If Rejected/Year Off Before PhD

Graduate School
1

<p>I don't think I will have enough pubs by the time my application rolls around to get into Social Psych programs (avg. acceptance rate of 13.7%). I've been in a lab for the past year and am working on my honors thesis, but my section of the lab hasn't been very successful in getting publishable results, so I don't have much to show for my time and effort. </p>

<p>If you've been rejected from grad admissions and plan to reapply, what do you plan on doing during the next year?
Does anyone know someone who was successful with reapplying 1+ years after graduation?</p>

<p>I'm especially interested to hear from psych majors or people with other degrees that really don't add up to good entry-level work, but any ideas on this are good.</p>

<p>I need a backup plan.</p>

2

<p>Publications are a bonus when applying to graduate school, but they are not a necessity. They are just one way of showing that you have solid research experience. From talking to professors and students who have been on grad school admissions committees, publications are not the most important criteria, because they can’t tell from looking at a paper what YOU actually did. To them, letters of recommendation were much more important. Do you think that your PI from the research you’ve been doing would be able to write you a really strong letter of recommendation?</p>

3

<p>I agree, a lot of my advisees have gotten into excellent physics Ph.D. programs without a publication as long as they have significant research experience and strong letters of reference.</p>

4

<p>I’m in social psych and you don’t need to have publications before applying. They’re nice, but not required. I didn’t have any publications before I got into my top 20 social psych PhD program.</p>

<p>Yes, I know plenty of people who are successful after taking a year or two (or more) off and reapplying, especially within psychology. In fact, it’s kind of becoming the norm in a very competitive field. Many of my classmates in my program took a few years “off” before returning for the PhD. It’s a complete myth that a psychology BA doesn’t lead to good entry-level work; you have to be creative and think a little broadly.</p>

<p>The BEST thing that you can do if you don’t get in anywhere is to work as a lab manager/research coordinator for 2-3 years after college. The most obvious place to do this is in a psychology laboratory at a major research university. I attend one, and all of the professors in my department have at least one lab manager. On the flip side, every lab manager we’ve had who has wanted a PhD in psych has successfully gained admissions to top PhD programs (mostly clinical, although we did have a few social). There have been four in my lab during my time as a grad student and the first three are all doing a PhD somewhere (the fourth is still with us; he’s applying for fall 2015).</p>

<p>But look at other fields, too. Academic medical centers have tons of departments that need research coordinators; you might look within psychiatry but also at schools of public health, neurology/neuroscience, other clinical medicine fields (psychiatric nursing, occupational or physical therapy, etc.) You might look at other university schools: education, for example, or social work.</p>

<p>There are also positions for full-time research coordinators/associates/managers at non-academic institutions. Non-profits and think tanks hire social science majors to do this work all the time, especially if you have decent skills in statistics and with SPSS. You might look at RAND or RTI International; they have BA-level research associate positions in the social sciences. ETS hires psych majors to help design and calibrate their tests, as do other testing corps (ACT, Pearson, etc.). They also do social psych analyses; ACT was recently hiring a summer intern to help them look at academic achievement in low-income and ethnic minority groups, for example, and I know their full-time folk work on that. Some corporations may also hire in-house researchers; market research firms, for example, hire BA-level folks to help with their research. Some business may have in-house market research analysts as well.</p>

<p>So the hierarchy is this:</p>

<ol>
<li>Lab manager in a psychology lab</li>
<li>Lab manager in a psych-related academic laboratory, like psychiatry or public health or education</li>
<li>Lab manager/research coordinator in a less-psych-related field, like occupational therapy, nursing</li>
<li>Research associate/coordinator at a non-profit/think tank*</li>
<li>Research associate at a testing corporation**</li>
<li>Research associate/coordinator at a market research firm/for-profit corporation</li>
</ol>

<p><em>This could potentially be more desirable than #3 depending on the kinds of projects on which you work.
*</em>This could potentially be more desirable than #4 or even #3 depending on the kinds of projects you get.</p>

5

<p>Wow, I didn’t know there were that many options for psych majors! People from my school usually end up working retail or at a theme park (Florida), so that was my impression of the options. I will look into those recommended jobs.</p>

<p>And hmm…I can see why letters of rec would be so important then. Grad students in the lab often let an undergrads present a piece of a project they worked on together as first author, giving the false impression that the undergrad created the project.</p>

<p>I should be able to get a good rec from my PI. I was heavily involved in writing reports for military-funded projects, parts of which may or may not be published in a journal, unfortunately. :frowning: I am also helping to design another experiment for the military. The results will not be published before I apply, but maybe my PI could talk about what I have done in his letter? I am easily the most active undergrad on my side of the lab.</p>

<p>Honestly, I thought in-progress experiments would do me little good. That is also why I am wary of my honors thesis, which will not be completed until the spring semester. </p>