Erika Carlson Graduate student Social and Personality area

Graduates students tend to have one thing on their mind - how can I prepare myself for the job market? The answer tends to be: conduct lots of research and get your results published! These tasks become much easier when you work in a department that provides resources for conducting research, promotes collaboration, and minimizes time commitments to non-research related tasks (e.g., minimizing TA requirements). As a social/personality graduate student at Wash U, I can say that I am fortunate to be a part of such a department. Regarding material resources, Wash U provides graduate students with generous stipends, assists with travel costs to conferences and other professional meetings, and provides TA-exempt funding for dissertation work. The department also ensures that students have access to the equipment they need to conduct quality research. For example, I study social interactions, and to help me pursue this line of research, the department equipped my lab with interaction rooms, state of the art camera systems, and the latest behavioral coding and statistical software.

In addition to providing tangible resources for research such as funding and equipment, the department also provides the best intellectual resources – that is, brilliant, approachable faculty members who are leaders in their field and eager to discuss ideas with students. This is definitely one of my favorite things about Wash U - faculty members that are approachable and value students’ opinions and ideas. A great example of this is our personality area’s monthly journal club meetings. As a group, personality faculty and students pick a discussion topic with a related reading and spend an evening at a faculty member’s house discussing the issue. Last month, our group decided to discuss genetic research in the context of personality, and Bob Krueger, a leader in the field, answered our questions and shared his perspective on the latest developments in genetic research. Many faculty members at Wash U are also eager to collaborate across labs and even areas. For instance, several students in the personality area have had the opportunity to apply their research interests in personality to neuroscience (e.g., fMRI research), clinical psychology, memory and attention, health, and aging. The opportunities for collaboration make Wash U an ideal place for students who have broad research interests. Overall, I believe that the psychology department at Wash U provides students with the training and experience necessary for a successful and productive academic career while also providing students with a friendly, intellectual environment to explore their unique research interests.	The Personality and Self-Knowledge lab