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Undergraduate Students August 13, 2018

One Tip for Choosing the Right Graduate Program

Towards the end of the Fall semester every year, faculty in my program review applications for entry into our doctoral program in counseling psychology. It’s a fun experience – on our end at least – because we see so many aspiring psychologists who are talented and poised to do great things. As an applicant, each stage of the process is filled with doubt. Where should I apply? Will I get interviews? Will I get an offer? Will I get more than one offer? Will I be able to succeed wherever it is I end up?

Graduate and Postgraduate Teachers, Undergraduate Students, Undergraduate Teachers November 6, 2017

Avoiding the “I’m So Busy” Trap

Anyone who has had the chance to work in more than one psychology department – either as undergraduate, graduate, or faculty member – comes to realize that every workplace is different. There are different norms, different dress codes, different colleagues, and different leadership styles. But whatever work setting you end up in, you are guaranteed to find one strong commonality:

everyone is so busy.

And you will find this commonality immediately because everyone will want to tell you how busy they are.

Graduate and Postgraduate Students, Undergraduate Students September 18, 2017

Try Being Curious First

The infamous Google memo by James Damore rightfully struck a cord in social media, the popular press, and academia. The memo hit on many things, but in particular a core argument that has raged for thousands of years: are men and women innately different? And if they are different, should attention to these differences be reflected in policies in the workplace and society in general?

Graduate and Postgraduate Students, Undergraduate Students August 21, 2017

An Easy Way to Handle Criticism

Last month I gave a conference talk where I was one of several invited, keynote speakers. The audience was around 300 people, and I felt prepared, but a bit nervous. Giving talks like this are not necessarily new for me, but only a few times have I been featured in such a prominent role. Once I got going with the talk two things happened that I was unprepared for.

Graduate and Postgraduate Students, Undergraduate Students June 26, 2017

Giving Gratitude in Graduate School

Graduate school is really, really hard. This is because as a psychology graduate student you are living a life that combines coursework, supervised research, independent research, and typically a part time job which pays you just enough to live around the poverty line. Demands are high and very often the praise and positive feedback graduate students get for all their work is minimal. This is not just because academia is an exercise in managing rejection (journals, grants, etc.), but because faculty themselves (myself included) are often not the greatest at doling out consistent compliments and positive feedback. Maybe we have become so accustomed to using rejection as a motivator we forget that the opposite may be equally, if not more, effective in motivating those we mentor.

High School Students, Undergraduate Students April 24, 2017

Navigating Email Expectations

Now in my 8th year as a psychology professor, one topic job that seems to consistently come up in conversation around working with students is email etiquette. I guess I should clarify that these conversations usually have to do with one part of email etiquette: expected response time. For better or worse (probably worse), it’s clear that in academia email has become the dominant way people communicate with each other.

Undergraduate Students March 20, 2017

Finding an Approach to Writing that Works for You

A few years ago my research team and I set out to understand a simple question:

How do very productive academic psychologists approach their work?

We specifically were interested in professors who published a lot and whose publications were cited heavily by other academics. And because our research area was counseling psychology we specifically targeted faculty in these programs. To find these folks we tallied the numbers of publications and citations for every faculty member in a counseling psychology program and then asked the 20 most productive people on this list if they would be willing to be interviewed – 17 agreed.