The University’s Psychology Doctoral program awards funding to graduate students, with the goal being to fully fund each student for at least four years via full tuition waivers and stipends.
“In essence, you’re getting paid to get your PhD,” Dr. Joshua Clapp, an associate professor, said. “We’ll guarantee two, three, or four years of funding and will also often be able to fund people beyond that.”
Admission to the doctoral program occurs once per year; generally, acceptance is granted to students who have a bachelor’s degree in Psychology or a similar field who are looking to graduate with a PhD. Each year five to six students are accepted into the clinical program, and three to four are accepted into the experimental program.
“In the Clinical PhD program, the model is more of a mentorship model,” Dr. Clapp said. “So, when students are applying to work for different programs, they’re applying to work with a specific individual, as opposed to applying to the program.” Dr. Matt Gray, a professor, said, “Most of us at any given time, probably have about three or four doctoral students.”
Each faculty member in the program who is accepting students to mentor will select students who will work primarily with them in their research lab on campus. Oftentimes faculty members will suggest that students reach out to specific professors if they have similar research interests.
“I applied for my mentor, Dr. Kayla Burd,” Olivia Grella, a first-year doctoral student, said. “And she does research on jury decision making and perceptions. My research interest is in victim blaming and cases of sexual violence, so that research overlap is what really drew me here.”
Grella explained that there is a lot of work to be completed by students who are accepted into the program.
“I have classes, we take nine credits. And then in your first year we do a first-year project, which is doing an empirical study of our own that we work on with our advisor,” Grella said. “You are juggling a lot of different research projects at once.”
Despite the amount of work that is required for students to do within the program, Grella said, “I like it a lot. We’re all super collaborative, so it’s not a competitive program. We’re not competing with each other for funding or publications or things like that. It’s more like, if you’re interested in something and someone else is interested in it, you’ll just team up and work on it.”
Students who are interested in learning more are encouraged to reach out to the Department of Psychology on campus.
