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How Do I Choose A Graduate Program?
Choose a program based upon your research interests as well as your personal and professional needs. The majority of graduate students go through this or a similar process. Ultimately, there are four main steps for deciding on which programs to apply to: (A) evaluate yourself, (B) rank order the program criteria based upon your interests and needs, (C) compile the list of available programs, (D) narrow your list based on your most important criteria.
A. First, Evaluate Yourself!!! 1. Evaluate your professional goals and personal needs. Why do you want to pursue a doctoral degree? Does your employment interest require a PhD? Do you wish to do applied work, basic research, teach in academia, or do clinical work? In terms of your professional interests, what coursework or program will you need to pursue your interests? What are your program needs in terms of financial assistance, location, length of program, transfer credits, faculty/student dynamics, focus of program (i.e., warm vs. cold climate, interdisciplinary vs. rigid structure, etc), full- or part-time program, or even family needs (i.e., you have a family and require certain course schedules, daycare, etc)? 2. Evaluate your research interests. What type of research interests you? Can you see yourself doing that research for the rest of your professional career? Do you have a specific area of research you wish to do or are your research interests more general in nature? If your interests are more general, you should begin examining specific topics in your research area to narrow your focus. Many programs will not accept students without having a clear and relatively defined research focus.
B. Examine Program Criteria Examine your student and professional needs of a doctoral program. Evaluate what type of program will work best for you in terms of program approach, program content, and program culture. Some applicants will identify very strongly with one particular approach or particular content areas, while others may be indifferent. If you feel very strongly about some of these program factors, then those should be major criteria used to decide which program to apply to. a) **Rank order these criteria (listed above) from most important to less important criteria. Realizing your personal and professional needs (in the ‘evaluate yourself’ area) will help you rank the criteria. b) The top criteria will reflect the most important aspects of program approach and content (i.e., those reflecting your research interests). c) The rest of the ranking list will reflect your more personal needs (i.e., culture, transfer credits, full/part time, funding opportunities, etc). d) Sometimes applicants will have extenuating circumstances placing more personal needs at the top of the list. For example, location of the program may become one of your top criteria for choosing a program, but it should not take precedence over your research interests. e) Note: some of the factors may not be important to you. If this is the case, do not worry about ranking them!
C. Compile the list of PhD programs in Developmental Psychology You can do this by looking at the Developmental Psychology APA Division website[1] and/or look at the Graduate Study in Psychology published by APA [2]. These lists will typically include programs in Developmental Psychology, Human Development, and Applied Developmental Psychology. If you already know the type of program you would like to apply to (Applied vs. Academic focus), then you can compile a list of only these programs.
D. Narrowing the List of Programs After compiling the list of programs, use your ranked criteria as a checklist. 1. First Pass: You will begin narrowing your list by your top criteria. As noted previously, your top criteria should be related to the approach and content areas listed above (i.e., this defines the doctoral program in relation to your own needs). The programs satisfying your top criteria will be those you explore in more detail. For example, if you really desire a program that has a strong research emphasis in language acquisition as well as an interdisciplinary perspective, narrow down your school list by these criteria. To do this, you may have to “dig a little deeper” by exploring the program websites, looking at faculty profiles (research interests, recent publications), looking at the programs degree requirements, and looking at courses offered. 2. Second Pass: Use the rest of your criteria to narrow the list to a manageable number (a good rule of thumb is 10 – 15 programs). You will probably notice that your list quickly narrows because the schools do not match all of your criteria. 3. Pass Three. Now you have narrowed your list down substantially to a handful of programs. At this point, it is usually a good idea to classify your potential programs based upon program ranks, in terms of extremely competitive to gain acceptance, moderately competitive, and least competitive. This information is available in APA graduate program reviews and published program reviews (i.e., look at acceptance rates). You should have several choices distributed across these three tiers. By doing so, you increase your probability of gaining acceptance into a program (instead of applying to schools that are ally extremely competitive). See next section!!
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