Health Service Providers (HSP), the internship application process tends to be one of the most stressful periods of their graduate school training. Preparing applications by looking through training brochures of multiple internship sites, writing cover letters, completing essays, logging hours… the list goes on. It is difficult to really practice self-care during this intensive process, and sometimes we find ourselves struggling to complete an application in the eleventh hour. A number of sites have early deadlines, some before November, while others go straight through to the end of November/early December. Students can choose different ways of submitting their applications, some opting to submit in batches, based on deadlines, while others may opt to submit all applications at one time.

If you’ve finished submitting your application at this point, CONGRATULATIONS! This is the perfect time to take a break!

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Some students may be thinking, “Now is the time to prepare for my interviews, plan travel, etc.” As someone who has been through this same process last year and also taking part in it again this year, my advice is this: DON’T DO IT.

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Thinking about submitting a Convention proposal to APAGS? Let us help!

Presenting at a conference is an excellent way to network or promote your research, and looks great on your CV! APAGS has a couple of options for you to do both at the 2017 APA Convention in Washington, DC!  This post will contain helpful information to help you decide whether you would like to submit a proposal for a poster or a program.

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REPOST: Principles of Good Writing: Avoiding Plagiarism

This is a reposting of a blog post from the APA Style Blog that was published in May 2016.

Principles of Good Writing: Avoiding Plagiarism

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by Harris Cooper, PhD

Committing plagiarism can have devastating effects on your education or career. Perhaps most distressing is that it is so easily avoided.

Plagiarism involves the copying of text into a new work without crediting it to the original source. The main reasons why people plagiarize are simple. First, they want credit for someone else’s ideas. This motivation can come from a desire to impress others and to foster career advancement. Second, it can occur because people are just plain lazy. They have found a passage written by another that fits their paper well and is expressed clearly. They think it would be too much effort to rephrase and credit the source.

Instances of plagiarism can range from stealing an entire work, by simply changing the name of the author, to paraphrasing someone’s work and not attributing the ideas to the original written document (Turnitin, 2012). Also, motivation can be used to distinguish among acts of plagiarism (Barnett & Campbell, 2012). Plagiarism can be intentional or conscious. It can also be unintentional or inadvertent; for example, when you read something and then later forget that it had a source other than yourself. Regardless of the motivation, plagiarism is plagiarism, and the possibility of unintentional plagiarism means the steps you take to avoid it ought not be based on your memory alone.

Students often ask “how many words in a row constitute plagiarism?” There is no black-and-white answer to this question. Different people will answer differently. Also, context might matter. For example, it is not unusual to find descriptions of research apparatus and psychological measures that share short strings of words without attribution to the original source, and without engendering charges of plagiarism.

Read the entire blog post.

Mental Health and Immigration Detention

berks-countyThis summer, I joined psychologists and lawyers from across the Midatlantic and New York to visit the Berks County Detention Center, in Pennsylvania.  Berks is one of 108 immigration detention centers around the country run by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and it is home to 36 families, including children of as young as two years old, who are awaiting deportation from the U.S.  The purpose of our visit, which was arranged by Human Rights First, was to review conditions in the detention center; as a doctoral student in clinical psychology, my particular interest was in understanding the mental health needs of the detainees, and the availability of qualified mental health care in the Center.

Many studies and reports have demonstrated the impact of detention on mental health, and some of these impacts were clearly visible in talking to the families at Berks.

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Seven Proven Parenting Strategies for Nurturing Better Behavior

ParentEvery parent only wants what’s best for their child.  Which is precisely why the vast majority of parents spend time exploring ways and means by which they can interact with their children, in a manner that both fosters positive behavior and creates stronger relationships.  Unsurprisingly, it is a subject that has been explored and investigated in extreme depth and a prominent matter of discussion when studying child psychology.

However, with such a wealth of information available both via the web and in print, it can be extremely difficult for parents to figure out which proposed strategies are the most effective.

In a recent Monitor on Psychology publication by the American Psychological Association, influential child psychology leaders were asked for their own opinions and input on the subjects of effective parenting strategies.  The purpose was not to attempt to identify what constitutes ‘perfect’ parenting, but rather to shed little a light on the strategies that were less theoretical and more research/evidence-backed.

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