<p>Hello,</p>
<p>I am going to be a junior in the fall at a Top 25 undergraduate school majoring in Statistics/Psychology. I originally wanted to go to Graduate school in the field of Psychology but have recently changed my career goals and would like to get into Statistics (Im thinking either Biostat, Math-Stat, or Psychometrics) in Graduate school. As I was originally interested in Psychology, I joined a Perception Lab my fall semester of sophomore year. I left that lab for personal reasons and joined a Cognition Lab my spring semester. As my career goals changed, it no longer made sense to be in a Cognition lab and I will be joining a Psychometric lab in the fall 10 semester. If it matters, my GPA is 4.0 for Math/Stat classes and a 3.8 overall.</p>
<p>I have a couple questions</p>
<p>1)Will being a part of three different labs during three different semesters look bad or seem suspicious when applying to Graduate school? Would it be advantageous to simply not include the Cognition/Perception labs in my resume if applying to Statistics programs?</p>
<p>2)Is research in a Psychometric lab insufficient research experience if I decide that I would like to do Biostat or Math-Stat? Should I be looking to join a lab that more generally fits my potential career goals? If so, should I be rushing to find a different lab for the fall '11 semester or stick with the Psychometric lab and look to join my fourth lab in four semesters during the spring of my Junior year?</p>
<p>Thanks and I appreciate any guidance.</p>
<p>No replies? Was something I wrote unclear?</p>
<p>1) Compare this to other students you know applying for graduate school. How many of them worked in three labs in three semesters? Would you at least believe this is super unusual and might beg the question of whether you can fulfill a commitment to a lab. If you can paint a compelling story for why you moved around so much, I don’t think it would necessarily be a bad thing, but if it is vague, poorly articulated or too “personal”, then I think it will be a serious problem.
2) You don’t need to remain in the same research topic or even the same sub discipline in graduate school. You developed a bit of a skillset in your research experience, and some of it may be relevant to future work. Alternatively, only the mindset of developing testable hypotheses and carrying out data collection/analysis will transfer. Either way, the experience will be valuable even if you don’t remain precisely the same topic.</p>
<p>Also, I can’t stress this enough, you should not be looking into moving into a fourth lab in four semesters.</p>
<p>Thank you very much for your input. </p>
<p>I don’t think it’s that odd that I have switched from more social-science Psychology labs to a more statistical Psychometric lab considering my career goals have changed. This must not be that uncommon. The thing I mostly worry about is whether a Psychometric lab is sufficient research experiene for an undergraduate considering biostatistics or mathematical statistics. I seem to agree with you, belevitt, that the skills/knowledge that I gain working in a Psychometric lab at the undergraduate level will probably be barely any different from the skills/knowledge I gain in a biostatistics lab. But will Graduate schools look at it the same way?</p>
<p>*Oops, I caught a mistake in my original post. Under 2) I meant the fall '10 semester NOT fall '11 semester.</p>
<p>I’m in the sciences and moved through a few labs – they traced the progression of my research interests (it was a logical progression/refinement of interest) - I ended in a lab that researches what I want to research in grad school. I think you can explain your lab changes in this way too - you were getting closer to what you want to do in grad school. You need to emphasize that you didn’t change labs bec. you couldn’t make a commitment/follow through/get along with people (hopefully you didn’t move for these reasons…) - but because you were developing your research interests. If you make this clear on your apps, I think you should use all research experiences. IMHO, it’s totally normal to work in a few labs as an UG as you are supposed to be exploring your interests and figuring out what you want to do. But - do stick with your third lab.</p>