7. FAQs and pro tips for prospective PhD applicants
1. Will you be reviewing applications for a student to begin Fall 2025? Yep! Please note that I will only review applications that are submitted through the UO application portal. I will not review application materials sent directly to my email.
2. Should I email you to express interest in applying to your lab? You do not need to email me just to let me know you’re applying to my lab. Those emails can be stressful for you to send but won’t have an impact on how I review your application. Save yourself the stress. However, if you have questions that would determine whether you’d like to apply and that weren’t answered elsewhere on my website, feel free to reach out to me and/or my current/previous mentees.
3. Can we set up a Zoom meeting? I do not schedule meetings with candidates before applications are due. (If we run into each other at a conference, that’s different.) I understand that meeting could provide applicants with better info on fit and what I’m like as a mentor and human. But it’s important to me that I review all application materials as fairly as possible, starting from as close to the same baseline for all applicants as possible. Plus, I just can’t accommodate the number of meeting requests I receive. If I were to meet with candidates who request meetings, I would have much less time to write papers and apply for grants. Me publishing less and applying for fewer grants could lead to me having fewer opportunities for future grad students. So me not meeting with applicants promotes me being the most effective mentor I can be to my current and future students.
4. Is UO’s program fully funded? Yes! Funding is guaranteed for the first four years. Funding in the fifth and sixth year may be available (has been available for many, many years but is not officially guaranteed). Funding is provided through graduate employment (GE) positions, which cover tuition and 95% of fees, and provide a stipend.
5. How much do you care about publications? Many if not all of the candidates I’ve historically invited to interview have at least one first-authored paper. However, I want to make clear that I don’t really care about whether you’ve written or published a first-authored paper. I care about the experiences you’ve had that prepared you for doctoral-level study in a research-heavy environment. Publications can be a way to document your preparation (and they’re the most common indicator thus far), but they’re not the only way.
There are hundreds of details and decisions that go into completing a study and writing a manuscript. A non-exhaustive list of these details includes things like:
- coordinating a study administratively (IRBs, progress reports)
- managing participant progress through a study
- collecting data (whether it’s self-report, interviews, psychophys, salivary samples, etc. etc. etc.)
- recoding variables
- structuring/managing data
- checking assumptions for statistical tests
- handling missing data
- conducting statistical analyses
- creating compelling data visualizations and/or tables
- conceptualizing a study idea
- conducting a literature review
- developing a coherent argument for a study
- writing clearly and succinctly
- recognizing the strengths and limitations of your study/data
- etc. etc. etc. (the list goes on)
In the vein of showing vs. telling (see document #6 in this series), if you’ve had publications by the time of applying, please don’t just tell me you’ve published X number of papers. I want you to also explain your experience with some of the above elements that go into writing a paper. Did you come up with the study idea? If so, how? What motivated it? Were you involved in data cleaning/management and/or running analyses? What specifically did you do? Did you stumble during the process? How and where did you stumble? How did you recover from the stumble?
If you haven’t had publications by the time of applying, please tell me about your experience with any/some of the above elements that go into writing a paper–even if they haven’t culminated in you participating in or completing the paper-writing process yet.
Whether you have publications or not, I will be looking for students whose statements of purpose convey the experiences and skills that show that they’re well prepared for this next stage of training, which will involve lots of involvement with writing and research (especially lots of involvement with managing and analyzing data. So if you have these experiences/skills, definitely highlight them!).
6. Do I need to have research and/or clinical experience related to eating disorders and/or suicide in order to apply? No. If you do have these experiences, amazing–please tell me about them! If you don’t have these experiences, no worries. Your skills and knowledge from other relevant experiences will probably translate to my topic areas. However, it will be important for you to explain in your statement of purpose why you’re interested in specializing in eating disorders and/or suicide. How did you become interested in either or both of these topics? What interests you specifically about these topics? What types of questions do you want to study related to these topics?
7. Do I need to take the GRE? Nope. UO does not require the GRE.
8. Pro tip re. application how-tos. There are lots of resources out there to help guide you through effectively applying to clinical psychology PhD programs. Here are a few:
Getting Into Grad School peer workshop series
List of eating disorder-focused clinical psychology PhD faculty (compiled by the Academy for Eating Disorders Early Career SIG)
List of suicide-focused clincial psychology PhD faculty (I don’t know who to credit for this–if you know, please let me know so that I can update!)
9. Pro tip re. faculty rankings. Some application portals, including UO’s, ask applicants to rank order their faculty of interest. I typically only review materials of applicants who rank me as their #1 preference/professor of interest. I do this because last year (my first year taking a student) there were ~100 applications with me ranked first. There were 50+ additional applications where I was ranked lower in folks’ lists.
I review applications thoroughly. But I have only 2ish weeks to review all apps, complete preliminary interviews (if applicable), and invite selected candidates to interview. Given the number of applications and the time crunch to review apps, it is just not feasible for me to thoroughly review materials of the applicants who didn’t rank me as their first preference. So, I recommend thinking critically about who you rank as your #1 preference. (And to be clear, ranking professors of interest is not personal and is not a popularity contest. Ranking is purely a tool to make sure applications get funneled to the right people.)
I also recommend thinking critically about how many professors you rank. There are multiple reasons why an applicant might rank 2+ faculty in their application. One reason might be because an applicant has unique and niche interests that genuinely overlap with 2 professors’ expertise. For example, if an applicant was specifically interested in enhancing exposure therapy to more effectively treat eating disorders and a given dept had both an eating disorder expert and an exposure therapy expert, it would be quite effective for the applicant to rank both of these faculty and to state their unique interests clearly in their statement of purpose.
However, other applicants might rank multiple profs because they think that ranking multiple profs will increase their chances of any one prof inviting the applicant for an interview. To try to cover their bases, the applicant writes in their statement of purpose that they’d be interested in topic 1 with professor A, topic 2 with professor B, topic 3 with professor C, etc. In my opinion, this approach comes across as surface level and makes it seem that the applicant’s research interests are just not well developed yet (which, by the way, is understandable! But in my mind this is an indicator that the applicant needs more time and guidance to sort out their interests). It’s almost like the applicant is distributing their eggs among multiple baskets. For me, this approach decreases chances of an interview invite because having clearly developed interests (in eating disorders and/or suicide) is an important criterion I use when evaluating applications. Thus, compared to the “eggs distributed among multiple baskets” approach, I’m much more likely to invite for an interview applicants who put all their eggs into one basket; and an applicant would put all their eggs ino one basket because their research interests are so well defined that they only align with 1-2 faculty. (And again, remember that everything on this site is my opinion. Other reasonable people may feel and approach this stuff differently.)
