The Graduate Office provides
support to almost 200 graduate students.
Lesley Newton and Kathy Hatfield
manage admissions, recruiting, student awards, and budgets; they provide
efficient organization and good advice to
students. Monique Ward served as
Interim Chair while Scott Paris was on
sabbatical during winter term 2005,
and we thank her for work on behalf of students. The Graduate Committee
included Laura Kohn-Wood, Jeff Hutsler,
Daphna Oyserman, Ramaswami
Mahalingam, Ellen Hamilton, Christian
Waugh, Adam Krawitz, Anne-Marie
McEvoy-Conley, and Michelle Segar; they met throughout the year to supervise
awards, curricula, and student
affairs. Thanks to all of them for their
service to the department.
This was another successful year
in many ways. Applications to doctoral
programs in Psychology increased again
this year. There were 698 total applications,
including 496 women and 149
students of color, not including applications
to joint programs with Education,
Social Work, and Women’s Studies.
Across all ten joint programs and areas,
41 new students will begin their studies
in Fall’05, of those 26 are female and 15
are minority students. The new students
are highly qualified academically with a
mean GRE Verbal of 646, Quantitative
of 719, and Writing of 5.5. Six of the new
students have won external fellowships,
either domestic or international, to
support their graduate studies.
Excellent teaching by our
graduate students remains a high priority
in the department. Andrew Smiler,
a postdoctoral fellow in Developmental Psychology, taught “Psychology of
Teaching and Learning” this year,
assisted by Rebecca Stotzer. We are
pleased that Amy Rauer and Nicole
Zarrett were selected as Outstanding
GSIs in a campus-wide Rackham
Graduate School competition.
The Graduate Council student
group organizes social events, helps with
recruiting, and chooses the recipients of
the Pat Gurin lecture award, who present
their research during Recruitment
Weekend. This year’s winners were Ciara
Smalls, Shawna Lee, and Hannah Faye
Chua. (For more about their presentations,
see below.)
During the year, 32 Psychology
graduate students completed their
dissertations and graduated. Seventy-five percent of the new graduates accepted academic positions in colleges
and universities—of those, one-third
accepted postdoctoral positions and two-thirds
went to new faculty positions; the remaining 25% of our doctoral graduates
accepted positions in business, industry,
or other settings.
For a list of our graduate student award recipients for 2004-2005, visit this page.
Pat Gurin Lectures
Ciara Smalls: The impact of previous
parent school experiences and parent
involvement on child academic
attitudes and behaviors. We explored
how parents’ past experiences and
demographic characteristics influence
academic involvement with their youth.
Parents’ past experiences included their
own school experiences as well as support
they received from their parents.
We also explored how past experiences
and academic involvement influence
various study attitudes and behaviors reported
by youth. The results suggest that
parents with more positive past experiences
have youth who demonstrate more
academic persistence and willingness to
be labeled as high achievers.
Shawna Lee: Balancing acts: The
possible selves of low-income women.
We analyzed the possible selves—the
future oriented component of self-concept—among women transitioning
from welfare to work. Possible selves are
context-dependent: participants in job
training programs had a higher proportion
of work-oriented possible selves, in
contrast to women applying for welfare
benefits, who were more focused on
child-oriented possible selves. Furthermore,
priming women to think about the
difficulties of work increased the salience
of child-oriented possible selves.
Hannah Faye Chua: High-level scene
perception: Eyetracking evidence comparing
Chinese and Americans.
We measured the eye movements of Americans and Chinese participants as
they viewed pictures having a focal object
on a complex background. Striking differences
in eye movements were observed as
early as after the first saccade, and within
the first second of viewing the pictures.
Congratulations to our 2004-05 PhD Graduates!
