Fun Psychology podcasts and comics!
The resources below include links to the advice of other people that I found really helpful when applying. I hope these resources will help you as much as they've helped me – best of luck!
Finding Ph.D. Positions and Supervisors
Lots of possibilities here! See the links below for concrete approaches:
- The Psychology Grad School Wiki for prospective graduate applicants includes lists of open positions
- A big-picture summary of what grad school is and how to go about it
- A comprehensive A-Z application guide by Jamil Zaki, Stanford
- A two-part Ph.D. application bootcamp by Yale students: See here and here (and here for content from previous years)
- A comprehensive search guide by the Sokol-Hessner Lab
- Another two great application guides to start with by Eric Lee and Kate Nuss
- DAAD Database for German Ph.D. positions
- Findaphd.com
- Mailing lists such as the listserv of the Cognitive Dev. Society or the ISLS Newsletter
Emailing Potential Supervisors
Emailing potential supervisors is important because it puts you on their radar (even if they may not reply), and more importantly, because it helps you figure out whether your person of interest is accepting applications in the first place. You don't want to spend hours preparing applications for a Ph.D. position that doesn't exist! Kind people on the internet (and universities!) have shared helpful email templates:
- Lucy Lai's template
- Tufts University's template
- Claire Whiting's email content tips
- A whole collection of email templates by successful NYU applicants
- Princeton University's template
Asking for LORs
Asking for recommendation letters (of which you usually need three) can be uncomfortable if you don't know what the common procedure is. As a first-generation student myself, and someone who worries about saying the wrong things, I actually googled how to do it – and it helped! See below for my search results.
- Rec. Letter Etiquette
- UC Denver tips
- Berkeley faculty tips
- More faculty tips posted on Stackexchange
- More tips!
Writing a "Statement of Purpose" (SOP)
The statement of purpose is required for almost any graduate school application in the U.S, and arguably the most important document that you yourself will write. The resources below will give you a good idea of what it's for and how to write it (at least they did for me!).
- Cornell tips
- Berkeley tips
- Stanford tips
- Yale tips
- Faculty tips (Jay Van Bavel, NYU)
- Princeton faculty tips
- Cambridge tips
- Example SOPs: Tiffany Tseng, MIT Media Lab and sixteen (!) Example SOPs by successful NYU applicants, covering various subfields of Psychology
Writing a "Research Proposal"
To my horror, I recently found out that when applying to a Ph.D. program in the UK, one has to write a research proposal: A text of about four pages outlining what you envision your dissertation work to be, including a theoretical introduction, a plan for data collection, your data analysis approach, and everything inbetween. You can find...
- ... an outline of what's different about Ph.D.s in the UK here
- ... a very comprehensive UK application guide here (written by Timothy Sandhu).
- ... and further tips here (Cambridge) and here (Edinburgh)
Compiling an Academic CV
Tips and example CVs below (you may also want to check out the CVs of students in the lab you're interested in):
Application Assistance
I recently found out that there are very kind souls out there that volunteer their time to help prospective applicants prepare their materials:
- List of all ongoing assistance programs that is regularly updated (maintained by Meltem Yucel)
- MIT BCS Application Assistance Program
- UCSD Diversifying Psychology Event
- Harvard P-Prep Program
What to Expect in Ph.D. Interviews
- List of potential interview questions, Science Magazine (written by faculty)
- A great and detailed blog post about the interview experience, written by Monica Gates
- More tips from an applicant here
- Huge interview resource collection here
Other (Potentially) Helpful Links / Content
- Academic secret menu
- What (some) faculty say they look for in applicants
- Paper about grad school application "kisses of death" (how fun)
- Google Drive folder by University of Texas students, including templates for application tracking, contacitng potential future advisors, advice on writing your CV, etc.
- Sam Gershman's advice for young investigators: https://gershmanlab.com/docs/advice_young_investigators.pdf
- Behind the CV: (Personal) stories from faculty and researchers – an initiative by UPenn
- Growing Up in Science: (Personal) stories from faculty and researchers – an initiative by NYU
... and some light-hearted Psychology podcasts and comics to keep you motivated: