The Psychology Graduate Applicant’s Portal (www.psychgrad.org)

Abstract

Applying to graduate school presents a novel situation to students. Paradoxically, they need to be both aggressive and discriminating researchers. Without a schema for determining what information is essential and how to acquire it, students are more prone to abort their research too soon, make costly decision errors, and make the graduate application process more worrisome than is necessary. The Psychology Graduate Applicant's Portal offers such a schema for filtering through the masses of information on the application process. The Portal assists students in researching, decision making, managing time, and handling anxiety. Existing Resources for the Graduate Applicant There are, of course, many very helpful sources of information-several that academic advisors would consider essential for a student to consult. It is difficult to imagine a student not consulting the American Psychological Association's (APA, 2000) Graduate Study in Psychology. This reference work is a complete listing of graduate programs in the United States and Canada that contains each program's admission requirements, median scores on GPA and admission exams, and application and acceptance statistics. One of the most helpful sections of Graduate Study in Psychology is the categorization of the graduate programs by program area (developmental, clinical, cognitive, etc.). This resource provides an important starting point for a student in locating and narrowing down the range of schools to consider. There are two other resources that provide a broad range of information for the prospective graduate applicant: APA's (1993) Getting In and Patricia Keith-Spiegel's (1990) Complete Guide to Graduate School Admission. These two books are very similar, and the authors present comprehensive overviews of the steps required in deciding to apply to graduate school that can be simplified to the following areas of knowledge: (1) choosing which programs to apply to, (2) the steps in the application process itself, and (3) what to do when you hear back from the schools. One important contribution of these books is that they suggest a timeline for all the application steps and the various components of the decision-making process. This is important for the prospective applicant, since time management can be difficult in a novel and uncertain situation. Other sources of information are the myriad Web sites, mostly sponsored by individuals in psychology departments, that contain information about applying to graduate school. The goal of most of these sites is to provide some kind of basic information to the undergraduates who are at the host institution. The information on such sites is rarely comprehensive and often consists of links to other sites, rather than content.