June 10, 2026
It's been a quiet semester, which is good. After the happenings at Brown at the end of last semester, we needed a quiet semester. My lab published a few papers, and we submitted a few more. My first year graduate student made progress on her first year project, and won a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. My fourth-year student passed her dissertation proposal defense and won a grant from the Caplan foundation to do some of the thesis research. I was even able to secure additional funds for my postdoc, at least for a little while. My thesis student graduated with honors and is going to be a teacher. Three other research assistants graduated from the lab, and we have a nice photo of the five of us together at graduation. And, for the first time in a decade, I'm not teaching a summer class, which gives me more time to write.
But there's not much to write about regarding advising, so it's not clear what I am going to do with this blog - at least for the summer. I'm sure there will be things to write about when students come back in the Fall. I'm going to take on a new role in Fall 2026 as Honors Advisor for the CPSY department, so I'm sure I will write a little about that, maybe even before the Fall semester begins. But today, I have another project in mind. I want to write a little about my field.
Many years ago, I wrote a blog for Psychology Today. My kids were really young, and I didn't really have time to do it. I think I wrote 9 entries, and then gave up because I was doing it so sporadically. But I always liked the idea of blogging about cognitive development and the broader impacts of research in my field. I might do a little of that here (in this section). But the first few ideas I have for entries aren't about broader impacts per se, They are about observations about the field and how its evolved, as well as a little bit about graduate school (which I know is not the subject of a blog on undergraduate advising, but since so many entries are about applying to graduate programs, talking about what its like to be a graduate student might be interesting). Anyway, that's the point of this section. It's mostly for cognitive development nerds (and don't get me wrong, I am a BIG cognitive development nerd (oh, who am I kidding, I'm just a big nerd)). But every now and then, I might say something of interest to the average undergraduate. However, I'm going to write this section assuming that you know a little cognitive development (or that you've taken CPSY0610 or 0620, which are the two introductory developmental classes that I teach).