Feds to College Students: "We don't want your professors to know how to teach"

The National Science Foundation just changed the rules for their 3-year graduate fellowships: no teaching is allowed. Ostensibly, this is to ensure that fellows are spending their time doing research. This is different from the National Defense Science & Engineering graduate fellowship Vow of Poverty: you can teach as much as you want, so long as you don't earn money from it.*

Consider that, ideally, PhD programs take 5 years, and the final year is spent on (a) writing the dissertation, and (b) applying for jobs. This means that NSF graduate fellows may have as little as one year in which to get some teaching experience.

Presumably, NSF was thinking one of three things:

1) They're trying to make it harder for their fellows to get jobs at universities that care about teaching.
2) They honestly don't believe teaching experience is important.
3) They weren't thinking at all.

I'm curious what will happen at universities that require all students to teach, regardless of whether they have outside fellowships or not. Will they change that rule, or will they forbid students to have NSF fellowships. Given the current financial situation, I'm guessing they'll go with the former, but it's hard to say.

*The exact NDSEG rule is that your total income for any year should be no more than $5,000 in addition to the fellowship itself. Depending on the university, this can be less than what one would get paid for teaching a single class.

Apply to Graduate School?

Each year around this time, I try to post more information that would be of use to prospective graduate students, just in case any such are reading this blog (BTW Are there any undergraduates reading this blog? Post in the comments!).

This year, I've been swamped. I've been focusing on getting a few papers published, and most of my time for blogging has gone to the Scientific-American-Mind-article-that-will-not-die, which, should I ever finish it, will probably come out early next year.

Luckily, Female Science Professor has written a comprehensive essay on The Chronicle of Higher Education about one of the most confusing parts of the application process: the pre-application email to a potential advisor. Everyone tells applicants to send such emails, but nobody gives much information about what should be in them. Find the essay here.

I would add one comment to what she wrote. She points out that you should check the website to see what kind of research the professor does rather than just asking, "Can you tell me more about your research," which comes across as lazy. She also suggests that you should put in your email whether you are interested in a terminal master's. Read the website before you do that, though, since not all programs offer terminal master's (none of the programs I applied to do). Do your homework. Professors are much, much busier than you are; if you demonstrate that you are too lazy to look things up on the Web, why should they spend time answering your email?

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For past posts on graduate school and applying to graduate school, click here.

A Frog at the Bottom of a Well

My college had a graduate admissions counselor, with whom I consulted about applying to graduate school. Unfortunately, different fields (math, chemistry, literature, psychology) use completely different methods of selecting graduate students (and, in some sense graduate school itself is a very different beast depending on the field). My counselor didn't know anything about psychology, so much of the information I was given was dead wrong.

My graduate school also provides a lot of support for applying for jobs. This week, there is a panel on "The View from the Search Committee," which includes as panelists professors from Sociology, Romance Language & Literatures, and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. That is, none of them are from Psychology. I do know that different fields recruit junior faculty in very different ways (for instance, linguistics practices a form of speed-dating at conferences as a first round of interviews, while others psych has no such system).

So...do I go? Keep in mind that I get lots of advice from faculty in my own department (and also from friends at other psych departments who have recently gone through the process). That is, how likely is it that the experience of these three professors will map on to the process I will actually go through? How likely is it that a one-hour panel can cover all the different variants of the process? How likely is it that there is information that would be relevant to anyone applying to any department that isn't obvious or something I am likely to already know?

Thoughts?

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The title of this post comes from an old proverb about a frog sitting at the bottom of a well, thinking that the patch of blue above is the whole world. Often (always?) we don't realize just how limited our own range of experience is.
photo: e_monk

No tenure, no way!

The New York Times is carrying an interesting but misguided discussion of tenure today. As usual, the first commentator warns that without tenure, academic freedom will die:

As at-will employees, adjunct faculty members can face dismissal or nonrenewal when students, parents, community members, administrators, or politicians are offended at what they say. If you can be fired tomorrow, you do not really have academic freedom. Self-censorship often results. 

Mark Taylor of Columbia replies, essentially, "oh yah?"

To those who say the abolition of tenure will make faculty reluctant to be demanding with students or express controversial views, I respond that in almost 40 years of teaching, I have not known a single person who has been more willing to speak out after tenure than before.

Instead, tenure induces stasis, a point to which Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio University, agrees:

The fact is that tenured faculty members often use their power to stifle innovation and change.

Money

You might, reading through these discussions, almost think that universities have been slowly doing weakening the tenure system because they want to increase diversity, promote a flexible workforce, and reduce the power of crabby old professors. Maybe some administrators do feel that way. But lurking behind all of this discussion is money. Here's Taylor:

If you take the current average salary of an associate professor and assume this tenured faculty member remains an associate professor for five years and then becomes a full professor for 30 years, the total cost of salary and benefits alone is $12,198,578 at a private institution and $9,992,888 at a public institution.

I'm not sure where he's getting these numbers. The numbers at Harvard for the same period is $6,320,500 for salary alone. Assuming benefits cost as much as the salary alone gets us up to our $12,000,000, but that's for Harvard, not the average university. Perhaps Taylor is assuming the professor starts today and includes inflation in future salaries, but 35 years of inflation is a lot. I'm using present-day numbers and assuming real salaries remain constant.

In any case, money seems to be the real factor, mentioned by more or less all the contributors. Here's Vedder:

My academic department recently granted tenure to a young assistant professor. In so doing, it created a financial liability of over two million dollars, because it committed the institution to providing the individual lifetime employment. With nearly double digit unemployment and universities furloughing and laying off personnel, is tenure a luxury we can still afford?

Adrianna Kezar of USC notes that non-tenured faculty are often not given offices or supplies, which presumably also saves the university money.

Professors make choices, too.

So universities save a lot of money by eliminating tenure. And certainly universities need to find savings where they can. What none of the contributors to the discussion acknowledge, beyond an oblique aside by Vedder, is that tenure has a financial value to professors as well as universities. Removing tenure in a sense is a pay cut, and both present and potential academics will respond to that pay cut.

Becoming a professor is not a wise financial decision. The starting salary of a lawyer leaving a top law school is greater than what most PhDs from the same schools will make at the height of their careers should they stay in academia. And lawyers' salaries, as I'm often reminded, can be similarly dwarfed by people with no graduate education that go straight into finance.

Most of us who nonetheless go into academia do so because we love it. The point is that we have options. Making the university system less attractive will mean fewer people will want to go into it. It's really that simple.

Caveat emptor: Is academia a pyramid scheme?

That's the question on the blogs this week (see here and here). The question arises because each professor will have some number of students during their career (10-20 is common among the faculty I know), whereas the number of professorships increases very slowly. So the number of PhDs being produced far exceeds the number of academic positions.

As pointed out elsewhere, this neglects the fact that many PhD students have no intention of going into academia. Even so, it's clear the system is set up to produce more graduates who want academic jobs than there are jobs available. Prodigal Academic wonders if that's any different from any profession -- generally, there are more people who want the best jobs than there are best jobs to go around. Unlike PA, who doesn't think there's a problem, Citation Needed thinks most people entering graduate school aren't aware of how unlikely it is that they will get a tenure-track job, partly because it isn't in the schools' interest to mention this.

It depends

I largely agree with these fine posts, but I think they overgeneralize. Not all PhD programs are the same. Different fields vary wildly in terms of number of students produced, the likelihood of getting an industry job, etc., and also in terms of the caliber of the program. For instance, nearly every graduate of the psych program at Harvard goes on to get a tenure-track job. A sizable percentage get tenure-track jobs at the top institutions (Harvard, Yale, UChicago, etc.).

On the other hand, at even highly-respected but lower-ranked schools, getting a tenure-track job seems to be the exception. Here I have less personal experience, but a friend from Harvard who is a post-doc at a well-known state school was surprised to discover basically none of the students in that program expected to get an academic job. I've heard similar stories from a few other places.

A common problem

This isn't unique to academia. Many people believe lawyers earn a lot of money. Much fuss is made in the New York Times about how starting salary at a major law first is around $170,000/year (or was, prior to the Great Recession). While basically anyone who graduates from the top three law schools who wants such a job can get one (some go into lower-paying public-interest or public-service work), at most law schools, few if any graduates land such jobs and most lawyers never earn anywhere near that money. As a first approximation, nobody who graduates from law school lands a big firm job, just as, as a first approximation, nobody with a PhD gets a tenure track job at a top research institution.

From my vantage point, the problem is that media (newspapers, movies, etc.) fixate on the prosperous tip of the iceberg. Newspapers do this because their target audience (rather, the target audience of many of the advertisers in newspapers) are people who themselves graduated from Harvard or Yale and for whom getting a tenure-track job or being partner at a major law firm is a reasonably common achievement. Movies and television shows do this for the same reason everyone is beautiful and rich on the screen -- nobody ever said Hollywood was realistic.

This is fine as it goes, but can get people into trouble when they don't realize (a) that the media is presenting the outliers, not the norm, and/or (b) just where their own school/program fits into the grand scheme of things. As Citation Needed points out, it's not necessarily in the interest of less successful schools to warn incoming students that their chances of a job are poor. And, particularly in the realm of undergraduate education, there are certainly there are schools who cynically accept students knowing that their degree is so worthless that the students will almost certainly default on their loans.

What to do

Obviously the real onus is on the student (caveat emptor) to make sure they know what their chances of getting the job they want are prior to matriculating -- and this is true for every degree, not just PhDs. For most schools -- undergraduate and particularly graduate -- you can get data on how graduates fare in the marketplace. This can help determine not only which school to go to but whether it's worth going to school at all (it may not be). But to the extent it is in society's interest that people aren't wasting time and money (often as not, taxpayer money), it is worth considering how, as a society, we can make sure that not only is the information available, but people know that it's available and where to get it.

Do professors teach?

Luis Von Ahn has an excellent discussion on his blog about the teaching/research balance at major research universities. The comments are worth a read as well, especially this one and Von Ahn's response.

Overheard: The Prodigal Academic

I recently started reading The Prodigal Academic, a blog by a professor recently returned to academia after 7 years away. Lately she's written a number of useful posts about academia as a career. See these posts on spousal hiring, search committee dynamics, interviewing for tenure-track jobs, and women in science.

Academics on the Web

The Prodigal Academic, in discussing "Things I Wish I Know Before Starting on the [Tenure Track]", writes

Actually spend time on my group website. This is a great recruiting tool! Students look at the departmental website before they arrive on campus to plan out their potential advisors.

As someone closer to the applying-to-school phase than TPA, I admit that there are schools I probably did not consider as carefully as I should have because their websites were skimpy and I had difficulty finding much information.

In fact, even though our department has a relatively good website, I very nearly didn't come to Harvard because I couldn't find the information I needed. I came from an adult psycholinguistics background and so I hadn't ever read any of her (developmental) papers. We went to different conferences. Harvard's departmental website is set up around five research areas: Cognition, Brain & Behavior; Developmental; Clinical; Social; Organizational Behavior. Since I was cognitive, I checked the cognitive section for psycholinguists and didn't see her. I only found out about her because I ended up working at Harvard for a year as a research assistant in a different lab.

Again, I actually like our department's website. This is just a story about how the organization of websites can ultimately have an important effect.

Websites are also important for disseminating research. When I come across an interesting paper by a researcher I don't know, I almost always check their website. If they have papers there for download, I read any that look interesting. I've discovered some very important work this way. But if they don't have papers available (or, as sometimes happens, don't even have a website), that's often the end of the journey.

The Job Search

The Prodigal Academic has a fascinating post on how candidates for job academic job searches are chosen. I've never been through a job search (on either end), so I have no real comment. The closest I came was filing job applications for two searches in the History & Religion department at Oberlin. What impressed me then, as now, is how many there were.

What does a professor do all day?

Readers of this blog will remember Dick Morris's strange claim that professors don't do anything except teach -- it's not even clear he thinks they have to prepare for class or grade papers. This raised a considerable backlash on the Web, in which many pointed out that teaching is, for many professors, only one pursuit (and often not the main one).

Around the same time, but apparently independently, a professor of psycholinguistics, Gerry Altmann, listed how he had been spending his time. In the space of 2.5 weeks, sent out 18 manuscripts for review (he's a journal editor), wrote 51 action letters (telling authors what decisions had been made), reviewed 7 NIH grants (interesting, since he works in the UK), and visited collaborators in Philly to discuss a new project (presumably part -- but not all -- of the 3677 miles he reports having flown).

How much do professors get paid?

The American Association of University Professors recently released a report on the financial situation of professors. One interesting datum apparently gleaned from the report is a ranking of universities by full professor salaries. I have heard it said that Harvard pays below market because it pays in prestige, but that doesn't jive with its industry-leading $192,600/year (keep in mind this is average for full professor, which is rarely achieved before one's 40s at best).

One interesting fact noted shown in figure 2 of the report itself is that while, yes, PhDs do earn less than professional degrees (law, business, medicine, etc.), the difference is, on average, not nearly so large as one might expect. In 2007, the average PhD made around $95,000, while the average professional school graduate earned about $115,000 (both numbers are down, incidentally, from 1997).

That said, the ceilings are probably different. The average full professor at Harvard -- arguably the pinnacle of the profession for someone with a PhD -- as already said makes just under $200,000/year...or about the same as the typical big-firm lawyer a couple years out of law school (though perhaps not this year).

The Academic Job Market Tanks

"This is a year of no jobs." Ph.D.s are stacked up "like planes hovering over La Guardia. -- Catherine Stimpson, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University.

The above quote is taken from a recent article in the New York Times. Although people usually flock to graduate school in a down economy, the down economy means fewer spots in graduate school. This is just as well, it seems, if there are fewer jobs for graduating Ph.D.s.

The article is based mostly on anecdote, but the anecdotes match what I have seen as well. A graduate student from UT-Austin frets that more and more job searches have been pulled as universities announce hiring freezes. Two colleagues of mine who were on the market this year also reported jobs they had applied for disappearing. One has managed to find a post-doc position; the future of the other is uncertain.

For those who want numbers, there are a few in the article. It reports 15% drop in history department job searches and a 25% drop in the length of the American Mathematic Association's largest list of job postings.

In addition to the problems faced by people on the market, this is problematic for a country that wants to increase its intellectual output. Ph.D.s are long and hard and not worth it if there is no job at the end. Discouraging employment figures are not going to help the president's goal of increasing our nation's supply of scientists and engineers. To the extent that the work of historians and area-studies researchers informs policy, it seems we'd want to make sure there are employment prospects for humanities students as well.

Again, the Times has no numbers, but the article quoted a few discouraged undergraduates who are putting off graduate study (though frankly I don't think going straight from undergraduate to graduate programs is a good idea, anyway). Moreover, they point to Thomas Benton, a columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Eduction -- academia's trade journal -- who has been actively discouraging students from going into the humanities, arguing that it makes no sense unless you are wealthy or well-connected. I'm not sure undergraduates read the Chronicle, but the existence of that sentiment is troubling.

Ours is a knowledge-driven economy. Everybody seems to recognize that in the push to get more Americans to go to college. Hopefully, there will be professors there to teach them.

Getting in to Graduate School

It's standard dogma that when the economy is bad, people go back to school. Although it doesn't appear to be major news yet, a number of schools are reporting an increase in applications (here and here, but see also here).

Despite an increase in applications, it is very possible fewer people will actually go to graduate school. This recession may be unique.

There are two problems. First, masters, MD and JD programs are very expensive, and students typically require loans. I shouldn't have to elaborate on why this might present a difficulty for the prospective graduate student right now.

Second, universities are cutting the number of students they are admitting. I don't have systematic numbers, but I know that the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is reducing the number of students admitted for PhD programs. If the richest university in the country is slashing enrollment, I don't think I'm going out on too far a limb in assuming others are as well. Large private universities are depending on their endowments (i.e., the stock market) to cover operating expenses, and students are expensive. State schools are dependent on government financing, which is also drying up.

It is obvious why PhD students at a school like Harvard are an expense: instead of paying tuition, they are paid a salary by the school. I don't know if the enrollment cut will hit the professional schools. It is well-known that undergraduate programs are typically run at a short-term loss (tuition does not cover expenses), with the school figuring they'll make up the difference in future alumni donations. I do not know, but suspect, that the same is true for the professional schools. That said, the only schools at Harvard right now that don't seem to have a hiring freeze are the Law and Medical schools.

As I said, this is not being widely reported, and I do not have numbers for the industry as a whole. Hopefully I am wrong, because such a trend would be bad. During a recession, more people suddenly have time for school. When the recovery comes, it meets a better-educated and more capable workforce, (presumably) further fueling the recovery. This time, the opposite may happen.

Harvard Laboratory of Developmental Studies summer internship program

The summer internship program at the Harvard Laboratory of Developmental Studies began this Monday.

Lots of labs take interns. In fact, if you seem motivated, smart and competent, I suspect pretty much any lab would take you on as a volunteer for the summer. What makes the LDS internship program different is that it's an actual program.

The labs (primarily the Snedeker Lab and the Carey Lab -- Spelke Lab does not participate directly, though there is so much sharing between the three labs they often do so indirectly) take about a dozen undergraduates each summer. Each participant is assigned to a specific research project run by a specific graduate student. The projects are chosen such that there is a good chance they will be completed successfully before the internship program ends, making sure the interns have something to talk about at future job or school interviews. The faculty advisers are very concerned that the interns don't just do busy work but actually learn something, so interns participate in a weekly reading group as well as a weekly lab meeting.

In addition, there are activities such as the twice-monthly barbecue (organized this year, in part, by yours truly). Oh, and many of the summer students get financial support, which is a definite plus.

Anyway, it appears to be a good program. This is my first summer participating (my intern will be studying pronoun use), so we'll see how it goes.

Why admissions interviews should be abandoned

An important part of the admission process to a competitive college is the admissions interview. I'm against it. And that isn't just because interviews were originally instituted to keep Jews out of Harvard. It's because they are poor predictors of future performance and, even worse, they are poor predictors that people weight very heavily.

I was first clued into this by none other than Google. Google recently revamped the way it chooses new hires, and an important part of the overhaul was minimizing the importance of the interview. As Laszlo Bock, Google's vice president for people operations said, "Interviews are a terrible predictor of performance."

This stands to reason. We all know people who make great first impressions but then turn out to be lousy employees/students/friends/etc. Similarly, we know people who originally struck us as dull but turned out to be our best employee/student/friend/etc. However, it would be nice to have something quantitative to back up this observation, and so I've been on the lookout ever sense.

It is in this context that I read this following quote from a classic Science paper by Tversky and Kahneman:

It is a common observation that psychologists who conduct selection interviews often experience considerable confidence in their predictions, even when they know of the vast literature that shows selection interviews to be highly fallible. The continued reliance on the clinical interview for selection, despite repeated demonstrations of its inadequacy, amply attests to the strength of this effect.

Tversky and Kahneman probably did not think this was a problem with the clinical interview per se. They give several other examples, including a study in which participants read a short description of a particular lesson a student teacher gave. Some participants were asked to evaluate the quality of the lesson, giving it a percentile score. Others were asked to guess the percentile score of that student teacher's overall abilities 5 years in the future. The judgments in both conditions were identical. That is, the participants believed that the quality of a single lesson fully predicted how good a future teacher would be. They don't take into consideration that the student teacher might be having a bad or good day.

Tversky and Kahneman have an explanation for why people care so much about interviews. Across the board, people believe that small samples are much more reliable than they are. I recommend the original paper if you want the full argument, but they bring up many examples. For instance, participants believe a random sample of 10 men is just as likely to have an average height of 6 feet as a random sample of 1000. This is not mathematically possible, but even experts in statistics can, under the right circumstances, fall for this.

This is why I think the admissions interview, as well as the job interview, should be scrapped. It takes place over a short period of time, which means it is an inherently unreliable predictor of future performance. It's unreliable, but, even knowing that, the information gleaned from it irresistible.


Tversky, A., Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124-1131.

Getting a Ph.D. in psychology

Some may have noticed that my posts have been infrequent for the last week or two and wondered why. There is a simple answer to this:

Quals.

What are quals? They seem to be different in different universities, and quite possibly even between different departments. The top Google hit for "qualifying exam" sounds absolutely nothing like what I am doing. This seems to be true of graduate school in general, which is to say that there policies differ a great deal. I certainly got into trouble as a prospective graduate student by assuming that information I learned about one graduate program would generalize to another. 

One purpose of this blog is to make more information about the process available. So, for those who are interested:

As far as I can tell, the traditional qualifying exam is an examination that qualifies one to work on a Ph.D. That certainly seems to be the case in Piled Higher and Deeper, which is set at Stanford (see the comic below). 

In my department, it works very differently. Our qualifying exams are rolled into a course we take during our first year (usually). This before we get our Master's degree, which is typically at the end of the second year. 

The course is different depending on which research group you belong to. My research group (developmental) actually requires students to take our own qualifying course as well as another. I took the developmental course last semester and am taking the cognition, brain and behavior course this semester.

What is required for the courses can vary a great deal depending on which professor is in charge. This semester, we have a total of 63 hours of examination spread out over 6 tests -- three in the middle of the semester, and three this week. Which is why I have not been posting much.

Who gets National Science Foundation fellowships?

The National Science Foundation awards around 900 graduate fellowships each year to a wide variety of sciences, including everything from linguistics and mathematics to physics. These fellowships are a big deal, being both very hard to get and making a significant impact on the finances of the awardees.

NSF has not yet officially contacted awardees for 2008, but word is spreading rapidly. Last night, some enterprising hopefully applicants hacked the NSF website to get the list of awardees. By morning, a number of applicants had logged on to the NSF applicant website and found an "accept fellowship" link on their applicant homepage. A little later in the morning, the list was made available on the website, though the page itself claimed that the awards list was still not available (that has now, as of this afternoon, been fixed).

So, which universities cleaned up? This is an incomplete survey of the 913 awards made:

Berkeley: 87
Stanford: 58
MIT: 40
Harvard: 36
University of Washington: 25
Cornell: 23
University of Michigan: 22
Princeton: 21
Columbia: 19
Yale: 18
UC-San Francisco: 17
Northwestern: 17
UT-Austin: 16
CalTech: 16
Rice: 14
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 13
University of Chicago: 12
Carnegie Mellon: 11
University of Florida: 11
Duke: 12
UCLA: 10

This doesn't list universities that got fewer awards, and it also doesn't account for 73 entering graduate students who did not list what university they will be attending, or any number of entering graduate students who haven't made up their minds and may switch universities. But it is a rough count.

What matters most, though, of the list, is that Oberlin beat Swarthmore 5 to 3.

Getting a job in psychology

Several friends are applying to be research assistants in psychology labs this coming academic year and have been asking me advice. It occurred to me that there may be readers of this blog who are also interested in advice. With the caveat that this advice is based only on my experience and the experience of a few friends, here it goes.

First, if you are considering a PhD in experimental psychology (by which I mean not psychotherapy), I recommend spending some time as a research assistant (either during college or after) before applying to graduate school. There are at least three reasons:

1) You'll almost certainly get into a better school if you have research experience.

2) You'll have a better sense of what type of psychology you want to study, as well as whether you really want to do research at all. Many people quit PhD programs, or graduate and then decide to do something else.

3) You'll probably be more productive in graduate school, because you'll come in with some valuable skills. This may help you get a leg up on the competition (or possibly prevent them from having a leg up on you).

Of course, many brilliant psychologists started graduate school with little or no background in psychology, much less research experience. Einstein got bad grades in math, but that doesn't mean getting bad grades in math is a recommended strategy for becoming a physics genius.

So where are research assistant positions advertised? I have no idea. I got every RA position I've had (5, counting 2 in high school) by contacting a professor directly and asking if they had an opening. But I have noticed that professors sometimes advertise open positions on their websites.

Finally, it seems like RA positions are usually filled between late February and early April. So if you are interested, now is the time to apply.


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PS If anybody else in the field has anything to add, please use the comments.

Interview Daze

First-year graduate students in my program are in charge of organizing interviews for prospective graduate students. We were given notice last Friday; the interviews start this coming Tuesday. So it's been a busy week.

When I applied to PhD programs in Psychology the first time around, I didn't know there were interviews. Most department websites don't mention them, and the only people I knew who had been to graduate school recently were in other fields and didn't do interviews. So I applied to graduate school and went to Spain for the spring, and was very surprised when I started getting invitations to visit schools. A friend of mine recently told she also had no idea interviews would be required. It turns out, in fact, that some schools do interviews and some do not. It is extremely difficult to find out which schools are which.

I bring up this story, because I think it is emblematic of the graduate school admissions process, at least for psychology. Information is scarce, and the procedure varies considerably from school to school. I don't know whether knowing more about the process would help you get into a program, but it seems reasonable to assume so. In that case, there would be a significant advantage for people already on the inside.

To put this into a concrete example, suppose you want to get a PhD in psychology at Harvard. If you are an undergraduate at Stanford or Yale, it's very likely that your professors can tell you a lot about the admissions process at Harvard (which is quite different from that at Stanford or Yale, as it turns out), because there is a lot of cross-talk between those three schools. If you are an undergraduate at a regional public university, it's much less likely you can get access to that kind of information.

Access to information may not translate into access to admissions. I certainly hope it does not. But, on the off-chance that it does, one goal of this blog is to give more information about the admissions processes to the extent that I can. If any aspiring students have questions, you should be sure to ask.

"Every psychology major starts by wanting to be a therapist"

One of my officemates, also a first-year graduate student, recently claimed that all undergraduate psychology majors enter the field because they want to be therapists. This definitely wasn't true of me. I often forget that there is a branch of psychology that does therapy (this is easy to forget at my school, which doesn't offer a counseling program. In fact, I'm not sure any school I applied to offers a counseling program). But, then, I wasn't a psychology major.

Someone recently suggested to me that I write about who I am and how I got here. I personally doubt anybody is all that interested in my life story, but I do have one reason to tell bits and pieces of it. Most people seem to know very little about psychology. In fact, for all my father is a professor of psychology and I had worked in several psychology labs, I knew far too little about the career track at first, and I believe this hurt me the first time I applied to graduate school (yes, I applied twice). A lot of really crucial information simply isn't available.

This post kicks of what will be a series of probably non-consecutive posts about the psychology career track, as illustrated by my own path (keep in mind that I'm only half way there).

First, since my father was a psychologist, I was determined not to be. That had already been done. Otherwise, though, I had no good idea what I might do, other than a vague idea that maybe I'd be a writer.

One day in a deep Ohio December, as I was at my study carrel in Mudd Library studying for discrete mathematics exam, suddenly, the clouds parted, the light shone down, angels sang, and I knew what I wanted to do:

Artificial intelligence.

When asked what that meant, I typically said that I wanted to make one of these, but what really interested me was making a talking robot. Artificial intelligence wasn't a course track really offered at Oberlin, and though I majored in computer science for a while, I eventually switched to math, which I found more appealing. In the meantime, I volunteered at the Brain and Language Lab at Georgetown University.

I really enjoyed my work at Georgetown. Then, I went to a conference on natural language processing, which is essentially the field of trying to make a talking robot, and I was very disappointed. It wasn't want I imagined at all. At the time -- and maybe still now -- the most successful technique was to use a lot of templates. This seems to work very well -- and if you believe Tomasello's theory about language, it might even be how humans produce language -- but it wasn't for me. I preferred my current work in cognitive neuroscience.

So, for a while, I was going to be a cognitive neuroscientist. However, it turns out that there are very few cognitive neuroscience labs that study high-level language processing, particularly in the cities that were options for me in terms of graduate school. Relative to memory or vision, for instance, it has been difficult to use traditional cognitive neuroscience techniques to learn about language. The best fits turned out to be primarily labs in psychology departments. So, reluctantly, I decided to mostly apply to those (recall that I didn't want to be a psychologist).

It actually gets worse. I ended up in a developmental psychology lab. My father is a school psychologist, which is quite different on many levels, but it's still about the psychology of children. Thus, my path to psychology may be summarized as one man's unsuccessful fight against Nature.

For those of you working in the cognitive sciences, feel free to leave a comment with your story.