I am going into my sophomore year and I am majoring in Psychology. I am trying to think of ways to make me stand out when I apply to a Ph.D. program. I plan on having a high GPA and GRE score. I also plan on volunteering at my local hospital and working in the Psychiatric unit at my local hospital. I also plan on getting research experience. What else can I do? I plan on applying to eight different programs. I was looking at some of the admissions stats and some of them showed that 123 people applied and only 5 to 8 were offered admission. I am amazed at how competitive it is to get into a Ph.D. program for Psychology. I also have been told only apply to programs that offer funding and a stipend.
If you are at a college that has PhD students there, you should start talking with them to get advice. Younger faculty are also good people to talk to. In addition to getting research experience, you should think about what specific courses you could take that would help prepare you for a research-based advanced degree. Would you want to take more statistics classes, for example?
@juillet will have terrific advice for you.
Hey there! (Thanks MYOS!)
You’re right about all of the basics that you absolutely have to be minimally competitive. Here are some ideas for being more competitive:
-
Do at least one summer research experience. Since you are going into your sophomore year, you have time to do two! I would advise doing at least one (and ideally both of them) at a different university than your own. This allows you to expand your network and get 1-2 letters of recommendation from professors at other universities that have supervised your research, which will strengthen your application. You can look at the NSF REU site (Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences sites: https://www.nsf.gov/crssprgm/reu/list_result.jsp?unitid=5054) to find some that are sponsored by the NSF. And here’s a broader list of summer research experiences, hosted by the Empirical Reasoning Lab at Barnard College (https://erc.barnard.edu/research_opportunities#summerresearch). These programs usually pay you a small stipend (usually on the order of $3-4K for the summer) and cover your housing costs.
-
Talk to your psychology professors to choose your courses carefully. You want to make sure that you have strengths in psychological research methods and in statistics. If your department offers an upper-level course in statistics or methods beyond the introductory one, take it. If it doesn’t, but another social sciences department (often political science) does, take that one. If you like math and are pretty good at it, you might consider doing calculus-based statistics in the math department, but you’d have to take 2-3 semesters of calculus and probably linear algebra before being able to take that. Choose your courses based on what subfield you want to enter - if you want clinical (which it sounds like you do), take abnormal, for example.
You may also want to take a couple of related classes in other social sciences, just to explore your interests. For example, if you think you’re interested in the effects of race and class, it wouldn’t hurt to take Race, Class, and Gender in the sociology department; or if you are interested in the psychology of political behavior, see if you can find a class that’s relevant in the political science department.
-
You will probably want to apply to more than 8 programs…I’d say 8 is a minimum. I’d advise in the realm of 10-12.
-
Practice your writing skills; you may even want to take a class in the English department on professional writing or something. This will help you write a better statement of purpose, when the time comes.
-
As you get research experience and take classes in the psychology department, pay attention to what you like and don’t like, and begin to shape an area of interest. This is probably the single most important part of your application; you could be an excellent applicant, but if your research interests don’t align with anyone’s in the department, you won’t get admitted. That’s because for PhD programs in psych, you are generally admitted to work with a specific professor (or at least you need to be able to be placed with a professor who matches your interests).
So follow your interests when it comes to trying out research, taking classes, and participating in extracurriculars. Any of those can help you define your interests. My research topic was partially inspired by a public health poster I saw in my residence hall that raised some questions for me!
4 and #5 together will help you craft a great statement of purpose.
Thanks for the help!
I like the above post, Juliette is on point. I would just emphasize the research aspect and say that if it was me, aside from the obvious of needing as high of a GPA and GRE as possible, I would do all I could to gain a ton of research experience with professors. Really bust your keester helping them out, maybe get some good LORs out of that time doing research for them and just push yourself to obtain a lot of experience in research that will look great on your application. If you have time to add anything extra like maybe an internship over the summer doing more practical work like you are talking about at your hospital that would be good, just be wise about timing and don’t take on more than you can realistically handle. I mean it’s important to be able to have a break now and again too, very important. So again if it was me, academic year I would work very hard and structure my classes carefully, try and have balanced semesters so that you aren’t in all super hard classes at once, and make time for you to do a fair amount of research. Get yourself onto some good research studies with good professors and work your way into more and more important roles doing research with them. Spend the summer doing some practical work, but also don’t for get to get some time to relax. I think if you do all that, and if you spend some serious time, like a good 3 months prepping your personal statements for these schools and get them very polished, so they show what you have done and also show your heart, I think you will be a competitive candidate.
I’m in the same boat as you, trying to make myself as competitive as possible to get into a psych PhD program (though I’ll probably do a master’s first, which will give me more time), so I’ll share some things I’ve learned.
First of all, like I said, you might want to consider a master’s. It does make you more competitive for a PhD program on its face, but considering it gives you more time to accumulate research experience, internships, develop your research proposal (big part for me; I’m hoping to do a psychiatric epidemiology master’s program, and I feel it would be a great opportunity to get started on/develop my research proposal), its benefit extends beyond simply holding a master’s degree. Especially if your gpa isn’t quite where you want it to be yet, it can be a sort of stepping stone school to get into an even better school/program.
Another thing I’m getting started on is learning to program. Graduate schools and PhD programs love students who can code because so often it can be of benefit in a research setting. The more languages you know (and the relevant languages) and the more proficient you are the better. Even better, if you know a certain professor in a program works with certain languages, and you go out of your way to learn them, that will look great.
Pretty much everything else is covered by Juillet I believe. Most important things are research experience, gpa, and relevant courses, as well as the institution you’re doing this at. If you’re at a sort of meh school, you’re almost definitely not going to get into one of the top programs, even if you got a 4.0 and have great experience (there are of course exceptions, like if you truly set yourself apart in your level/type of experience). With that said, you could go from a meh school for your bachelors, to a very good school to get your master’s, to a top-tier school for your PhD.
Extra math skills never hurt, especially for a research scientist, stats especially. Writing skills are fantastic too, and can really set you apart. It’s amazing how many people are terrible writers. Researchers need to be able to write coherently and clearly, and extremely well-crafted essays/statements of purpose can take you to the next level. And you’re definitely going to want to figure out what area you want to do research in well before you starting applying to schools. Just keep narrowing it down, even if you aren’t totally sure yet. Don’t waste a class on something you know you don’t want to do research in just to get your bachelors.
A master’s program is never going to hurt you, and is probably going to help you in admissions. But unlike a lot of humanities fields, you don’t need a master’s degree in psychology to get into a PhD program. You can get the things you really need (research experience, developing your research statement, letters of recommendation) from working as a research assistant or lab manager/coordinator for a few years after your bachelor’s degree. Since master’s degrees in behavioral science are rarely funded, this is likely to be much cheaper.
By all means, get a master’s if you really want to - particularly if you have interests in intersecting fields (like public health, social work, other social sciences, etc.). A master’s is certainly an excellent and well-structured way to gain that experience. But that’s not the only way to do it, and it’s certainly not the cheapest.
I definitely agree with the math and especially the writing skills. Writing is SO important in graduate school and beyond, and I come across so many students, early career PhD students and even PhD graduates with bad writing. I’ve got experience hiring folks for industry research roles and your writing is definitely something we look at. Life in the program is just really much easier if you have strong writing skills.
Perhaps another example would be behavioral economics that relates to both psychology and economics.
Any PhD worth getting is going to be funded. Usually an offer of non-funded admission is considered a polite rejection.
Why would you go through with it though? You’d have to fund it yourself? I guess that’s possible. I don’t know what a “PhD” worth getting is, but a lot of people just want to get a PhD for work or to break into the field. I could imagine some studies done in the social sciences or even other fields could be kind of affordable. I mean hell if I could get my PhD at Harvard and get to work with their professors but that was my only way I might take it. Maybe they start to like you and decide to fund what you’re doing. I mean that’s a pretty epic foot in the door in same cases. Or do you not even get an advisor?
This is a complex issue with a couple moving parts, but I’ll try to be succinct. Especially in the social and natural sciences, PhD students are just typically funded. Lack of funding has a lot of direct and indirect negative effects.
If you are a student in a department where some students are funded and some aren’t, your lack of funding is (bluntly) a signal that you were a less competitive candidate than the students who did get funding. That creates a disparity - not only in available resources for students but also in how you are perceived by professors. Since advising, mentorship, and teaching by professors are key linchpins to PhD programs, that will have a negative direct effect.
Students who don’t have funding take longer to finish on average, probably because they usually have to work and/or take time off so they can scrape together funds to continue. They publish less, because if they have to work or otherwise worry about money, they are spending time they could’ve been using to do research and publish and present working. They probably have more extant stress, because every semester or year they’re worrying about how they’re going to secure funding to continue. That stress is going to interfere with being successful in the program.
And funding begets more funding: students who apply for fellowships and grants have to show a history of having been funded before. Ironically, if you already have a fellowship it’s easier for you to get another one. Conversely, if you aren’t funded, you can’t prove that other people think you’re good enough to give money to, so it’s harder for you to get new funding.
I was in a department where some students were funded and some weren’t. We had actual professors in the department telling students to turn down unfunded offers.
Well, first, Harvard (or any other elite program) isn’t going to accept you to a PhD program in psychology without funding you. They fund all their students. If they don’t want to fund your work, they reject you.
But at more mid-level or lower-ranked programs that accept some students without funding (or in fields where it’s more common for even top programs to admit some students without funding):
a) it really doesn’t work out that way. See above:
b) assuming you get funded, you still have to pay for the unfunded portion of your PhD. Even in a best case scenario where you get funding for year 2+, you’re still having to cover $60K yourself. If you have to cover two years, that’s $120K, which is more than the vast majority of PhD graduates can hope to make in their first few years out of grad school, which makes it difficult to repay.