HIGH IMPACT COFFEE HOUR

Tune in to our conversation with Andrea, a third-year PhD student in Clinical Psychology based in Chicago, about her path to grad school with a background in social work and what her day-to-day life looks like. Andrea also breaks down how she structured her career according to her long-term goals, and why she chose to pursue a PhD in Clinical Psychology. Finally, the three of us discussed the similarities and differences in each of our path to academia and current experiences.

A few months later, we are back! Kat and I have been busy with grad school, but we finally sat down and recorded an episode in light of recent events, specifically the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In this episode, we talk about how we have been dealing with the current news cycle, how we try to navigate the terrains of 2022, and how we experience these events as 20-something grad students struggling to find meaning and focus in our everyday work at the same time of war, continuing pandemic, and diminishing human rights. We find ourselves questioning a lot, and there is a glimpse of desperation, anger and frustration, but we know we aren't shouting into the void: through commiseration and candidness, we come to undertand that we are not alone, and that you may be feeling a lot of the things that we are, too. Hope y'all take care out there and, if applicable, acknowledge the disruption that politics has brought to either yourself or someone you love, for what is political is personal. 

Informative & interesting articles:

A few resources below:

Tune in to our conversation with Cas, the host of Clinically Psyched Pod (a podcast about the hidden curriculum of grad admissions to Clinical Psychology programs), where she talks about her interests and knowledge in Sexual Psychology! We also discuss her ongoing journey to grad school and share our own experiences and difficulties in our respective applications cycles. Shows mentioned: Succession (available on HBO), Sex Education (available on Netflix), Pop Culture Detective (YouTube channel); this came up in our post-recording chitchat and requires reader's discretion (TW: may elicit the familiar urge to burn down the patriarchy even before climate change ends us all; I was too caffeinated for this).

Keywords: PhD experiences, productivity tips

Tune in as we share how our first year of PhD program is going and went, what we have been up to, where our focuses are! We also talk about how we organize and manage our research life, finding a work-life balance, and how we establish a support systems. This episode also includes our productivity tips and other techniques that we have tried out, what worked for us and what didn't. If you are curious about our PhD lives, or anywhere between thinking of applying to PhD programs and well underway into yours, here is a snippet of our individual experiences that hopefully provides some insight into what a first year can look like! Mentioned in this episode: Ekim's spreadsheet planner for organizing their grad life; free and available.

Keywords: Chronic pain, fibromyalgia, traumatic life experiences, career path

Tune in for our conversation with Ariane, a PhD student at the University of Manchester whose project aims to develop diagnostic tool for chronic pain treatment in clinical settings using Bayesian models. We talk about her career trajectory and her experience in her PhD so far, as well as what it means to take a hollistic approach to understanding the human mind. Ariane completed her Master's degree in Neuroscience at the University of St. Andrews, where she studies stress and decision-making, and transitioned into pain research. Pain can be a wonderfully existential topic that is simultaneously subjective and objective. If you are interested in the role of early traumatic experiences in shaping experiences of pain later in life, and if you occasionally ponder about the adaptive brain, this episode is a gem!

Keywords: Autism, consciousness, connectivity, development, cognition

Tune in to an episode with Dr. Lucina Uddin, head of the Brain Connectivity and Cognition Lab situated at the University of Miami, where we learn about her career trajectory and thoughts on autism and cognitive flexibility.  Taken from her lab website, they are broadly focused on investigating the relationship between brain connectivity and cognition in typical and atypical development. Within a cognitive neuroscience framework, their research combines functional connectivity analyses of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data and structural connectivity analyses of diffusion-weighted imaging data to examine the organization of large-scale brain networks supporting high-level cognitive processes. This is an episode that none of you would want to miss out on!

Keywords: race, ethicity, mental health services, intervention

Tune in to an episode with Tasfia, a graduate student at Emory University and research coordinator at Harvard University. We dive into her undergraduate Honors Thesis on cultural tailoring in mental health services specific to race and ethnicity, where she engages in qualitative research and develops her own codebook. She also discusses her role as a Research Coordinator and her future research aspirations.

Keywords: career, work-life balance, decision fatigue 

Tune in to our chat with Simone, where she tells us about her career path, thoughts on work-life balance, and offers candid advice to graduate students on the importance of finding focus. Simone is an Experimental Social Psychologist at the University of Cambridge, where she is also a fellow at Jesus College. In this episode, we also discuss one of her recent papers, Quantifying the Cost of Decision Fatigue: Supoptimal Risk Decisions in Finance, with Dr. Tobias Baer on decision fatigue applied to the finance sector, specifically how credit loan officers decide on loan applications. If you're interested in the decision-making literature and cognitive load, do check it out! 

Keywords: career path, addiction

Tune in for a conversation with Ara, an incoming Clinical Psych PhD student at the University of Rhode Island this fall, where she talks about her career path to date and experience with addiction research. We also discuss the future of research in Clinical Psych using virtual reality and psychedelics. Ara is also a co-founder of Psychin' Out, a Slack resource for grad applicants.

Keywords: career path, grad apps, programming struggles

Thinking of grad school? Join us for a special episode (rant) with Emily Turner for a candid talk of the good, the bad, and the ugly on her grad school quest without a psych background, where we also discuss the barriers in academia as grassroots researchers! Resources mentioned: Psychin'Out (Twitter, Slack), OpenAcademics, "Why Women Can't Program" (article; well, we can and we do), more info on the gender gap in STEM, and a paper that looked at female 6-12th graders' confidence in math and science. Finally, our personal recommendation of ZedStatistics (free, not sponsored). May you find the resource that works for you!