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.
With a surge of awareness from many mainstream media outlets and a newfound push to teach the importance of mental health, psychology has never been more popular and readily accessible to the public. Although there has been an increase in awareness, there are still many fields and subjects of psychology that are not as commonly popular or are simply unknown.
Industrial-organizational (I-O) psychologists use theories and principles from psychology to scientifically study working populations and improve the effectiveness of organizations. However, for aspiring I-O psychologists, it may not be clear what path to follow to land their dream job. In this post from APA’s Division 14, or the Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychology’s (SIOP) Visibility Committee, we point students towards some helpful resources as they start to think about choosing and preparing for a career in I-O!
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.
With a surge of awareness from many mainstream media outlets and a newfound push to teach the importance of mental health, psychology has never been more popular and readily accessible to the public. Although there has been an increase in awareness, there are still many fields and subjects of psychology that are not as commonly popular or are simply unknown.
When I was earning my bachelor’s degree in psychology, classmates, professors, family members and guidance counselors would tell me that I needed a graduate degree if I wanted to get a job using my degree. At first, I believed them and planned for graduate school at some point in the future. But, before going to graduate school, I worked for four years in academic research. Below, I’ll describe some different research careers that someone with a bachelor’s degree in psychology could pursue and, most importantly given the difficulty some college graduates encounter finding jobs, what you need to do to prepare for each career.
On my annual family camping trip, I was out on the lake fishing with two of my brothers. We were making small talk as we were getting our lines ready to throw in the water.
“How’s work?”
“Good. Busy.”
“You? How’s work?”
“Same, busy.”
Then my brother asked a question that seemed almost comical, “Amanda, what do you do, anyway?” My other brother piped in curiously, “Yeah, what do you do??” The question came after I had been in my current position for a couple years, and I had been working as an I-O Psychology practitioner my whole career.
Every semester, psychology students around the country anxiously file into their required, introductory statistics classes. Although some love it, statistics tends to be difficult and anxiety-producing for psychology students (who sometimes refer to it as Sadistics 101). To combat this, publishers have released a flurry of student-friendly textbooks designed to make statistics more palatable. However, students often face challenges learning statistics, and, frankly, don’t generally like it.
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.