February 6, 2025
We are in the middle of our process of admitting a cohort of graduate students for the Fall 2025. I've written a great deal about the graduate student admission process, and what yo might want to do to prepare for an application to a Ph.D. program (go back to the section of this blog on applying to graduate school). What I want to do here is focus on what you might do once you get to graduate school. I will admit at the outset that this is probably going to involve multiple entries. Here I'm going to limit myself to some general pieces of advice, which mostly correspond to experimental (i.e., non-clinical) programs.
1) Take classes
There's been a movement in graduate education over the last 30 years to reduce the number of required courses that Ph.D. candidates have to take. To give an example, as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, I had to take 2 semesters of statistics, 4 semesters of "Core" training courses, and 6 electives in order to qualify to advance to candidacy (i.e., 12 classes). Our department now requires the same 2 semesters of statistics, but only 2 semesters of Core training and 3 electives (i.e., 7 classes). Our current requirements are similar to many other Ph.D. programs around the country. So, this is real.
I personally came in to my graduate program in the Cognition area, and started by satisfying requirements in that area (core classes in memory, attention, concepts and categories, etc.). But when it because obvious that I was going to work pretty much exclusively with children, I started taking the Developmental area's requirements (Cognitive Development, Language Development, etc.). So, I actually wound up taking well more than 12 classes during my years at Cal.
Here's the thing - graduate school is just about the only time that you are ever able to learn anything new. And that's what the classes are for. They expose you to literature you've never seen before, and keep you in the habit of reading and reviewing and thinking about your broader field. And, like taking the GREs as an undergraduate student and not waiting (even if you're taking gap years), you're going to be more prepared to learn in a classroom setting than when you're in graduate school. Yes, there is always time for more learning - it's just harder to do.
2) Read
This one is obvious - and it sometimes dovetails with taking more classes than necessary. Classes keep you reading. So, even if you aren't going to take more classes, try to read more. Pick up books (sometimes trades, sometimes academic books) in adjacent fields. If you are genuinely interested in academia, you're going to have to talk with people who aren't in your field - it's nice to know more than just your own research. This is also (by the way) a lynchpin for deciding whether you want to go to graduate school in the first place - if you aren't interested in reading about other research in your broad field (like psychology), maybe a Ph.D. in psychology isn't the right career path.
3) Learn something your advisor doesn't know
At the end of the day, having a Ph.D. means that you have stretched the boundaries of scientific knowledge. If you only know what your advisor knows, then you haven't really done this.
4) Explore something else beyond what you study.
Believe it or not, graduate school is a time to explore other facets of yourself beyond what it is that you study.
I went to a small liberal arts college, which did not have a large creative writing program. I enjoyed creative writing, and even started a student organization dedicated to it, which I ran for all four years of my time in college (it even lasted another year after I graduated). However, I never took a creative writing class. In my second year of graduate school, I realized that at a large university like Cal, the English department had a bunch of creative writing classes. They were by invitation (you had to submit work to get into it). So, I applied for one. I got in. I took it (this was the Spring of my second year). (note, this did require some conversations with my advisor, but she was pretty supportive). In all, I took three of these classes during my time at Cal (and started a fourth, but it was during my qualifying exam semester, so it was not tenable). I knew that I was doing well in these classes - most of the other students were grad students in comp lit or English, and they all accepted me as one of their own.
The last one I took - during the Fall of my last year of graduate school - was with a pretty famous author who also had a full time job as a professor at Cal in the Comp Lit and English department. He never went to his office - he would conduct all his meetings at Cafe Strada on Bancroft Street in Berkeley. It's a huge coffee place with lots of seating, mostly old style wooden booths. He had end of semester meetings with all the students there, and I remember meeting him on a sunny December morning. He told me that I was getting an A in his class (although actually, I was taking it pass/fail), but that I had a lot of promise. He wanted to know if I wanted to switch into the Comp Lit department and get my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. By this point, I was sending out job applications for Assistant Professor jobs in psychology and well into writing my dissertation. I told him no, because my passion was in the psychological sciences and I wanted to job that I have now.
While I was at Cal, I published a few pieces, and sent a lot more out that was rejected from magazines. I even put a short book together once. But I stopped when I got my job here. I never engaged in creative writing seriously after I moved from Berkeley to Providence. And the conversation with this author remains my biggest sliding door moment (kudos if you get that reference). But exploring my passion for writing and ultimately taking this path really helped me understand what I wanted to do with my own career.
5) Recognize what you need in order to succeed. Don't expect to be told this.
This is probably the hardest one. Every field - even fields within psychology - are different. Each has a set of expectations - about what to publish, about what conferences to go to, about what statistical methods or techniques to use - about EVERYTHING. You have to learn what the expectations are, and the only way you can do this is to talk with people - particularly people you admire to learn what you need to do. No one will ever tell you what you need to do. And that brings me to....
6) Talk with smart people. Every day.
This one is easy. You're in a program with other graduate students, and they are going to be smart. But you're also in a program with faculty and postdocs. Talk to them. Coffee usually helps here. You never know where ideas are going to come from or how conversations might affect you.