I am extremely lucky that Robert enjoys exploring certain useless hypothetical possibilities as much as I do. The other day, when we were talking about things related to my obsessive consideration of the educational enterprise, I wondered whether one reason Rice undergrads so commonly have double-majors while students at state universities (it seems to me) generally have one major and possibly a minor is that state schools have more stringent core curriculum requirements, leaving fewer hours available to pursue another major.
For example, state universities in Texas are legislatively mandated to require students to take certain government and history courses and have other university-specific requirements as well. Rice has extremely limited requirements outside of the student's major. There are three areas (humanities, social science, and science/engineering) and in addition to meeting the requirements of your major, you need only take 6 hours in each of the other two areas. For instance, a chemistry major will need to take 6 hours of humanities and 6 hours of social science. People will often do this by taking the two-semester "huma," "soci," or "nsci" (pronounced: Nazi) interdisciplinary sequence created specifically for non-majors.
So this raised the question: if I had attended UT, would I have been able to be a psychology and economics double-major in a standard four-year degree plan? Robert and I looked it up.
I would have needed to take two additional courses to graduate in four years, which is doable since I only took 12 hours each semester of my senior year instead of 15. I would have needed to add economic statistics and vector calculus. This assumes that I can use economics as the "minor" for my psychology major and vice versa; I don't know whether that's allowed. In any event, I would have had to substitute 9 of my electives for other required classes, as follows:
Do not take:
English 101,
Religious Studies 202 (Atheism and Its Critics),
Psychology 202 (Social Psychology) -- wait, but this was my interest area for grad school!,
Psychology 231 (Industrial-Organizational Psychology),
Sociology 203 (Intro to Sociology),
Sociology 386 (Sexuality and the Social Order),
Ling 200 (Language),
Accounting 305 (Financial Accounting),
Econ 445 (Managerial Economics)
Instead, take:
UGS 302 or 303, which I don't even know what it is,
Rhetoric 306 (introduction to writing and argumentation),
Government 310L (Introduction to American Government),
Government 312L (The Politics of the US and Mexico),
1 course in US history,
1 course in Texas history,
1 course in visual or performing arts,
1 more course in German,
1 more course in science.
Ugh. So it appears that it is possible (subject to my understanding of the requirements) that I could double-major in these fields at UT but it would not be nearly as fun.
Another hypothetical scenario: Both Robert and I would be qualified to teach high school math in the state of North Carolina, since only 24 hours in the subject is required. (I will have 27 hours of math by the end of this semester; Robert has something approproaching a gazillion, to put this in rigorous mathematical terminology). It's interesting that the hours do not have to come from specific coursework; I would be much better prepared to teach high school math if I had taken a modern algebra and a geometry course, for instance, rather than linear algebra and differential equations. This being said, I do feel that I could teach at the level of high school math without those courses.
Another way to be qualified to teach a subject involves passing the Praxis exams from ETS (the GRE people). The ETS website has sample questions for each of the roughly 69 subjects they offer. Robert and I tested ourselves against a bunch of these tests and found that we were able to individually get a surprisingly high percentage of the questions right in fields where we have zero to very little educational experience - fields like agriculture, biology (Robert moreso than I), business education, and physical education. Of course we killed psychology and economics, and fields like math are straightforward. But even our scores in theater were much less dire than I would have expected. These tests must be pretty easy. I mean, yeah, we are overall knowledgeable people and multiple-choice test-taking ability comes into play, but seriously, I know almost nothing about agriculture.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Last Programs
OK, everyone, I now have spoken to all the programs I applied to.
Yesterday I got a call from a professor at Less Favored University's psychology program and because I was not expecting it to be such a person (R answered the phone) and because I was both distracted with getting ready to walk out the door and a little brain-fuzzed with medication, I was more abrupt with telling the person I am accepting an offer from another program than I would normally have been. I will email the department and re-iterate my status but also, I hope, I will be a little nicer. It's not that I sounded exactly like I was telling a telemarketer that I wasn't interested in his product, but it was definitely more like that than I would have wished.
Then today I got a call from Dreamy marketing program with a tuition waiver and research assistanceship offer. There are so many things I love about this program - including the "almost scary" (according to the program director) match between my interests and the focus of the faculty and the fact that they have a crop of newish junior faculty from seriously top programs (think: Wharton, Duke) who are "hungry" (she says) to work on publications, with which I could help and be a co-author. This might be the very best program for my purposes. Unfortunately the university is located in an area that, when I referred to it as "isolated" in our conversation, made the program director laugh. The university is the primary employer in the area, and though in a typical year, they hire a lot of instructors to teach classes, the downturn in the economy means that they won't be doing so much of that. She said, laughing, "It's too bad you love your husband and want him around." But yeah, I do.
Final update:
1 acceptance, no funding
1 acceptance, inadequate funding
3 acceptances, tuition waiver and assistantship
1 acceptance, funding unknown (because I didn't let him tell me the whole story)
I really did NOT expect that I would be looking at 3 fully funded masters degree offers. I love that I have so many good options that it's not a total no-brainer to choose.
At a minimum, I will send in my polite regrets to the three non-funded schools in the morning. I feel almost ready to make the final decision and accept the program that has been #1 on my list all along. We'll see if I'm ready to do that by tomorrow.
Oh yeah, have I mentioned that the way the timeline works, I will be applying to PhD programs about 18 months from now? That seems so soon!
Yesterday I got a call from a professor at Less Favored University's psychology program and because I was not expecting it to be such a person (R answered the phone) and because I was both distracted with getting ready to walk out the door and a little brain-fuzzed with medication, I was more abrupt with telling the person I am accepting an offer from another program than I would normally have been. I will email the department and re-iterate my status but also, I hope, I will be a little nicer. It's not that I sounded exactly like I was telling a telemarketer that I wasn't interested in his product, but it was definitely more like that than I would have wished.
Then today I got a call from Dreamy marketing program with a tuition waiver and research assistanceship offer. There are so many things I love about this program - including the "almost scary" (according to the program director) match between my interests and the focus of the faculty and the fact that they have a crop of newish junior faculty from seriously top programs (think: Wharton, Duke) who are "hungry" (she says) to work on publications, with which I could help and be a co-author. This might be the very best program for my purposes. Unfortunately the university is located in an area that, when I referred to it as "isolated" in our conversation, made the program director laugh. The university is the primary employer in the area, and though in a typical year, they hire a lot of instructors to teach classes, the downturn in the economy means that they won't be doing so much of that. She said, laughing, "It's too bad you love your husband and want him around." But yeah, I do.
Final update:
1 acceptance, no funding
1 acceptance, inadequate funding
3 acceptances, tuition waiver and assistantship
1 acceptance, funding unknown (because I didn't let him tell me the whole story)
I really did NOT expect that I would be looking at 3 fully funded masters degree offers. I love that I have so many good options that it's not a total no-brainer to choose.
At a minimum, I will send in my polite regrets to the three non-funded schools in the morning. I feel almost ready to make the final decision and accept the program that has been #1 on my list all along. We'll see if I'm ready to do that by tomorrow.
Oh yeah, have I mentioned that the way the timeline works, I will be applying to PhD programs about 18 months from now? That seems so soon!
Monday, March 16, 2009
Great Offer - Follow Up Thoughts
I started to write this in the comments to the previous, but wait, this is my blog; I can put it in its own post!
As a salary, the TA/RA offers correspond to about $18 - $25 per hour to do stuff that is pretty easy and fun (compared to any "real" job I've ever had). While I could certainly do better in the job market, it wouldn't be as enjoyable and certainly wouldn't be moving me toward the same goal. (If I get my way into and out of a marketing PhD program, I'm in really good shape, even considering the "opportunity cost" of having been in school for such a long time.)
Meanwhile, I am catching up with the grad-school forum on the Chronicle of Higher Education website and just now am in the middle of a very long thread saying "Please don't pay your own way for a humanities PhD! It's madness!" I feel good about being funded to get a degree that actually moves me forward a bit.
I have been skeptical of what would happen if I do an experimental psychology masters and then decide not to continue to a PhD. I don't think this will happen, but it's worth considering what the next step would be. While a lot of people would tell you that such a degree is borderline worthless (at least compared to a more applied or professionally-oriented masters, such as I/O psychology), I have been pleasantly surprised to see during Robert's job search that there are research openings in companies/government for people with psychology masters degrees. My last job was one that typically requires a masters degree but fortunately they put the advanced degree in "preferred" rather than "required" qualifications. Robert and I call my honors double-major B.A. from a top 20 university the "Rice masters" because it is so frequently equivalent to or superior to an actual masters degree from a less prestigious school in competing for jobs. However, I am seeing jobs that I would otherwise be qualified for (e.g. social science research jobs) based on skills and experience that I would not be considered for because I have "only" a bachelors degree and they specifically require a masters or higher. Of course, I have to assume that competition for such jobs is pretty tight and that even with the masters, they are tough to get. It's times like this that I am glad that no matter what happens, I will still have significant job experience and a well-developed skill set for re-entry into the non-academic job market.
As a salary, the TA/RA offers correspond to about $18 - $25 per hour to do stuff that is pretty easy and fun (compared to any "real" job I've ever had). While I could certainly do better in the job market, it wouldn't be as enjoyable and certainly wouldn't be moving me toward the same goal. (If I get my way into and out of a marketing PhD program, I'm in really good shape, even considering the "opportunity cost" of having been in school for such a long time.)
Meanwhile, I am catching up with the grad-school forum on the Chronicle of Higher Education website and just now am in the middle of a very long thread saying "Please don't pay your own way for a humanities PhD! It's madness!" I feel good about being funded to get a degree that actually moves me forward a bit.
I have been skeptical of what would happen if I do an experimental psychology masters and then decide not to continue to a PhD. I don't think this will happen, but it's worth considering what the next step would be. While a lot of people would tell you that such a degree is borderline worthless (at least compared to a more applied or professionally-oriented masters, such as I/O psychology), I have been pleasantly surprised to see during Robert's job search that there are research openings in companies/government for people with psychology masters degrees. My last job was one that typically requires a masters degree but fortunately they put the advanced degree in "preferred" rather than "required" qualifications. Robert and I call my honors double-major B.A. from a top 20 university the "Rice masters" because it is so frequently equivalent to or superior to an actual masters degree from a less prestigious school in competing for jobs. However, I am seeing jobs that I would otherwise be qualified for (e.g. social science research jobs) based on skills and experience that I would not be considered for because I have "only" a bachelors degree and they specifically require a masters or higher. Of course, I have to assume that competition for such jobs is pretty tight and that even with the masters, they are tough to get. It's times like this that I am glad that no matter what happens, I will still have significant job experience and a well-developed skill set for re-entry into the non-academic job market.
Another Great Offer
I spoke with my potential advisor from the experimental psychology program (Program B) that I received an offer from in January but was waiting on funding information. They have offered me their top funding package, which includes a full tuition and fee waiver, a $13,500 research assistanceship (9 months, 20 hours per week), and a summer stipend of $2,500 to support an independent research project of my choosing. The advisor was really nice to talk to and I think the program in general and her lab in particular are wonderful. I would be very happy to go there.
But yeah, if the official letter from the other school (Program A) comes with the offer I have been given verbally, I am still going to choose that one. I think Program A sets me up better to pursue a variety of different theoretical research streams, while at Program B, I would be working in a more specific and applied area - I'm super interested in this applied area, of course, but (1) that could change, (2) it is more limiting when applying to PhD programs since it may fall more heavily into "health psychology" (and I don't want to get a PhD in that), and (3) I am primarily interested in the theoretical aspects of this applied area than the applications, if that makes sense. Program A also has three potential advisors with good research matches, while Program B has only the one. The coursework in the two programs is basically the same; both require a thesis but Program A requires a "major literature review paper" in lieu of the additional elective required at Program B.
All this being said, it was a fantastic offer and I feel great about getting it.
I still have not heard back from two programs, but as soon as I get the official letter from either of the psychology programs I have already talked to on the phone, I am going to withdraw my applications from them and turn down the two un/under-funded offers I already have. This is getting super-close to being a done deal.
But yeah, if the official letter from the other school (Program A) comes with the offer I have been given verbally, I am still going to choose that one. I think Program A sets me up better to pursue a variety of different theoretical research streams, while at Program B, I would be working in a more specific and applied area - I'm super interested in this applied area, of course, but (1) that could change, (2) it is more limiting when applying to PhD programs since it may fall more heavily into "health psychology" (and I don't want to get a PhD in that), and (3) I am primarily interested in the theoretical aspects of this applied area than the applications, if that makes sense. Program A also has three potential advisors with good research matches, while Program B has only the one. The coursework in the two programs is basically the same; both require a thesis but Program A requires a "major literature review paper" in lieu of the additional elective required at Program B.
All this being said, it was a fantastic offer and I feel great about getting it.
I still have not heard back from two programs, but as soon as I get the official letter from either of the psychology programs I have already talked to on the phone, I am going to withdraw my applications from them and turn down the two un/under-funded offers I already have. This is getting super-close to being a done deal.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Thought Experiment #2: Overconfidence
From Russo, JE and Schoemaker PJH, 1989, Decision Traps: Ten Barriers to Brilliant Decision-Making and How to Overcome Them:
For each of the following items, provide a low and high guess such that you are 90% sure that the correct answer falls between the two. Your challenge is to be neither too narrow (i.e. overconfident) or too wide (i.e. underconfident). If you successfully meet this challenge, you should have 10% misses -- that is, exactly one miss.
1. Martin Luther King Jr.'s age at death
2. Length of the Nile River (miles)
3. Number of countries that are members of OPEC
4. Number of books in the Old Testament
5. Diameter of the moon in miles
6. Weight of an empty Boeing 747 in pounds
7. Year in which Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born
8. Gestation period (in days) of an Asian elephant
9. Air distance from London to Tokyo (miles)
10. Deepest (known) point in the ocean (in feet)
Once you have your low and high guesses, scroll down...................
Answers:
1. 39 years
2. 4187 miles
3. 13 countries
4. 39 books
5. 2160 miles
6. 390,000 lb
7. 1756
8. 645 days
9. 5959 miles
10. 36,198 feet
How did you do? I missed two (books in the OT and weight of a Boeing 747), so I was a little bit overconfident, but not too terribly bad. But it was an effort even to do this well; I could easily have missed more.
"Less than 1% [of a sample of over 1,000 people] got 9 or more answers right. Most people missed 4-7 items (a surprise index of 40-70%), indicating a substantial degree of overconfidence.
...Calibration is the degree to which confidence matches accuracy. A decision-maker is perfectly calibrated when, across all judgments at a given level of confidence, the proportion of accurate judgments is identical to the expected probability of being correct. In other words, 90% of all judgments assigned a .90 probability of being correct are accurate, 80% of all judgments assigned a probability of .80 are accurate, etc.
...The most effective way to improve calibration seems to be simple: Stop to consider reasons why your judgment may be wrong."
Scott Plous, The Psychology of Judgment and Decision-Making
For each of the following items, provide a low and high guess such that you are 90% sure that the correct answer falls between the two. Your challenge is to be neither too narrow (i.e. overconfident) or too wide (i.e. underconfident). If you successfully meet this challenge, you should have 10% misses -- that is, exactly one miss.
1. Martin Luther King Jr.'s age at death
2. Length of the Nile River (miles)
3. Number of countries that are members of OPEC
4. Number of books in the Old Testament
5. Diameter of the moon in miles
6. Weight of an empty Boeing 747 in pounds
7. Year in which Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born
8. Gestation period (in days) of an Asian elephant
9. Air distance from London to Tokyo (miles)
10. Deepest (known) point in the ocean (in feet)
Once you have your low and high guesses, scroll down...................
Answers:
1. 39 years
2. 4187 miles
3. 13 countries
4. 39 books
5. 2160 miles
6. 390,000 lb
7. 1756
8. 645 days
9. 5959 miles
10. 36,198 feet
How did you do? I missed two (books in the OT and weight of a Boeing 747), so I was a little bit overconfident, but not too terribly bad. But it was an effort even to do this well; I could easily have missed more.
"Less than 1% [of a sample of over 1,000 people] got 9 or more answers right. Most people missed 4-7 items (a surprise index of 40-70%), indicating a substantial degree of overconfidence.
...Calibration is the degree to which confidence matches accuracy. A decision-maker is perfectly calibrated when, across all judgments at a given level of confidence, the proportion of accurate judgments is identical to the expected probability of being correct. In other words, 90% of all judgments assigned a .90 probability of being correct are accurate, 80% of all judgments assigned a probability of .80 are accurate, etc.
...The most effective way to improve calibration seems to be simple: Stop to consider reasons why your judgment may be wrong."
Scott Plous, The Psychology of Judgment and Decision-Making
Monday, March 9, 2009
Head Start
This morning I got a jump on my future job as a research methods lab instructor - a guy in the library computer lab asked the lab student-worker if she knew SPSS and she said, sorry no clue. He said, that's okay, I'm just totally confused by this assignment. I offered to help him, and 30 minutes later, he had finished his assignment (which appeared to be for a macro econ course since the rows of data were economic and demographic indicators for various countries). I did occasionally have a crisis of "oh man, how does a person do this from the menu toolbar?" since I do most of my work in syntax. But we got it done, and I felt glad to have helped the guy out.
I was similarly utterly confused when I had to do my first assignment using R (an open source statistical programming language) and had nothing but an online manual and some example code from my professor to go on. Fortunately, after I figured out a couple of key points (write the commands in an editor, then paste it in; oops, don't modify the professor's code in Word because all the auto-correct things in that program make it a non-usable code editor - like the tendency to make a minus sign into a longer dash*) and Robert interpreted a bit of stat-speak into actual English, I was able to do it pretty easily.
*Note: the professor made this same mistake himself and it took him and one of my class-buddies even longer to figure it out during office hours than it took me at home, so I didn't feel quite so stupid.
Today I also had to hugely disappoint the marketing professor I am working for this semester when she asked me if I could continue working with her over the summer and next fall. This led the research group of three professors to talk about finding a replacement for me. "Perhaps we can find a clone?" one said. Another said, "There's no chance of that, but I hope we can find somebody who is basically competent." I hope they do actually find a replacement (unlike the "real" job I had before this one).
I'm almost done with my lit review for our project, and am now having that sort of crazy, sort of dripping-with-power feeling of being extremely knowledgeable about a narrow line of research. I'm quite excited that I am going to start doing the hypothesis testing analysis next, probably starting by next week. It's been too long since I've worked with analysis of variance techniques, and I'm looking forward to getting back to my analytical roots with this after living in the land of the regression analysis for so long. (OK, there will be regression also, but that's sort of inescapable when there's survey data involved.) Overall, I'm enjoying working on this project a lot and am feeling good about the quality of work I'm doing. I could really see myself doing this for a living, you know?
I was similarly utterly confused when I had to do my first assignment using R (an open source statistical programming language) and had nothing but an online manual and some example code from my professor to go on. Fortunately, after I figured out a couple of key points (write the commands in an editor, then paste it in; oops, don't modify the professor's code in Word because all the auto-correct things in that program make it a non-usable code editor - like the tendency to make a minus sign into a longer dash*) and Robert interpreted a bit of stat-speak into actual English, I was able to do it pretty easily.
*Note: the professor made this same mistake himself and it took him and one of my class-buddies even longer to figure it out during office hours than it took me at home, so I didn't feel quite so stupid.
Today I also had to hugely disappoint the marketing professor I am working for this semester when she asked me if I could continue working with her over the summer and next fall. This led the research group of three professors to talk about finding a replacement for me. "Perhaps we can find a clone?" one said. Another said, "There's no chance of that, but I hope we can find somebody who is basically competent." I hope they do actually find a replacement (unlike the "real" job I had before this one).
I'm almost done with my lit review for our project, and am now having that sort of crazy, sort of dripping-with-power feeling of being extremely knowledgeable about a narrow line of research. I'm quite excited that I am going to start doing the hypothesis testing analysis next, probably starting by next week. It's been too long since I've worked with analysis of variance techniques, and I'm looking forward to getting back to my analytical roots with this after living in the land of the regression analysis for so long. (OK, there will be regression also, but that's sort of inescapable when there's survey data involved.) Overall, I'm enjoying working on this project a lot and am feeling good about the quality of work I'm doing. I could really see myself doing this for a living, you know?
Friday, March 6, 2009
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