<p>"Psychology professors and officers of the American Psychological Association have been using the web page as a canvas for their ill-informed argument that graduates of non-clinical programs in psychology -- psychological researchers -- can compete for non-university jobs in the labor market. I have spent 10 years in the labor market, applied for over 500 jobs, and worked as a contract employee (a senior researcher) for The United States Department of Labor in Washington, D.C. I have learned as much about the value of the psychology research Ph.D. as anyone. Coming from a position of pride, the APA struck a defensive tone on its web site, using a dozen success stories to disguise the exception as the rule, but I am here to set the record straight." </p>
<p>If you're thinking of using your major in Psychology as a stepping stone to a license to practice therapy, a tenure-track university professorship, or even a job of generic worth in the post-baccalaureate labor market, you may wish to turn your head slightly so as not to look directly at the paragraphs to follow, which provides an aerial view of a career track which itself is "tenured" and fraught with 3200 meters of hurdles and landmines. If Psychology is your true vocation, I hope you will continue to pursue it, but armed with the facts about psychology's career ladder and the world outside the university" </p>
<p>CAREERS IN PSYCHOLOGY: YOU HAVE TO LIKE LONGSHOTS
I received my research Ph.D. in Social-Personality Psychology in the mid-90s. Though I have applied for hundreds jobs over the years, only twice have I been interviewed for a position for which I submitted an application. This does not mean I have been unemployed for 10 years. I often receive phone calls from headhunters looking for technical writers to work 3-9 month contracts for Washington, D.C. area clients. Washington, D.C. is the Land of Short-Term Project Work, The Land of the 3-6 Month Contract, and while the pay rate is premium, you hemorrage money between contracts, so you're never able to build savings, pensions, or job security. Good writers are hired PRN, which is to say on an as-needed basis. Employers do not maintain permanent staff positions for technical writers.
I have spent the past 10 years after receiving my Ph.D. applying for jobs, looking for a career and a company that I could call home. Despite all the flux, I developed versatility -- and a diverse package of knowledge and skills -- from my contractual employment across various high growth industries: information technology, government, pharmaceutical, health care, and finance. At one point I splurged on a reputable consulting firm dedicated to managing professionals' careers, meeting weekly with an advisor with whom I collaborated on strategy and tactics. The consulting firm was a great source of intellectual capital for me. I learned a great deal about the labor market. I learned a number of trade secrets as they applied to customizing a resume and cover letter. In the final analysis, however, the firm could not add value to my degree and work pedigree. At the end of the day, I was still a Ph.D. in Social Psychology, and absent any technical or business certifications, my fortunes would hinge on what this degree meant to prospective employers.
What does the Ph.D. mean? Not very much, unfortunately. After the first hundred failed "missions," so to speak, an inquiring mind like myself begins to ask questions. I decided I should have something to show for the hours spent crafting cover letters and customizing resumes. I decided as a matter of policy to follow up rejections by phoning the employers to learn what they thought of my resume.
However, most employers never see your resume. It is rare in the modern era of staffing for employers to make the most critical decisions with respect to filling their vacancies themselves. Granted, the employer will choose from among the 3-5 finalists that they have interviewed, but employers are relying more heavily on third parties -- "resume processing vendors" and "staff recruitment specialists" -- to determine who they will interview. Typically, the employer will provide a list of specifications (AKA "requirements" AKA "specs") to the third party. The third party isn't going to get jiggy with that list. They may receive a resume from a very intriguing professional who is off the charts on intelligence and who has the experience to do the job, but if that experience isn't packaged in precisely the units imagined by the employer and codified in the "specs," that applicant's resume will NOT be passed along to the employer for interviewing. It's not so much about gatekeeping in principle ("gotta keep out those damn psych majors") as it is about expediency. I remember a time when publishing companies drowned in thousands of unsolicited manuscripts from aspiring novelists. Publishing companies tired of phone calls from authors of the "did you read my book?" variety. No staff could possibly read thousands of books. So publishers developed a "no-unagented-manuscripts" policy, passing the job of initial screening to a new class of professional gatekeepers called literary agents. They also adopted a "don't-call-us, we'll-call-you" policy, actively soliciting cost-effective short manuscripts from established authors and celebrity ghostwriters.
Similarly, a new species of middle man was spawned to help employers widdle down that enormous stack of job-seekers: the staffing outsourcing solutions industry, or what I've called the "third party." For the third party, the employer is a valued client. The third party is in business to make its client happy by following its clients' specs to the letter. For the third party, processing applications is not a thinking job. The recruiters have no reason to ever think, "Hey, this guy's background is interesting" or "Say, look at the intangibles on this fella. I bet he could do a good job for them." They don't handicap or hedge bets. They don't read between the lines of an applicant's resume for clues as to why the applicant thought he would be an excellent fit for the job. They don't even care if an applicant spells it out in a cover letter. If you are applying for the job of a project manager with a marketing firm, you either have that degree in marketing and that PMP certification, or you don't. They won't give a damn whether you have a Ph.D., even if the advertised job is managing a campaign to market psychological research services and your Ph.D. is in research psychology. Trust me. I've been there.
If you don't trust me implicitly, then at least trust me often. I live in the labor market. I call the public and private sectors -- AKA "real world" -- my home. I know what I'm talking about. My assessment of the perceived labor value of the research Ph.D. is based not just on a legacy of frustration but on research. I talk to employers. I talk to the third parties. I talked to a premier professional career management firm. I even performed contract work for The United States Department of Labor. Many psychology professors -- chances are there are at least one in your department -- manage a rather rosy "careers for psychology graduates" web page -- and I am as qualified as any of these professors to opine on this matter. In fact, how can I not be more qualified? These psychology professors transitioned seamlessly from graduate school into some university and have had virtually no contact with the labor market. While they argue that the person with a bacceleureate degree or doctoral degree in Psychology should make competitive candidates for a broad spectrum of jobs, the argument is one grounded in logic and embroidered by pride. The reality, borne out in experience, says otherwise. Now I will grant you that I agree with most of these psychology professors. In fact, I have found myself arguing my merits over the years with employers and third parties. However, the evidence I have gathered over my record of failure resembles the closest thing to empirical research we have on the subject. I agree it remains anecdotal, and I would like to see some broad fact-finding mission in this area. Call it a survey or even an employment epidemiological catchment area, if you like. But it should be comprehensive and ideally, it should include a direct sampling of employer knowledge and opinions with respect to the B.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology. If the research is ecologically valid, it should perhaps make use of vignettes, asking employers representing various high growth industries to express a rank-order preference for applicants with hypothetical qualifications. This is important because when psych profs build their careers pages, they like to imagine what their graduates can do for employers "in a vaccuum," which is to say that these profs are not even taking into account the fact their graduates will compete with graduates of other degree programs and that these "other graduates" bring many of the same skills (and more) to the arena.
In fact, one of my recent experiences would make an interesting vignette. Imagine a hospice recently created a Director of Marketing position. The Director of Marketing develops new business for the hospice and maintains relations with physicians who serve as referral sources. What you will probably find is that the Ph.D. in Psychology is seldom the first choice even when compared to a (1) registered nurse, (2) recent college graduate with a B.A. in marketing, and (3) a project manager. I've recently interviewed for such a position. What makes my story even more remarkable is that hospice officials seemed extraordinarily pleased with the fact that this Social Psychology Ph.D. has already demonstrated mastery of all the job requirements in building a very successful health care business from nothing. I also built a referral base by reaching out to physicians and speaking the medical language. Despite being lauded during the interview for being the only canidate to have both medical and marketing knowledge, I was NOT invited to the second round of interviews. Why not? Upon further questioning, the employer decided it was important that I did NOT have a marketing degree. Oddly enough, the hospice hired an RN with no marketing degree. Now what can we conclude from this anecdote? Not much. Being only one instance, it is quite possible the hospice favored an internal candidate. Maybe the RN worked for the hospice or knew someone who did. It's even possible that the hospice never intended to hire anyone they interviewed. Maybe the hospice intended to add marketing responsibilities to one of their own RNs (throw the RN an extra $5K per annum for her new duties) and staged the interviews as a way of gathering intelligence for the RN. I remember being asked point blank during the interview, "so what would you do to market our hospice? what is your plan?" Considering all the applicants they interviewed, that's quite a lot of information they could acquire at virtually no cost to them. They even made off with the glossy tri-fold color brochure I mocked up for them. Just a conspiracy theory, but it's a practice I happen to know does go on. But nevertheless, I still feel I came away from this process having learned what these hospice officials thought of my Ph.D.
Judging from the sum of my conversations with employers and their third parties, it is my belief that what the research psychology Ph.D. has to offer is a mystery to just about everyone. At one point I assumed that employers and their third parties would give me the opportunity to explain what my Ph.D. training / education represents before turning me down for an interview. Actually it was more of a blind hope. I should have recognized in the early going that I was being passed over without being given an ample chance to state my case, but blind hope gave way to defiant and face-saving denials, and I recognize this same unproductive attitude in statements from many psychology professors bearing web pages.
The trend I really find rather disturbing is that a number of recruiters have urged me to omit the Ph.D. from my resume. I was reluctant to purge such a major achievement from my resume and I was equally reluctant to concede that somehow my Ph.D. was something to hide. In the view of these third parties, the Ph.D. represents an exotic set of knowledge and skills with no application outside the academic milieu. Employers complained to recruiters that they had difficulty understanding why someone with a Ph.D. would want to join their company. Some employers also feared that I would want too high a salary or, once hired, would abandon the company at the first sign of a better offer or opportunity to reconnect with academia. Not understanding the difference between the research and clinical Ph.D., some employers even wondered why I wasn't in business as a therapist. However, the greatest misconception about my Ph.D. was that I was an over-educated and under-skilled repository of impertinent knowledge. This misconception is not supported by my resume, which reveals that I am familiar with a lot of software. But when you ask an employer what he or she thought of you (as I did), you will find the employer does not remember much about you, having reviewed so many resumes. The employer also does not have the time to do you the favor of re-reading your resume carefully to help you grapple with the finer issues of your employability. The employer (or third party) probably did not even read your resume (or that of any other applicant) that carefully the first time. Having been contracted to work in some small I.T. companies, I worked with some CEOs fairly closely, and I happened to learn that they do not read resumes ... they scan them for keywords that will help them sort the resumes into different piles. No one is going to read your resume and appreciate how you took a different path to reach the set of skills, qualities, and knowledge they want in that position. They only have time to scan the document for the required degrees, certifications, and number of years experience working in jobs with titles similar to the one for which they are hiring.
I continued to cite my Ph.D. in my application materials for jobs in Media Relations, Marketing, Market Research, Operations Management, Data Analysis, Project Management, Business Analysis, Technical Writing, Clinical Research, Program Development, Quality Assurance, Management Consulting, Advertising etc. But I also tauted the skills and experiences I acquired in my 10 diverse years in the Washington, D.C. contract labor market. This lava lamp labor market comes without job security, pension plans, and affordable health insurance. But I discovered a whole new kind of pain when I left Washington, D.C. for the rest of the world. I thought the world beyond the Beltway might have more permanent job opportunities. I also hoped my resume would stand out as being "smarter" in smaller, non-professional markets. But what I really learned is how much I suffered without the assistance of those urban creatures, the headhunters ... the labor equivalent of drug dealers and pimps who could be counted on to hook me up with my next fix. At one point things got so bad, I had to resort to something entrepreneurial, designing a comprehensive database that integrated billing data with data across clinical disciplines to help cancer center administrators monitor and measure their book of business (and put a financial and clinical value on everything in their facility from equipment and procedures to physicians and policies). The effort was a conceptual success. The cancer center community embraced it as the future of quality and cost control, and I even found a company in Northern Virginia poised to set me up as the head of my own affiliated company if so much as one of these cancer center Vice Presidents could persuade the CIO, CFO, and CEO of their parent hospitals to part with roughly a million dollars. But alas, hospitals balked (at least for this budget cycle) in favor of continuing their tradition of hemorraging money without explanation or timely knowledge. (Information technology and data management is more primitive in hospitals than in any other institution with which I am familiar). It wasn't a total loss. Some hospitals decided to undertake a watered down version of my project internally, which is to say that I ended up serving as an unpaid consultant. Anyway, aside from this brush with success (AKA failure), I have had virtually no intercourse with the business world for 2 years. I have been under-employed (contracts; entry-level positions) and mis-employed (why would anyone think I would be perfectly suited to writing policies and procedures manuals for a financial institution like Fannie Mae when I have no background in finance?), but I have never been as utterly unemployed as I have been more than 30 miles outside the Beltway.
But "how can this be?" you ask, when my psych prof writes on his web page that his curriculum endows me with a range of skills relevant to all these different careers. Your psych prof, my old psych prof, and the APA included has been engaged in a well-meaning but ill-informed campaign to defend its relevance for every corner of the universe. The APA managed to find a dozen or so people with PhDs in research psychology who found their way into some good situations. The APA's web page strikes an unprofessional tone in its defensiveness and its attempt to pass off the exception as the rule. For example, there's a clinical psychologist who works in the White House (or perhaps for the White House in the Executive Building), but I don't see the Cleaning Management Institute celebrating the White House janitor. Who am I to deny that graduates of research PhD programs can accomplish anything? NASA launched a grade school teacher into space (educator astronaut mission-specialist extraordinaire Barbara Morgan). A professional wrestler was elected governor of Minnesota. My only problem is with the implication that these research PhDs were awarded their plum positions on the strength of their training and education. More likely than some employer thinking, Look at the Psychology Ph.D. on that guy/gal, is the possibility that these candidates distinguished themselves as personalities that they won their jobs on the merits of qualities that fall outside the range of products nursed through their programs of formal training. One simply cannot discount the contribution of individual differences in these achievements. I look at the desultory splattering of success among recipients of the research Ph.D., and I cant help but think such idiosyncratic factors (error variance in the native tongue of Ph.D. researchers) are vital. I am somewhat surprised the APA, which carries a torch for scientific rigor, encourages its readers to draw the bold conclusion in the absence of research like the catchment area or labor market analysis I suggested. And Im shredding my scalp trying to figure out why the APA would do something so irresponsible. Whats the upshot? Theres never going to be a shortage of psychological researchers. A faculty search committee cant advertise a tenure-track position without incurring a flood of applications. Its been that way for decades. Being familiar with the psyche of the modern Ph.D. researcher, I truly believe they feel slighted by the implication industry leaders do not favor their product or feel it competitive with that of other academic fields or business enterprises. If the APA is treating these employability questions as a crisis of confidence in academic Psychology, then they are sorely mistaken if they believe they think a stern word (i.e., false) and a few success stories will douse the flames. The APA usually responds to crises with some kind of task force. Its almost a knee-jerk reaction with them. Theres no reason to play the crisis card, and I am not sure they really believe leaders in business and government do not think highly of their research PhDs, but I do believe theyre concerned that their students and the general public might draw such an inference. But how do you handle such matters? What is really needed is a simple research project (call it a "task force" if you like, APA) to confirm their belief in the perceived market value of their research Ph.D. Then, they follow that up with one of their signature publicity campaigns, not unlike the kind they once used to curry support for prescription privileges for clinical psychologists. It was an idea that on the face of it seemed so absurd and irresponsible that the American Medical Association and American Psychiatric Association ( the other APA) did not throw many resources into opposing it. Now clinical psychologists with no medical training in New Mexico and Louisiana can prescribe medication to their patients. So lets not make any bones about it. The American Psychological Association is a lobbying tour de force in the tradition of Google, Bill, and Hillary Clinton. The APA enjoys outreach. So why not reach out to employers and dispel some of the murkiness surrounding the Ph.D. in research Psychology? Perhaps by this point they feel they have built enough of a cache that a mere assertion should do. You probably wont be able to convince employers that the psychology research Ph.D. is more advanced than comparable research doctorates in other fields of social science like Business Economics. Yes, its true. As much as it might surprise the APA, there are other social science and business fields that produce researchers. Psychologists are not the only PhDs other than natural scientists performing research. When I put in an application for a research position, I have competition from other social scientists. And then there are the statisticians. Even more disturbing, and this is straight out of the should-be-urban-legend-but-isnt file, is that hospitals are starting to hire certified Six Sigma Blackbelts where they once hired statisticians or behavioral science researchers. Six Sigma Blackbelts are to statisticians/PhD researchers what clinical psychologists with prescription privileges are to MDs. Six Sigma Blackbelts are actually not a stand-alone field. There isnt enough material for a 3-credit course at American University of Acapulco.
So when the APA throws together this web page ADHD, theres no real benefit other than professional pride, but there are real costs to students who buy the party line and find real disillusionment when they enter the labor market. The concerns that the APA claims to be fielding about job opportunities for PhD researchers are well-founded. The APA wants us to think the concerns are purely speculative, but no one in psychology is disposed to such speculation. We are proud members of a Nanny State and default to the assumptions that our professors are nursing/grooming us for knightly posts in the work-a-day kingdom (to make the world a better place for all the peasants). There is obviously some real experiences driving these concerns, and the APA would do well not to dismiss them as less criterial than the 12 success stories they framed on their web page.
I invested 4 years in an undergraduate psychology major and 4 years in a psychology PhD program. I was unshakably devoted to psychology within that critical career development period of my life. I even shunned a social life in high school in favor of precocious reading and research in the hopes of giving myself pole position for a career I knew I wanted since I was 13 years of age: psychology professor. But when my research interest (i.e. dreaming) was viewed skeptically by an academic community that could afford to cherry-pick its next colleague from among 80-200 applicants, I was banished from the castle, walking over the moat and into the moor that is the real world.
For months now students and faculty have been demanding that I present data to support my rather sobering claims about Psychology career development and employment. In fact psychology professors had been using the lack of empirical data to their advantage, but I must say that my experiences, while anecdotal, are extensive and well-researched. The fact the APA is fielding enough questions/concerns to warrant a web page signifies that my labor fortunes are no freak of nature. And having worked as a senior researcher for the United States Department of Labor, I am in a position to opine intelligently on the relationship between training, education, and jobs.
So what else have I learned? I believe we are locked permanently into a new norm that favors the specialist, the so-called sharpshooter with familiar job title recognition. Employers seeking to fill a marketing vacancy require (or show a prohibitive bias toward) applicants with a degree in marketing and applicants whose previous jobs bore the word "marketing" (or "business development") in the title. Employers and their third parties do not understand what a PhD in Social Psychology means, nor should we expect that of them in an age where job titles and certifications have diversified. Universities and flagship associations are offering new products -- degrees, certifications, qualifying examinations -- designed to appear relevant to the new economy. This is the Age we have to thank for the "Six Sigma Blackbelt," a rather thin field I like to call "advanced statistics for factory foremen." It's only important if you're counting widgets by the millions and even then, I'd sooner hire someone with a real degree in Statistics. And yet employers are recruiting for certified Six Sigma Blackbelts as if this represents the crowning mastery of some mysterio-exotic body of knowledge they have to have to know whether their assembly line is dumping 3 defective units per 1 million into the market or 6 defective units. What a bunch of hooey! Similarly, ever since the debut of Donald Trump's The Apprentice, everyone has been laying the claim to the title of "Project Manager." And why not? I've managed complex finances, supervised employees, analyzed client requirements, developed a business plan, etcetera, maybe not always as part of the same position, but if I was enough of an expert in the product or service I would be managing, I would expect to be interviewed. Unfortunately, this is the day and age where Project Managers are now also referred to as Project Management Professionals who can only go as far as their PMP certifications will take them. In this day and age, my application is a vexing impertinence to the employer demanding the trendy new PMP seal. Universities are beginning to adapt their curricula to employers who demand skills-based training from college graduates and the modern university is more willing than ever to wrap their students in the symbols of technology and professionalism. In this way, the gap between traditional liberal arts colleges and technical/community colleges, institutes, and online refrigerator repair type programs has never been thinner. The Project Management Institute is more than happy to endorse the new standards that help reinvent their flock from Cro-Magnon men to Homo Professionus (i.e., labor commodities on an ant farm). Like everyone else these days, they are products of manualized training. This is something the employer should keep in mind whenever they demand that their next PMP-certified project management professional -- with a membership in the Association for Project Management and a subscription to whatever monthy insider they put out -- "think outside the box." Incidentally, APM also publishes Standard Terms for the Appointment of a Project Manager to "assist in the recruitment of project managers ... companies wishing to adopt best practice and individual project managers wishing to standardise their terms and conditions for clients." In other words, this society which claims to represent the world of project managers wants to tell employers who to hire. (This is not unlike the APA's efforts to educate high schools on the hiring of psychology teachers). I wonder what secret handshake will get me an opportunity to swear oath to the APM creed. The labor market could stand a fresh infusion of Denazification policy. The problem with the PMP certifications and the APMs of the world pushing them is that other relevant professionals will be excluded from all project management opportunities (e.g., those with a degree in Business Economics), which is fairly restrictive when you consider how trendy it is to call every management job a project management job. Soon we will all need a PMP certification to apply for every job that requires us to walk and chew gum at the same time.
END NEW CONTENT
In recent weeks, I have received emails from students claiming they took their concerns about what they read on my web site to a psych prof only to be assured that it all sounded like 'sour grapes' to them. By and large, psych profs behaved as if there was nothing unusual about the career trail ahead of their students. Some psych profs even go so far as to telescope the psychological aspects of a wide range of jobs and industries, the path to which their students will enjoy some sort of advantage or first right of refusal. But once I plugged into data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Science Foundation, I had this thing won, and psych profs are beginning to pay a price for their insouciance and disingenuity. Students are beginning to realize that it is their professors, and not I, who have done them a disservice in discouraging them from thinking critically about what the field has to offer them vocationally. Pasted below are some choice excerpts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics web site:
"About 3 out of 10 college and university faculty worked part time in 2002. Some part-timers, known as adjunct faculty, have primary jobs outside of academiain government, private industry, or nonprofit researchand teach on the side. Others prefer to work part-time hours or seek full-time jobs but are unable to obtain them due to intense competition for available openings. Some work part time in more than one institution. Many adjunct faculty are not qualified for tenure-track positions because they lack a doctoral degree."
"Opportunities directly related to psychology will be limited for bachelors degree holders."
"Opportunities for college and university teaching jobs are expected to improve, but many new openings will be for part-time or non-tenure-track positions. Prospects for teaching jobs will continue to be better in academic fields that offer attractive alternative nonacademic job opportunities" (i.e. not Psychology).
"Also, recent cutbacks and the hiring of more part-time faculty have put a greater administrative burden on full-time faculty."
"The following tabulation shows postsecondary teaching jobs in specialties having 20,000 or more jobs in 2002:
Graduate teaching assistants 128,000
Vocational education teachers 119,000
Health specialties teachers 86,000
Business teachers 67,000
Art, drama, and music teachers 58,000
English language and literature teachers 55,000
Education teachers 42,000
Biological science teachers 47,000
Mathematical science teachers 41,000
Nursing instructors and teachers 37,000
Computer science teachers 33,000
Engineering teachers 29,000
Psychology teachers 26,000
"The number of tenure-track positions is expected to decline as institutions seek flexibility in dealing with financial matters and changing student interests. Institutions will rely more heavily on limited term contracts and part-time, or adjunct, faculty, thus shrinking the total pool of tenured faculty. In a trend that is expected to continue, some institutions now offer limited-term contracts to prospective facultytypically 2-, 3-, or 5-year, full-time contracts. These contracts may be terminated or extended when they expire.
I'd like to call your attention to the number of psychology teachers (26,000). In a search I identified 113 colleges or universities offering doctoral programs in Social Psychology. Assuming each program admits 2-5 students per year (let's say an average of 3.5), that's 396 students in any given class. If we multiply by 5, we estimate 2,000 graduate students in the social psychology five-year PhD program pipeline. If we multiply by 35 (this is how long someone is likely to be employed as a professor), we get 13,860. And that's just Social Psychology. Throw in developmental psychology (n = 104 U.S. doctoral programs), and we've already reached our saturation point (i.e. 26,000). And then there's Cognitive Psychology (n = 80), Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Quantitative Psychology, Health Psychology, Applied Psychology, Experimental Psychology, General Psychology, and the two big fields, Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Clinical Psychology. Recipients of doctorates in I/O and Clinical Psychology have a wide array of opportunities outside the university, including self-employment (hang a shingle if all else fails), but they still represent a sizeable proportion of that 26,000 employed as professors. In other words, the number of graduates of doctoral programs in Psychology maintaining jobs in universities is a small subset of the total number receiving doctorates. And if you have a non-clinical doctorate (i.e. a member of a licensed profession), you really have nowhere else to go. The universe of psychology-related jobs outside the university is small.
Before I begin to guide you through the Psychology career ladder, you should know that you not only have to like longshots to gamble on this career but you have to be prepared to absorb the costs of failing to find your way to the cheese. Do you have an exit strategy if you find yourself bogged down in your march toward a psychology career? When you leave the hall of mirrors, will you be able to recognize your real self from among the many personas you were required to adopt along the path of "professional development"? I refer here not only to the psychological stress of enduring "basic training" in Psychology, but to sacrifices which include loss of self-esteem, arrested development as a mature adult and, of course, loan debt, as illustrated by the following Yahoo discussion forum.</p>
<p>The group is described as follows: "a listserv of doctoral-level psychologists, post-docs, and interns who have interest in issues related to value and money in psychology and mental health. The group was developed in response to an energetic discussion on the APPIC postdoc list in spring of 2001 as people grappled with their inability to pay off student loans. We will explore ways to increase the value of psychology and psychologists."
Psychology Careers Hurdle 1: Getting into Graduate School</p>
<p>The first hurdle, achieving admission to a Ph.D. program, is fraught with hidden odds & obstacles, not the least of which is competition from 80 to 680 applicants for anywhere between 2 and 5 positions. (A clinical Ph.D. program at a reputable or popular university in sunny California or snowy Colorado during an economic downturn can draw upwards of 700 applications). While 67% of Baccalaureate Recipients expressed plans to pursue advanced degrees in Psychology, the data support my contention that the odds of achieving admission to graduate school in Psychology are slim (approximately 18% of Baccalaureate Recipients end up enrolled in a graduate program full-time, and of these who are enrolled, 61% are pursuing advanced degrees other than psychology [US Dept. of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Office of Educational Research and Improvement [NCES 98-071]). And when we break it down by level of study, the vast majority are admitted to masters rather than doctoral level programs. A Bureau of Labor Statistics report based on a review of 1997 data revealed that 67% of all persons with a BA or BS in a social science were required to accept positions outside their field of study, compared to only 18% for all persons with a BA or BS in a health or life-related field of study. For additional information on the odds and obstacles to graduate school and on strategy and tactics for achieving admission, see the special feature Applying to Psychology Graduate School.
Psychology Careers Hurdle 2: Surviving Graduate School in Psychology</p>
<p>Most psychology majors are unaware that in the vast majority of doctoral programs a "C" in a graduate course results in academic probation. (I am familiar with one program in which a B- results in your referral to a faculty committee hearing). Now for the more frightening news. I know many students with a near-perfect academic performance in graduate school who were placed on conduct probation for what amounts to deviation from some social norm. Graduate faculty reserve various categories of conduct probation for ill-fitting students who cannot be criticized on academic grounds. Grounds for probation may include the perception that a student's inattention to detail signals an unwillingness to openly celebrate Psychology. You may be in trouble if you don't...attend nearly all faculty social functions, voluntary colloquia, or join extracurricular research teams in the hopes of becoming the sixth author on as many four page publications as possible. Remember, you are playing a zero sum game. Psych profs in every graduate program around the country can fail out half their graduate student body and still receive over 100 bids from newly minted PhDs to fill their next tenure-track opening. They can afford to cherry-pick. They can afford to use their graduate training programs to clone themselves and socialize students into a culture of standard bearers, ambassadors, and administrative savants. In a search for suitable apprentices or 'junior colleagues,' they will demonize and disqualify persons considerably less eccentric than some of the personalities fired by Donald Trump on his reality television series. The habit of highly effective graduate students who survive the microscope of faculty attention, who find their papers in order at each characterological-block checkpoint, and who actually go on to claim the ultimate prize of tenure-track employment, is the dog-eat-dog understanding that they are competing with one another. As a graduate student, I furrowed my brows in the general direction of some of my cohorts who, to my dismay, treated the psychology department like a coliseum of gladiatorial carnage. How competitive could graduate school be when the distribution of grades among all the overachieving grad students was skewed toward the A range? Academic performance was not really being used to separate the men from the boys, so with naivety falling from my eyes, I gazed upon my fellow students with this "it's all good" expression on my face when I should have realized that non-academic (i.e. social) considerations (i.e. so-called 'standards') were being secretly applied to size us up. Just how were we competing? Think of it as a modeling contest. The losing students were those who 'costumed up' least, who less-than slavishly imitated the behaviors of their professors and the stylistic elements of research and teaching (i.e. epistemology). The students who would have been voted by the graduate program yearbook committee (if there were one) least congenital incarnation of conventional wisdom and practice (what psych profs like to call 'standards'). No one should really be surprised by this. This method of evaluating students bares a striking resemblance to conventional elements of their research projects with their aggregate statistics, their normative standard scores, and their penchant for controlling within-subjects variance (also known as "error"). As a graduate student, every slip is itemized and reported as part of their end-of-academic-term accounting session:
Unlike fellow students, you defer your graduate research design for the following Spring in favor of a seminar on Peter Berger's The Homeless Mind offered by your thesis advisor. Sure, there may have no rule that all students must take Experimental Methods in their first year, and sure your thesis advisor may have approved your course selection decision, but every other student leaped at the first opportunity to take the Experimental Methods course and so questions abound: "Why didn't you?"
You let it slip during student orientation that you are enamored with the works of Swiss psychiatrist CG Jung, in the company of behaviorists and theory-hating positivists who spend their entire careers assigning 'variables' to the x and y axis of ANOVA tables.
After the department head announces attendance at weekly colloquia are not mandatory, you decide to skip a few weeks of uninteresting presentations to analyze data for your thesis or grade papers in fulfillment of your responsibilities as teaching assistant.
At the end of each academic period, defined as either a trimester, semester, or year, the student's case is discussed by a student ethics & evaluation committee comprised of program faculty, where inferences are violently drawn about a student's attitude and character. A characterological assessment bordering on character assassination ensues, masquerading as normal performance evaluation. The whole process amounts to slander in that professors who are not yet familiar with the student are given certain expectations and possibly even the responsibility of assessing student responsiveness and improvement in future coursework/assistantship assignments. Students funded through a research or teaching assistantship are vulnerable to aggressive evaluation by the faculty member to whom they are assigned. In short, it is just as important to demonstrate a proactive enthusiasm and embodiment of the department or professional epistemology as it is to receive excellent grades. The designation of attendance at colloquia as non-mandatory or suggested is often a trap to test a student's commitment to department affairs and in broader psychology beyond his or her own area of interest. The equivocation of guidelines is also often a trap to identify students who do not seek out faculty expectations or who may be eager to presume latitude. For additional categories of vulnerability, consult the Ehrenfels interview titled Student Ethics & Evaluation: The Committees and the companion document Surviving Graduate School in Psychology. But beware! Academics are more than willing to hand out a masters degree as a door prize.
You are being compared with other students with respect to how much energy and initiative you put forth to learn the faculty's unwritten rules and expectations. You are being judged on your intrinsic interest in the field's standard operating procedures and, where a requirement is ill-defined, your interest in seeking out faculty for instructions. A habit of assuming latitude in a normatively ambigious situation often spells career death to graduate students.
Psychology Careers Hurdle 3: Building a Competitive Vita
And it gets worse! Those who do make it into a doctoral program and survive indoctrination to receive a PhD (usually after considerably more than 4 years), end up facing even worse odds of finding employment suitable to their education (i.e., assistant professorship). While the requirements for a doctorate in psychology are correctly estimated at 4-5 years in most department handbooks, it takes considerably more than 4 years, and in some cases upwards of 10 years, to build a vitae (i.e., resume) that will allow a student to compete for a university position following conferment of the PhD. Students often postpone or water down their doctoral candidacy exam or dissertation to teach sections of undergraduate classes, to sign on as the sixth member of a research team that may one day yield a four-page publication, or to travel the country in search of workshops and conferences to add to one's dossier. Research assistants are slaves to the whims of their mentors (on whom they depend for their funding and letter of recommendation); it is not uncommon for an assistant to be swallowed whole by the paranoia or perfectionism surrounding the mentor's next publication. The pursuit of the PhD may be complicated by other factors as well, as in cases where it is incumbent on a candidate, in planning his own dissertation project, to conform or capitulate to the preferences of an advisor or mentor on everything from research design to topic! This incumbency may be real, quasi-real, imagined, or dictated by the fact the student has no innate interests of his or her own.
Graduate students brawl for an unassigned section of General Psychology and it is almost invariably assigned to the student who has the most teaching experience, resulting in wide discrepancy between students who have taught 5-6 courses and students who have taught 0-2 courses. I remember being quite irritated by the prospect of postponing graduation beyond my fourth (or even fifth year) until students in their 8th year could decide they've had enough of graduate school -- or enough teaching experience -- to vacate the premises.</p>