Top-ranked graduate programs in psychology are extremely competitive to get into (think 10% acceptance rates or less). Many ambitious students will focus on getting great grades in class and being hard-working undergraduate research assistants. While those are excellent first steps, for the most elite programs, they often simply aren’t enough on their own.
Below, I discuss some of the best techniques to take your applicant profile to the next level. These are high effort but also high payoff tasks. An easy way to outshine the competition is to do what other applicants won’t do.
When you consider doing any of these (or any other options you are considering), remember that in everything you do while you are preparing for grad school, you are primarily trying to demonstrate:
- High initiative, and
- Strong interest in and commitment to research.
If something you are working on doesn’t clearly demonstrate both to an admissions committee, move on to another strategy. Half of the battle in being a competitive applicant is directing your time and energy to the highest-value activities that admissions committees care about most.
Conduct Independent Research
Ask in an existing lab you work in if there is any project you can do independently. Sometimes the professor might have a small piece of a current project to break off for you, or you can ask if they have old data they never used to do a correlational analysis.
Your research is likely not something that is ever going to get published anywhere, but it will give you great experience with the process, plus hopefully a little feedback and constructive criticism from the professor.
However, there’s a decent chance you’ll receive a “no”. Don’t be discouraged – it won’t be because your professor doesn’t like you, but because they’re really busy people, and taking responsibility for supervising another project is one more task they don’t have the time to do. No one is going to be mad or annoyed that you asked.
Even if you are 99% sure there is nothing you can work on right now, it’s still worthwhile to ask. Why?
- For one, there’s a chance that if something comes up research-wise at a later date, the professor will think of you and offer you a role first.
- There’s also the chance that they will remember your initiative in asking. This should have a positive impact of their opinion of you, which will come out in your letters of recommendation.
Complete a Senior/Honors Thesis
Many schools have some form of senior year or upper-year project or paper (it is usually optional or part of being in a specific department or in an honors program). Senior theses are excellent ways to synthesize all your experiences and prove you are ready for grad school work. Look up how the process works at your school, and do whatever you need to in order to qualify to complete a thesis.
Senior theses have the added benefit of necessitating that you work closely with at least one professor, which should strengthen your letters of recommendation if you use that professor. You should also mention the specific research you did for your thesis in your SOP and in interviews.
Apply to NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUs)
If you are a freshman, sophomore, or junior in college (in other words, if you don’t have a bachelor’s degree yet and have at least one more summer before you graduate), you should seriously consider applying to at least one REU for the upcoming summer.
REUs are structured research opportunities tailored to undergraduates in a specific scientific area. Departments at universities receive funding from the NSF (National Science Foundation) to support a program of research. Students in the program will receive a stipend and usually housing or housing assistance.
Each university’s program manages their own application process and may have specific qualifications of applicants. Most REUs are summer programs, and application deadlines are often early that year (January through March).
The list for psychology research opportunities is under the “Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences” category here.
You can apply to as many programs as you want. Be willing to apply more broadly than your specific interests. This is about getting experience, not locking you into a field.
REUs are prestigious, look great on applications, and offer excellent research experience. They may also net you a strong letter of recommendation.
Apply to a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
If you are a US citizen and a college senior, apply for a Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) through NSF. These awards are both extremely prestigious and extremely competitive (and they also provide significant funding for graduate study). Deadlines are usually in early November.
Your application package will involve both a personal statement and a proposed plan of research. Writing the proposal may feel uncomfortable because you have probably never been in a position to propose your own study before. That’s okay. You’ll be competing against other non-graduate students who probably also have limited experience.
You will need to write extensively about your personal accomplishments. Large portions of this can either come from your SOP, if you’ve already written it, or it will be good material for you to later use in your SOP. Either way, it won’t be a waste of time.
Have at least one professor look over your two essays, and ask for feedback in particular on your proposed study. It doesn’t need to be groundbreaking, but it needs to have an angle that you believe to be understudied, in an area that merits further funding for research, and it needs to be feasible for a future graduate student to do. Your professors can help you shape your proposal so it fulfills these requirements.
Finally, you will need three letters of recommendation from your professors in order to be considered for the fellowship. This is an almost identical process to receiving letters of recommendation for your grad school applications. You will enter your recommenders’ email addresses, and the system will send them a secure email and link to upload their letters.
You may be wondering why you should bother applying to the GRFP, if these fellowships are so exclusive, unless you are a spectacular student. Apart from the obvious “nothing ventured, nothing gained” perspective:
- NSF also recognizes “runner’s up” applicants with Honorable Mentions. This recognition is also quite impressive and can go on your CV and grad school applications.
- Mentioning that you applied to an NSF fellowship on your grad school applications and in interviews can make a strong impression. Most students won’t even know to apply to this or take the time to.
- Planning out a proposal for research is the first of many times you will do this over the course of your graduate career. Gaining this experience early means you will have less to learn later.
- One interesting thing the GRFP does is give you feedback, regardless of whether you won anything or not. In that way, it’s similar to a grant application. Since you can apply for the fellowship again as a first-year graduate student, you will have your critiques from your previous application materials to work off of to craft your application for the new year.
Applying to the NSF fellowship is time-consuming and can be very nerve wracking, but the rewards are so great that it is probably worth sacrificing a little class or work time if you need to in order to finish this application.
Take an Advanced Statistics Class
Demonstrating strong statistical and quantitative methodology skills can be a powerful way to set your application apart. A frequent complaint by and of doctoral-level programs in research psychology is that many students are great on the theoretical side but weak on the quant side. More evidence of a strong quantitative background is generally always better.
- Taking an upper-level or graduate-level psychology-specific statistics class is generally the best (if you have that type of class at your school). If you can’t find that, look to see if any of the other social sciences departments at your school have an upper-level stats class. If that doesn’t exist or isn’t a good option, see if there are any upper level research methods you could take (again, preferably psychology specific, but anything in social sciences is okay).
- If you have the background or willingness to work very hard, you could take general statistics classes through your school’s math or statistics department. This is probably overkill unless you really don’t mind taking the class or it is imperative that you prove very strong quantitative skills on your application (for instance, if you are applying to a competitive program/professor that is quant intensive, your research interest necessarily involves heavy statistical analysis, or, of course, if you are applying to a quantitative psychology PhD program).
If you can’t take an official undergraduate or graduate-level statistics course for credit, statistics is fortunately fairly well covered in many online lessons and tutorials. Anything that expands your knowledge of descriptive and inferential statistics is helpful.
- Click here for Coursera’s statistics courses, which are structured online courses scheduled at specific dates.
- Khan Academy has a ton of video lectures on different topics in probability and statistics, very clearly organized.
Take a Graduate-Level Seminar
You may be able to get a graduate-level class to count as part of your degree plan in your major. Pick out one or two specific classes from the course listing, and then talk with your academic adviser to see if you can enroll in one. You may need to schedule a meeting with your department head afterward, but ask your adviser first about what you need to do.
Taking a graduate-level class (and getting an A in it) provides evidence to admissions committees that you are ready for advanced coursework. A seminar-style class is best because it will be more similar to most classes you will take in grad school, and it also provides you the opportunity to get to know the professor, who may be a source of a recommendation letter when you applying to programs.
Though taking a graduate class is advantageous, it is not so much so that you should put yourself in a tough financial situation to take it. If you can make it part of your normal degree plan or if it isn’t a financial burden to pay for another class, it may be worthwhile, but it’s not so vital that you strain yourself financially to take it.
Learn SPSS or R
If you haven’t had to use SPSS and R yet, you will soon. These are both statistical programming software that you will use often as a graduate student (there are other statistical programs, but at most psychology departments, SPSS or R will be taught). They have distinct pros and cons:
- SPSS has command line and graphical “point and click” options, while R is pure command line (though there are independently-developed graphical addons that get mixed reviews).
- SPSS is very expensive, though your university library likely has a few computer labs on campus with SPSS on them. You can also get a student license for about $100/year.
- R has a much steeper learning curve and can be glitchier, but it’s free and open source.
You don’t need to take an official class to teach you R or SPSS. For grad school application purposes (and research in general, usually) being self-taught is fine. All the matters is how effectively you can uses these programs, not who taught you.
There are many guides and tutorials online about how to use both programs to conduct basic statistical analyses of the type you will likely be using during your first couple of years of grad school.
- A high-quality, free guide for R is R for Beginners – CRAN.
- One of the most comprehensive sources of tutorials for SPSS is SPSS-Tutorials.com.
Be sure to discuss the proficiency you have gained in either or both programs in your SOP/interviews and mention your beginner-level skills on your CV.
What’s Next?
None of these are easy tasks. If they were, more graduate applicants would do them. And not every applicant will need to go this far – if you are applying to a master’s program or less competitive programs in less competitive fields, this may be unnecessary. But if you are applying to top PhD programs, especially in clinical, counseling, or social psychology, you need every advantage you can get. Even completing a couple of these items can strengthen your doctoral application profoundly.
