Resources
Grad School Applications
My grad school application process was greatly facilitated by having access to amazing resources. As an undergrad at Harvard, I had access to influential professors both at Harvard and elsewhere, kind and knowledgeable grad student mentors, courses at other institutions, funding for travel and research, and so on. I am endlessly grateful to all those people who worked very hard to help me. At the same time, this underscores how much privilege I have and how much an uneven playing field grad school applications are. In this page, I tried to gather some resources that I think can be helpful to people who want to apply to grad school in psychology (or something similar). Hope you find it helpful, and feel free to contact me via email if you want to talk more :)
PRO-TiP
The Harvard psychology department produced several videos with invaluable information. These are interviews with faculty, who describe what they look for in grad school applications. I found this super useful, and it will be useful for applying to many psychology departments, not just Harvard.
Harvard Psychology PPREP & MIT BCS AAP
These are two application assistance programs where you can meet with people from either Harvard Psychology or MIT BCS and get help with your grad school applications (in case there was any doubt, this is free). Of course you should reach out and do this, because you get (1) advice, (2) someone to read your SOP, (3) insight into the department. You don’t need to apply to Harvard/MIT to use these resources.
SOP ADVICE
Here is some advice I’d like to share about SOPs. Of course, take my advice with a grain of salt, and there is no one correct way to write an SOP, but in my experience as an ex-applicant and an application advisor (through MIT’s AAP) these are good ideas to keep in mind:
- What the Statement of Purpose (SOP) is not: a college admission essay (“I am very well-rounded and have some quirky hobbies…”); a biography (“When I was a kid, my {insert relative} had a stroke and now I’m passionate about the brain.”); a detailed CV (“In my freshman year of college I did… Then in the summer I did… Then in my sophomore year I did…”). (Exception to the biography rule: if you belong to an underrepresented minority it might be useful to mention it to give more context to your application).
- What the SOP is: a sales pitch for why you will be a good grad student who will not drop out. Taking a student is a big commitment in terms of time and funds, so you want to convince your potential advisor that you are a good bet. How? Start with a good research question that shows thinking, knowledge of the literature, and connection to the potential advisor’s field; talk about your toolkit (e.g., MRI; stats; experiments; neural nets; EEG; etc.), how you used it in the past, and how you plan to apply it to your research question; prove that you know what the potential advisor does and that you have thought about how you can fit in the lab/department.
- SOPs usually have three parts: (a) My question is…, (b) I have experience and skills to show that I have the tools and persistence to study this question, (c) I want to work with Professor X in institution Y because… Parts a & c are usually one paragraph, and the majority of the statement is part b.
- I found reaching out to professors useful (not everyone does), but it should be done with care. Often, an email with a message like “I read your paper now let’s meet to talk” is not seen favorably by professors (in contrast, grad students would often love to receive an email like this). Instead, a more acceptable message is an inquiry about whether the professor is admitting students this year. This is good for you, because (a) then you know where to apply or not, saving time and money, and (b) this will familiarize your potential advisor with your name, so it sticks out more when they go through applications.
My Application Materials
I’m sure there are many ways to improve my application materials. Still, they got me in, so maybe they can help you in some way.
My letters to two professors whom I applied to work with (identifying information is reducted)
Statistics
Knowing how to do data manipulation and basic stats puts you in a position to conduct quantiative research. Data are everywhere, and being stats-literate means you can look at these data, learn from them, and communicate them. When it comes to grad school applications, I’ve heard several professors say that, first and foremost, they want potential grad students to have a good enough statistical toolbox to tackle their research questions. This doesn’t mean you now need to take difficult probability theory courses (though I do feel like I benefitted from putting myself through it), but it does mean that it would be a good start to learn to do stats in R, manipulate and visualize data (usually using tidyverse in R), and fit linear models (starting with simple regressions).
If you are totally new to statistics, I highly recommend the friendly and witty Field, A., Miles, J., & Field, Z. (2012). Discovering Statistics Using R. London, UK: Sage.
If you already know your regressions and p-values, another good thing you can do for yourself is learn Bayesian stats, which are in many ways better than frequentist stats and are growing in popularity in psychology. Specifically, the BRMS package in R will be useful. A dense-ish but useful book is McElreath, R. (2020). Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with Examples in R and Stan (2nd ed.). CRC Press.