Interested in Graduate School?
I attended two Graduate School Workshops after the Spring Break. The first one is facilitated by an undergraduate student, Manisha Kuttetira (B.S. in psych, neuroscience minor) who will graduate in May, 2017. It is about the general process of planning and applying to Graduate School. It mentions factors that one should consider while choosing which school to apply to. These factors include the location of school, identified faculties that you want to work with, and tuition cost. Of course before considering all of these things, it is important to ask yourself whether you want to spend the next two to five years after college studying what you choose to concentrate on, and furthermore whether you want to spend the rest of your life working in that area. Besides all those, Manisha shared with us her timeline and application process. She mentioned the documents that one need to hand in before the deadlines, which often include one’s personal statement, transcript, three letters of recommendation, resume (CV) and the GRE test scores.
In the personal statement, one should describe well the experiences listed on the CV, especially, the research experience, in order to show how you fit into the lab that you apply to. Revealing your confidence and motivation in the personal statement is also crucial.
Moreover, another student told us that the program director is one of the best resources that we can use during the application process. We can send emails to the program director asking any questions about the application.
The second workshop - hosted by Dr. Eigsti and two current graduate students of Clinical Psychology - narrows down its topic to “Jobs and Graduate School for Psychology Majors.” More specifically, its focus is on Clinical and Counseling Psychology. In addition to what the first workshop included, more detailed information was provided for psych major students who want to apply to Clinical/Counseling Grad School in this workshop.
At the beginning, in response to the question, “How to choose the right program,” Dr. Eigsti said that every job has its boring part, but what matters is whether you can tolerate that part. Secondly, there are many ways to end up doing what you want to do (e.g. counseling); you don’t have to have a PhD to do that. For example, you can get a degree in social work (i.e. MSW) taking courses in diagnosis and treatment of psychology problems in order to do counseling.
Although my interest is neither in counseling nor clinical psychology, I still gained useful information and suggestions by attending the workshop. Besides the ones mentioned above, Dr. Eigsti emphasized the importance of research for PhD program. Students in the program have to finish a research-based MA thesis and a research-based PhD thesis. This means that there will be a lot of writing. Also, she emphasized the importance of high GPA, GRE score, high quality letters of recommendation, and research experience for getting into the program. Furthermore, “poster, presentation, publication” and “your research interest” are two other critical things to have in mind while looking for graduate programs that fit you. You should looking for the faculty whose research interest matches yours. In the end, Dr. Eigsti provided some other resources, including websites and guidebooks for graduate school application.
Being a member of the "Humanities House Newsroom" encourages me to step outside my comfort zone to participate in more on-campus events and meet more people who are interested in different branches of humanities. This allows me to see things from different perspectives and think more critically, which is beneficial to my current goal as a research manager and to my application.
*The GRE stands for the Graduate Record Examination. It is a graduate-level admissions test that contains three main sections: verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and analytical writing.
Learn more about the GRE General Test:
