Tag Archives: Professional Development

Teaching as a Graduate Student

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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.

Negotiating Job Contracts: Effective Strategies to Improve Your Outcome

How to be comfortable being uncomfortable while negotiating

By Sarah Aghjayan

Are you in a position to negotiate your salary but do not know where to start? If so, you are not alone. According to a recent survey by Glassdoor, more than half of American workers accepted their employer’s pay offer without negotiating (2016). Many times, workers do not negotiate their salary because they are afraid of being told no or losing the job offer, they think it might create a negative impression, or their employer did not signal that the offer was negotiable by asking their expected salary. While negotiating can seem intimidating, there are several strategies that can help you feel more comfortable when negotiating and lead to a more positive outcome. Whether you are seeking a position in an academic, clinical, or industry setting, these effective strategies and resources may help boost your confidence when negotiating.

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9 Tips for Navigating an In-Person Convention

By Amanda Wisinger, APAGS Convention Committee

A return to in-person conferences is likely bringing about a mix of emotions for students – both positive and negative. Many of us have spent the better part of two years attending classes and seminars behind computer screens. For some of us, our entire graduate school experience has been spent in virtual spaces with limited opportunities to connect in-person with our peers and professors. We have grown adept at navigating a variety of typically in-person events being held virtually, such as dissertation defenses, interviews for practicum and internship, and even professional conferences.

If you are attending the APA Convention in Minneapolis this August in-person, it may be your first in-person conference ever. Or, your first in-person conference in a few years. While virtual conferences provided us with many benefits (e.g., reduced travel and lodging costs, the ability to refill your coffee by simply taking a few steps into your kitchen, attending sessions in your sweatpants, etc.), there were undoubtedly many opportunities that virtual events did not provide – including the ability to form new professional relationships and contacts through in-person networking.

Here are my top tips to boost your networking skills and make the most of an in-person Convention:

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Tips for Gaining Competency in Suicide Prevention as a Graduate Student

Kristen H. Erps and Stephanie Miodus

Graduates from health service psychology programs are expected to gain competency in many different areas before becoming independent practitioners. Despite developing key clinical skills throughout graduate training, one area that is often under-emphasized is recognizing and responding to clients at risk for suicide. In fact, studies have shown that many psychology graduates lack training in suicide prevention and intervention procedures and leave training feeling ill-prepared to work with individuals who are experiencing suicidality (Allen et al., 2002; Erps et al., 2020). 

The American Psychological Association of Graduate Students’ Advocacy Coordinating Team (APAGS-ACT) advocates for graduate students across all psychology training programs. As noted above, explicit education in suicide prevention, suicide risk assessment, and working with individuals who are at risk for suicide is not always a component of graduate training. For graduate students who hope to gain more competency in this area, APAGS-ACT has created a resource list that provides various avenues to independently gain education and exposure to suicide prevention. 

The resources in this list are not meant to be exhaustive; they instead provide a starting point for students who seek to increase their knowledge in this area. This list includes websites, organizations with which to get involved, volunteer and work opportunities, and trainings that are offered online. It also includes a competency assessment that can be used on an individual level or integrated into a graduate training program. 

The opportunities described in the resource list span conferences, community programs, certifications, and strategies for supporting those at risk for suicide, as well as other tools focused on suicide assessment and prevention. Graduate students in psychology programs are encouraged to explore these resources in order to supplement gaps they identify in their clinical training. Graduate programs can also use this resource list to support students in building their skills in suicide prevention, assessment, and treatment. 

References 

Allen, M., Jerome, A., White, A., Marston, S., Lamb, S., Pope, D., & Rawlins, C. (2002). The preparation of school psychologists for crisis intervention. Psychology in the Schools, 39(4), 427-439. https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.10044

Erps, K. H., Ochs, S., & Myers, C. L. (2020). School psychologists and suicide risk assessment: Role perception and competency. Psychology in the Schools, 57(6), 884-900. https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.22367

Where Science Meets Policy Part 3: Writing About Your Science for Non-scientific Audiences

Melanie Arenson & Mary Fernandes

It is critical that researchers translate their scientific findings to non-scientist consumers (seriously, we’ve written 2 blog posts about it – find out about engaging with stakeholders here and how to write academic papers for a broader range of stakeholders here). However, many researchers (including us graduate students!) feel uncertain about exactly how or where to write about our science. While graduate students typically get exposure to creating posters, giving talks, and writing scientific articles, very few of us are ever taught how to write for other mediums. Below are a few tips and tricks.

Writing for a non-scientific audience.

  • Adjust your lexicon. Sometimes this is easier said than done. Many of us have been talking about our work in scientific circles for so long that jargon is second-nature for us. Break the habit.  Write about your findings in your typical scientific manner and then go back and ask yourself, “but what does this mean?” — then replace whatever you wrote with that answer. Wherever possible, write in lay terms or connect back to phenomena that people know and understand.
  • Write a story. This sounds abstract, but it is really important. People are good at processing stories — they’re not as good at conceptualizing facts and figures and understanding why they matter. The story will change depending upon the science that you are talking about, but it should flow from beginning to middle to end.
  • Write short. Ideally, people should be able to get the gist your scientific findings and the story you are going to tell them within the first 3 sentences. Get to the point as quickly as possible. For longer pieces (e.g. a blogpost), you can definitely expand, but the first few sentences should be a punch that conveys the big takeaways.
  • Wherever possible, include accessible infographics. What these look like can change from discipline to discipline, but you want the graphic to be accessible, easy to understand without explanation, and to summarize the most important take-home point and/or summarize large amounts of information.

Now, share it!

  • Social Media: If you’ve written something just a few sentences long, tweet it, share it on Facebook, or find a great photograph to represent it on Instagram. Then, interact with anyone who comments on or likes it. Encourage people to share your work, and make sure you’ve provided links back to the original scientific article.
  • Link to longer pieces: If what you’ve written is longer than just a few sentences (e.g. you wrote a blogpost, or have talked about your research in a news article), provide the link to the longer story, but make sure you’ve got a 1-3 sentence summary of your results and why they matter. As a tip, if you’ve followed the tricks listed above, you’ve probably already written those 1-3 sentences.
  • Blog posts: There are a number of science-relevant blogs (in fact, you’re reading one of them!). These blogs can vary from area to area, but they are a fantastic way to disseminate your research.
  • Email and listservs: We know this can feel strange, but you should be sharing your work with your colleagues. This means blasting it out on listservs and sending it to your department. First, people in your field are probably already interested in your work. Second, they also have connections, and may want to forward your work to other people who might also be interested. Whenever possible, include links to both the scientific article and the more accessible format.

Help! The media has asked about my work.
First of all, congratulations! You’ve been contacted by the media, because they want to know more about the really cool science that you are doing.
Many scientists feel nervous about talking to the media. They worry their work will get misrepresented, or feel uncomfortable describing themselves as the expert. Below are a few tricks (some of them may feel familiar).

  • Adjust your lexicon. Before providing information to the news source, do some background research on them to see what their writing style is usually like, and who you think their target audience is. Then, adjust your language accordingly.
  • Tell a story. It’ll be a short story, but it should still be a story. Whenever possible, connect back to why your results matter. Contextualize it within the broader picture.
  • Talk short. Your answers shouldn’t be lengthy. Make sure you already know how you want to talk about your work and what the key takeaways are (think back to those 1-3 sentences you’ve been using for social media and the beginning of blog posts).
  • Plan your responses. Think about what questions you might be asked and plan out how you would respond. Pay special attention to anything you think might be taken out of context; aim not only to be understood, but also to avoid being misunderstood. Be as precise in your language as you can be, without sliding into scientific jargon.
  • Build a relationship. Whenever possible, build rapport with the media author that contacted you. You want to be in a place where you would feel comfortable contacting them if you think they’ve accidentally misrepresented your work.
  • Remember, you are the expert. This one can be really difficult, but you are the expert in your work. Take pride in that, feel confident in that.

Further resources.
Don’t just take our word for it! Tons of people have written about communicating scientific findings to non-scientists. Below are a few of our favorites:

Keep following the series for more ways to translate your science! Up next, we’ll discuss how to write a policy brief.