The holiday season is fast approaching, and if you’re like me you probably feel like a stranger going home for the winter break. One of the common refrain graduate students say is, “My parents still don’t know what I do.” In a research-heavy, experimental psychology program, the misconceptions of what “we do” abound. For me, my career goals currently encompass getting either an academic job teaching and doing research at a university or working in industry as a statistician. Only recently did my mother-in-law stop asking if I was going to open my own practice near our hometown in rural Nebraska. I know next to nothing about clinical or counseling psychology.

Some people have described the minds of graduate school advisors while thinking about their graduate students’ research, as Markov chains. That description is not made audibly by anyone who is still working on their degree and would like to continue doing so, of course. A Markov chain, in essence, is memoryless. What will happen next in a sequence of occurrences is determined by the current set of events and nothing previous.

Today is Thanksgiving Day, and the first thing that I am thankful for is the fact that I had no alarm set and was able to sleep in until 8:15 am for the first time in over 6 months.  As I took a moment to really contemplate on what it means to be thankful I spent some time really reflecting on what it is exactly that I am thankful for.  Though it is easy to get caught up in the day to day drama of graduate school and fall into a pattern of pissing and moaning, today I did not focus on that.  Today I thought about all that I as a graduate student have to be thankful for.  This is what I came up with:

Do you feel that faculty and staff members of your department, or university as a whole, don’t treat graduate students as well as you should be treated? I am here to assure you that you play a vital role in your department and university, and Chancellor Linda Katehi of the University of California in Davis agrees with me. Clifton Parker wrote this article to let graduate students know that they are cared for by their university. This compassionate attitude doesn’t stop at the University of California in Davis. While it may not seem this way, universities deeply care for their graduate students because faculty and staff members realize the importance that you bring to their university.

I could not be more pleased to be writing this blog right now. For many years, PhDStudent.com was but a twinkle in my eye and a notepad full of ideas, but now it’s finally come into fruition.

My name is René P, and I have a Masters and PhD in Experimental Psychology. I work as a senior statistician for both a university and a consulting company that I founded. I received my PhD in 2004, and I’ve been working with graduate students for the past 9 years. Working with PhD students on a daily basis has taught me that it’s not unusual to feel lost at some point during your graduate school journey. Many people don’t know where to go to find the answers they need, and that’s why I’m writing this blog.

Hello there, and welcome to my blog.  This focus of this blog is one of my favorite subjects in the world: me!  Well, not so much about just me, but my life and experiences as a graduate student.  But before I get too distracted with my experiences, I am going to take few moments to shamelessly, dare I say borderline narcissistically, talk about me.  I am 24 years old, and currently working on a PhD in Counseling Psychology.  Though at times this blog might sound like a cautionary tale against going to graduate school or a woe-is-me whine-fest, but I assure you that is not my intention. 

My name is Sara, and I am currently in my fifth year of graduate school in an experimental psychology program. I wanted to come to graduate school because I loved the scientific study of psychology, and wanted to (a) create my own knowledge in the disciple (i.e., do research), and (b) share psychology knowledge with others (i.e., teaching). I chose social psychology as the area I wanted to pursue, because I found the research questions concerning people’s behavior in social situations to be more interesting than other areas of psychology (e.g., neurological, pathological, or developmental questions). Although I’ve learned in my courses, these questions are quite interesting in their own right. My only regret is not having enough time in the five years here to explore them in more detail. 

Former president of the University of California, the late Clark Kerr, said that the purpose of a university was to provide “sex for the students, sports for the alumni, and parking for the faculty” (as cited in Calisphere, 2011, footnote 99). In his tongue-in-check statement about the purpose of universities, Dr. Kerr appears to have overlooked graduate students because, as we all know, graduate students are far too busy for, ahem, recreational activities.

Welcome!

PhDStudent is launching its blog feature, and I am privileged to write the one that starts us off. I would like to share with you the two goals I have in mind for PhDStudent and our new blog feature:

• Our goal for PhDStudent is to help you grow as a graduate student so that you may not only succeed but thrive in graduate school.
• Our goal for the new blog feature is to have an open community of graduate students, faculty members, and postdoc students.