Much like a crock pot used to cook large meals with minimal effort, data science can be used to improve efficiency, quality, and edibility of your products. Automation, simple algorithms, and machine learning (i.e. using data to create predictive models) are all tools that can be utilized to increase efficiency and accuracy and reduce costs, while visualization techniques help to communicate your analyses clearly and in an easy to digest way.
Imagine that you are one of the 125,000 individuals who just earned your bachelor’s degree in psychology. Congratulations. Now what?
While exploring your career options, you may have come across the field of Industrial-Organizational (I-O) Psychology, the American Psychological Association’s Division 14. I-O psychology is the study of behavior in the workplace. I-O psychologists frequently help businesses better hire, motivate, and retain employees. On the surface, this work might not look personally meaningful or exciting. But, dig a little deeper and you’ll find that many I-O psychologists apply their skills in surprising ways and their work can extend far beyond helping businesses succeed.
Since opening with four psychology programs in 2015, PSYCAS, the centralized application service for graduate psychology, has grown to nearly 80 programs at the master’s- and doctoral-levels of training in 2018. For prospective students to PsyD programs, more than one quarter of APA-accredited PsyD programs now participate in PSYCAS. Unfamiliar with PSYCAS? You can learn more here.
How important is social media when looking for a job? According to CareerBuilder.com, up to 70 percent of employers are looking at your social media profiles when considering you for a job.
Recently, I was looking at numbers and trends in employment for psychology degree holders gathered in the 2015 National Survey of College Graduates (I know – I’m a data geek, and I embrace it). As you would expect, the most common occupation reported through the survey was either a faculty or a psychologist providing psychological services (and in some instances both). Having been a graduate student and the director of a graduate training program, that wasn’t so surprising to me.
In a recent article, Stephen Chew and William Cerbin claim, “Teaching and Learning are lost in a buzzword wasteland.” Teachers struggle to figure out what works and what doesn’t, some quickly adopt any new strategy while others are stuck on worn out ideas that long ago ceased to work. Our students don’t recognize the buzzwords, but they’ve been subjected to numerous educational innovations in various classrooms leaving them with no uniform understanding of how their learning actually works. We certainly don’t know everything, but we can start by making sure that all teachers and students understand the basic processes behind encoding, storage, and retrieval of memories.
The website Breaking the Prejudice Habit began as an immersive learning project funded by the Virginia Ball Center for Creative Inquiry at Ball State University. Mary Kite, the project director, selected an interdisciplinary team of 14 students to find ways to “break the prejudice habit” (Devine, Monteith, Zuwerink & Elliot, 1991).
Stop me if you have already heard this one. Psychology is one of the most popular undergraduate majors in the U.S.; in the last year the data are available (2014-2015), 117,557 bachelor’s degrees in psychology were awarded. Said another way, in the past nine years, 1 million individuals received psychology baccalaureates (National Center for Education Statistics, 2017).
Industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology—what a mouthful! The field originally focused on the prediction and improvement of job performance in industrial and military settings, but after World War II interests in broader organizational phenomena (e.g., leadership, groups, motivation, satisfaction) came into frame. Before APA Division 14 incorporated as the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) in 1982, it was called Division 14, Industrial and Business Psychology from 1945 to 1962. In 1962, “Business” was dropped from the name, and in 1973 “Organizational” was added to the name.