Hey all,

I don’t know if any of you feel the same way, but for me writing the personal statement has been a very daunting process. Many schools ask really vague questions to which there seems to be no single good approach. While struggling with what to write for my statement, and how personal is too personal, I have stumbled upon Essay Edge website. It has some really good advice about the things that you should and should not write about. There are a few lessons on specific things that the personal statement consists of, which are very helpful. I hope you look through them if you need more guidance with your paper!

http://www.essayedge.com/graduate/essayadvice/course

Best,

Olena.

There will be two webinars hosted by Dr. Mark Terjesen, Director for School Psychology and Dr. Jeffrey Nevid, Director of Clinical Psychology, about the Doctoral Programs at St. John’s University.

These webinars are free, and will be hosted from 7:00 pm – 8:00pm on Tuesday, November 5th and Thursday, November 14th 

***Registration before the webinar is required. If you are interested, you may register for the date that works best for you by clicking on the links below, or copying and pasting the links into your web-browser: ***

School Psychology Webinar, November 5^th:    https://stj-events.webex.com/stj-events/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=665183560

Clinical Psychology Webinar, November 14^th: https://stj-events.webex.com/stj-events/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=663579441

Hi everyone! As we are all currently working on editing our personal statements, CVs, and researching the graduate programs we want to get into, many of us may be wondering the mistakes we should avoid doing in our applications that may diminish our chances of getting into graduate school. We generally learn the positive things to do to impress admissions committees such as research experience, leadership roles, a high GPA, and strong letters of recommendation. However, this research article entitled “Kisses of Death in the Graduate School Application Process” suggests that we should take into consideration the negative things that many applicants have done that contributed to their not being accepted to the graduate school of their dreams. By presenting its insightful findings, discussion, and recommendations, this article offers excellent advice on how to avoid the 5 categories of mistakes (kisses of death) that psychology graduate admissions committees look down upon. I have listed these five categories here and I strongly suggest that each one of you print out the article and mark it for yourselves to see where you stand in your application thus far. I found it very easy to read and quite entertaining, but most of all, useful and applicable for my application process. I hope you all will too!

5 Kisses of Death (in descending order of frequency):

1. Damaging Personal Statements

2. Harmful letters of recommendation

3. Lack of Program Information

4. Poor writing skills

5. Misfired attempts to impress

Here is the article:

http://psychology.unl.edu/psichi/Graduate_School_Application_Kisses_of_Death.pdf

Hey all,

On November 6th&19th Queens College is hosting an open house for a graduate program in School Psychology. This program is looking to select 15 students for a grant supported program.

I’ve attached the information from the flyers for this event, hope  you check it out

Continue reading Queens College Open House →

I will be at a conference in a southern city in a couple of weeks, and since I had interest in the clinical psychology PhD program at a major university in that city I decided to contact the program to see if I would be able to meet a student from their program who could tell me details about the program that are not found online.  I did not know how to go about this and whom to contact, but a friend who is in (non-psychology) grad school suggested that I contact the program head.  So I did, I contacted the department head who immediately responded, however she quizzed me about the program’s Student Handbook and said that it is expected that I read it thoroughly before meeting anyone in the program.  I had skimmed some of the Handbook; however I did not read all 70 pages of it thoroughly.

Through this experience I learned that most grad programs have a “Student’s Handbook” that explains the program thoroughly at-length, and that many programs expect you to have read it and to know it well when they are contacted.  I have found that these handbooks are sometimes not so visible on the program’s websites; however they can be more easily located through a Google search.