Presenting your research at a conference? Should you present a poster or a paper? Here are some pros and cons of both. Poster Presentations Pros Easy to prepare Create a few summary sentences in PowerPoint, add some tables or figures, and you’re good to go. Interaction with people one-on-one Poster presentations are usually 2 hours, which means more opportunities to have…

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Graduate school applications aren’t easy to complete, especially if you apply to more than 3–5 schools. It can be difficult to organize the different requirements for each application and to keep track of your specifications of the right school for you. I’ve already written about the elements of a grad school application that you should include, such as showing professionalism and following directions. Now, I want to touch on a…

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As graduate students, we are constantly being evaluated, from papers to presentations to clinical work to theses and dissertations. In addition, we are being evaluated against very high standards. That is just the nature of the beast that is graduate school. I know for me, at times, it can feel like being under a microscope and that my every action is being secretly observed and assessed. While I know on…

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As you begin to narrow down your grad school choices to a  few or a larger pool (depending on how much money you have for applications), you will soon realize that you now have to fill out applications, write essays, and ask for recommendation letters. Here are a few tips for you to make it through the process without being overwhelmed. Follow Directions It seems like an obvious rule, but…

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Those of you in graduate school probably know the feeling of being somehow disconnected from the “real world.” In many ways, if we are not careful, graduate school can alienate us from our friends, families, and things that we used to enjoy. However, what I am talking about here is being in a different temporal world – a world where time stands still, yet simultaneously passes by in a single…

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Lots of grad students are afraid of failure. Let me tell you about one of my biggest mess-ups in grad school (and they still let me graduate)! It was the semester I completed my qualifying exam, proposed my dissertation, and started to run Experiment 1. I was the TA for a lower-level course with 80+ students. My reputation around the department was that I’m a pretty conscientious person. I…

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If you haven’t dreamed of attending a particular grad school for your whole life, or if you haven’t aimed your studies to attend a certain grad school, then looking for a grad school can be pretty overwhelming. In this post, I’m going to give you a few tips about how to look sift through the many graduate schools out there and how to narrow your choices so that you can…

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I have already touched a bit on what it looks like to apply for graduate school, but I wanted to make sure I included a few things that are needed in a grad school application. Graduate Record Examination (GRE) Scores I know a test doesn’t sound appealing when you have many other things going on while you’re trying to apply for graduate school. However, many graduate programs require that you…

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In this first part of my new series about graduate school applications, I wanted to inform you about the application process. The many hours that you will spend researching, writing, and finally deciding on a graduate program will soon become worth it when you receive the education that you deserve. One of the first things that you need to understand when it comes to graduate school applications is that you…

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I recently had the experience of expecting my first baby a month before I graduated. Throughout the process, I accidentally learned several tips to graduating on time with a PhD. Here is the third and final installment of dissertation tips that I learned along the way during my pregnancy. You don’t have to be pregnant to enact these tips, but you can learn from someone who’s been through the dissertation…

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