Upcoming Reddit AMA about I/O Psychology Graduate School Applications

As a companion to my grad school series, I will be hosting a week-long AMA in the IO Psychology subreddit. Although it’s an AMA, I suspect that most of my time will be spent responding to questions about getting into graduate school in I/O psychology! My post about choosing between the Master’s and Ph.D. already has 400+ comments, so I guess people like my advice! This will be a relaxed sort of AMA, taking place over a week, from Wednesday, Oct 21, 2015 around 6PM through about the same time on Tuesday, Oct 27.

Here is the text of the announcement on Reddit:

We are proud to announce our next AMA will be Richard Landers starting on Wednesday October 21st at around 6 pm. He will be keeping the AMA thread going through Tuesday October 27th so there will be a lot of time for people to ask their questions. Feel free to tell your friends to bring their questions too! With the extended timeline it is reasonable to expect responses back will be at least a bit delayed from our more compact AMAs, so do note that.

Below is a Bio and AMA information from Richard:

Richard Landers is a very recently tenured Associate Professor of Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Old Dominion University. After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 2009, he began his research program on improving the use of Internet technologies in talent management, especially the measurement of knowledge, skills and abilities, the selection of employees using innovative technologies, and learning conducted via the Internet. Recent topics have included game-based learning, game-based assessment, gamification, unproctored Internet-based testing, mobile devices including smartphones and tablets, immersive 3D virtual environments and virtual reality, and social media and online communities. His research and writing has been featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Science News Daily, Popular Science, Maclean’s, and Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. He currently serves as Associate Editor of the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, on the editorial board of Technology, Knowledge and Learning, and is part of the steering committee for the Coalition for Technology in Behavioral Science. He was Old Dominion University’s 2014 and 2015 nominee for the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia Rising Star Outstanding Faculty Award. He is also author of a statistics textbook, A Step-by-Step Introduction to Statistics for Business (SAGE), and editor of the upcoming Social Media in Employee Selection (Springer) alongside sub-reddit moderator iopsychology.

If you’ve been looking into graduate school in I/O Psychology, you’ve probably seen Richard’s blog, which is the most popular resource on the Internet for getting into I/O grad school: http://iopsychology.info

On that website, he’s compiled a lot of advice on the most effective strategies for getting into both Master’s and Ph.D. programs, including a compilation of available PhD program rankings and more general guidance. The most popular page on the site (https://neoacademic.com/2011/06/14/grad-school-should-i-get-a-ph-d-or-masters-in-io-psychology/) currently has 431 comments, mostly questions from grad school hopefuls, about half of which are replies from Richard.

In this AMA, Richard will be primarily giving honest advice and answering questions about getting into graduate school in I/O from the perspective of an I/O faculty member selecting students into a fairly competitive I/O PhD program, but it’s an AMA, so any questions not covered by an NDA are fair game!