Grad School: How Do I “Get Research Experience” for an I/O Psychology Master’s/Ph.D.?
Grad School Series: Applying to Graduate School in Industrial/Organizational Psychology
Starting Sophomore Year: Should I get a Ph.D. or Master’s? | How to Get Research Experience
Starting Junior Year: Preparing for the GRE | Getting Recommendations
Starting Senior Year: Where to Apply | Traditional vs. Online Degrees | Personal Statements
Alternative Path: Managing a Career Change to I/O | Pursuing a PhD Post-Master’s
Interviews/Visits: Preparing for Interviews | Going to Interviews
In Graduate School: What to Expect First Year
Rankings/Listings: PhD Program Rankings | Online Programs Listing
So you want to go to graduate school in industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology? Lots of decisions, not much direction. I bet I can help!
While my undergraduate students are lucky to be at a school with I/O psychologists, many students interested in I/O psychology aren’t at schools with people they can talk to. I/O psychology is still fairly uncommon in the grand scheme of psychologists; there are around 7,000 members of SIOP, the dominant professional organization of I/O, compared to the 150,000 in the American Psychological Association. As a result, many schools simply don’t have faculty with expertise in this area, leading many promising graduate students to apply elsewhere. That’s great from the perspective of I/O psychologists – lots of jobs – but not so great for grad-students-to-be or the field as a whole.
As a faculty member at ODU with a small army of undergraduate research assistants, I often find myself answering the same questions over and over again about graduate school. So why not share this advice with everyone?
This week, I’d like to talk about an important step in preparation to enter grad school: How do I get “research experience”?
The amount of research experience you need really depends on your answer to the first big question. If you’re planning to go into a Master’s program, research experience is nice but not required. If you’re planning to go into a Ph.D. program, it’s a must if you want to get into even a slightly competitive program. Remember, almost everyone that wants a Ph.D. is smart; you need to distinguish yourself from other applicants in other ways, and lab experience is an important way to do that.
If you are at a school with a sizable research-oriented psychology program (typically large public universities), then you’ve got it easy; there are probably lots of faculty actively looking for undergraduate research assistants (URAs or sometimes just RAs). The easiest way to become an RA at such a school is to ask one of the faculty that can vouch for you. For example, if you were vocal in your Personality Psych class and you have a good relationship with that instructor, ask that person to help you find a URA position. Even if s/he doesn’t have a lab or isn’t looking, you’ll still get pointed in the right direction. And believe me, as faculty, a good word about your trustworthiness from a colleague will go a long way. Even if I’m not actively looking for URAs, if another faculty member tells me, “I had a GREAT student and she wants to be an RA,” I’ll often bring that student on board anyway.
You might wonder why trustworthiness is an important quality in a URA – it is in fact the most important quality. This is because the primary role of an URA is simply to show up where you need to show up, on time and without incident. We don’t expect URAs to advance the cause of science – we know you’ll be trained later as a graduate student to do that. Instead, we expect you to fill the vital roles of data coder, session proctor, and recruiter. These roles are the front lines of research. You cannot yet imagine how frustrating it is to develop the perfect research study, schedule a URA to run the session, and then to get a series of panicked e-mails from undergraduate research participants at the door of your research lab with no one to meet them. Avoid that, prove that you are reliable, and that’s also something we can comment on in our recommendation letters – something other faculty are looking for.
So what if you’re motivated to pursue an I/O degree but there aren’t any I/O research labs to join? Not a problem. You see, research faculty in I/O know that we are a somewhat rare commodity, and most of us understand that working in an I/O lab is unattainable for many qualified applicants. So experience is an I/O lab is not critical; you just need experience in any psychology lab. This shows us that you know what you’re getting into and understand what research really involves. I/O experience is certainly better – but if you simply don’t have access to it, we understand.
Now we get to the difficult cases: what if you’re at a college without any psychology researchers? I’ve heard a number of approaches to this problem, including working by remote at other universities (some faculty will take virtual URAs), summer research assistantships (these are often called REU programs), and simply traveling to the big university a few towns over a few times per week. If you want to go to graduate school, especially if you want a Ph.D., you need research experience and a close working relationship with faculty if you want good chances at getting in. Do whatever it takes. And fortunately, if you end up having to go to all this extra effort, you have an added advantage: it’ll be clear that you’re a serious applicant worth consideration.
The results of a poll by Saatchi & Saatchi have recently been floating around the blogosphere indicating that the majority of people want gameification at work. As with any time an online “expert” makes such a reveal, I wanted to check to make sure that methodologically, the conclusions it is drawing (i.e. people want gameification!) are valid given the data and approach it took.
To begin, here are some general details. The study was conducted via an online survey between May 11 and May 17 with 2004 US respondents, half of which were women. Ages ranged from 18-44. The recruiting strategy is not very clear in the materials provided by Saatchi & Saatchi. They only say that subjects were “recruited via email from Ipsos MediaCT’s Sample Community.” Ipsos is a huge international survey company, but I am not familiar with “MediaCT” or their “sample communities.”
A little research on the Ipsos MediaCT’s Sample Community turns up this document from Ipsos MediaCT. As far as I can tell, Ipsos MediaCT passively collects data from consumers as they traverse Ipsos’ client websites. This is a selling point according to the Ipsos document; with their samples, you aren’t tapping people who have completed surveys before, which is a methodological weakness (if all surveys come from the same core group of people, you are less sure that new surveys will generalize outside of that group). It’s not clear how e-mail addresses are harvested, but spyware is really the only answer I can come up with. That’s not necessarily bad from a methodological point of view (although it’s a little fishy that this information is not easily accessible), although it might be unethical.
There are also a number of odd features in the way that data is reported. For example, the report says, “50% of the US online population between the ages of 18 and 44 play social games on a daily basis.” In terms of realistically deploying gameification in an organization, we’re concerned with the entire US population – not just those already online, nor just those involved in this survey. Given that no information about sampling is really provided (see above), we don’t have any frame of reference for what “US online population” means.
As to why that might matter, consider this information buried in the Appendix: only 6% of those sampled have less than a high school education and 21% with high school but no college. Most jobs where gameification would be most easily applicable (and probably well-received) are not high complexity jobs (lawyer, doctor); they are entry-level jobs like basic retail and service industries, where high school educations are less common. Would gameification work for this group? Even if we were to ignore the peculiarities with the reporting here, the answer is simply not provided; “interesting” tidbits have been cherry-picked from the data and a comprehensive background is not presented.
Then there’s this gem, which spurred the popularity of this poll in general: “Among respondents who are employed, 55% would be interested in working for a company that offers games as a way to increase productivity.” The realities of gameification (i.e., game-based incentive systems) versus the vision of gameification that most employees might have when they see a question on a survey (i.e., let’s add FUN!) may be very different. And of course, note the very peculiar limiting to only those who are employed. If the unemployed don’t want to work for a company that offers games, wouldn’t that be a pretty bad sign?
So who really wants gameification at work? At this point, we don’t really know. And should we trust this data otherwise? I’ll give my standard advice: Trust it as much as you trust anything on the Internet.
One of my core personal missions is to convince the corporate world that gameification is a valuable tool in the arsenal of HR strategists for encouraging particular behaviors from their employees.
From a mechanical standpoint, gameification is no different from any traditional reward system. When you earn “points” for eating regularly at your favorite sub shop, you’re getting all the rewards that gameification can offer. Perhaps even more so, as points at the sub shop are probably tied to a free sub! But there is an important difference between the sub shop’s loyalty program and gameification as HR can use it: fun. Gameified reward systems are not only rationally “a good idea” but are also themselves enjoyable to participate in.
Convincing management that the workplace can (and should) be fun is a surprisingly difficult task. In the United States at least, there is a perception that work and play should be kept far apart. I’ve attempted to make my own contribution to the argument by publishing a piece on the online social network I developed with gameification elements as “Casual Social Games as Serious Games: The Psychology of Gameification in Undergraduate Education and Employee Training” in an upcoming text published by Springer-Verlag, Serious Games and Edutainment Applications. With gameification techniques in place, undergraduates took optional online multiple choice quizzes and called them fun, enjoyable, and rewarding. That’s power!
So given all that, I appreciate the effort by Socialcast to promote gameification with a big manager-friendly infographic (see below). It reports all sorts of interesting statistics, such as the low mean engagement of employees in the US workforce now, the expanding video gaming market, the wide variety of demographics (especially ages) now playing games, and the parallels between games and jobs.
It is potentially a smidge misleading though. While the infographic puts game mechanics and engagement right next to each other, it is essentially doing no more than wink wink, nudge nudge, they could be related! There’s not yet a whole lot of scientific evidence that game-focused programs actually do any good (at least, aside from my own and a handful of others). We also don’t really know the boundary conditions under which gameification works; for example, does the concept of leveling improve outcomes? And there’s absolutely nothing yet tying gameification to engagement, although I’ve got an open project right now that I hope will do just that (as long as the data look like I hope they will!).
Regardless, for now, the graphic does illustrate some interesting points; perhaps it will now be a part of my manager-convincing arsenal.
By the way, I use the term “gameification” instead of “gamification” quite purposefully. Why take the game out of gameification?
