City College will have a career planning colloquium featuring Dr. Scott Mesh.

Hi everyone,

I remembered that many people in our class are interested in pursuing their doctorate degree and staying in New York City. While selecting the faculty member that matches your interests is arguably the most important factor in choosing a program, geographic location is equally significant, as well. If you’re going to live somewhere for 4-7 years (or more!), you might as well enjoy the place! So I could totally see why many of you want to stay in the metropolitan area.

I’ve been told that CUNY has a great psychology graduate program. According to their website, CUNY Grad has PhD programs in a huge range of areas including: social, comparative, clinical, health, neuroscience, cognitive, animal, and I/O psychology. I would definitely encourage everyone to check out the faculty in these various programs, and consider any of these programs. Furthermore, the cost of a graduate degree at CUNY is much more economical compared to other private programs.

Here is the website to the CUNY Graduate Center.

Best,

Daphne

While we are honing in on grad school programs that fit our interests and goals, the next important step will be to choose a professor within those programs to advise our research towards our dissertation/thesis.  Obviously your research interest would have to be compatible with the prospective adviser; however there are questions as to additional qualities that make for a good adviser such as where they are in their career, personality types, etc.  I have found some information about this scattered online, and this article summarizes much of what I have found: http://chronicle.com/article/Choosing-The-Right-Research/46388/

On November 18th, 2013 from 2- 7PM, at the Grand Hyatt at Grand Central Terminal  CUNY graduate center will be  hosting a graduate fair in which students can learn about Master and Phd programs that CUNY has to offer. Preregistration is required.

To preregister visit, http://www.cuny.edu/admissions/graduate/fair.html

Hi everyone,

I noticed that several people have already posted helpful sites and articles about how to approach writing the personal statement. However, I found some additional sites that I think also offer great insight into writing a strong, compelling, and personal piece:

1. For more general advice about how to structure the personal statement, see: Writing in Psychology

2. This article highlights how to approach the statement with a clinical psychology program in mind; It is called Applying to Doctoral Programs in Clinical Psychology: Writing an Effective Personal Statement. (I am worried that the article might be outdated, as it was written in 1999, but I do feel that a lot of the advice can still apply to applicants today!)

Also, there are a great number of us REU students who are interested in clinical psychology, particularly working with a child and/or adolescent population. I found this article (or manuscript!) written by a student at the University of North Carolina to be extremely insightful–The author discussed applying to a clinical psychology program, and focused on students who were interested in taking a year or two off to build their application before applying to graduate school. This is something many of us, myself included, are looking into, as well. I also liked that the author highlighted the specific types of experience and research he did to get into a clinical psych program!

The article is called “Before You Apply to Graduate Programs in Psychology: Knowing When You Are Ready and Gaining Post-Bac Experiences.”

I hope you guys find this helpful!

Daphne