Finding a Research Mentor?

bsomerville writes "As an aspiring social scientist preparing to apply to Ph.D. programs, I'm keen to find a faculty mentor somewhere in North America who shares my research interests. This is more difficult than I thought it would be. While links to program websites are readily available, I'm surprised to find no comprehensive collection of faculty research interests in my field (clinical psychology). Instead this information is buried several levels down in each university website. Is this a common problem across all fields? Is there some inherent reason why no wiki-type Web resource exists to meet this need? It seems like a text-searchable database could be built fairly quickly and maintained by users, saving countless aspiring grad students thousands of clicks through university websites."

Comments

Re:Counting Psychologists on Toesies

[DynaSoar]

Clinical is a treatment oriented field, not a research oriented.

I am a professor of psychology (but not clinical psychology) at a research university. Parent poster does not know what s/he is talking about.

Again, this is completely wrong. Any APA-accredited program in clinical psychology will require you to study neuroscience, cognitive psychology, social psychology, etc. in addition to more practice-oriented training in assessment, treatment, etc.

Moreover, clinical scientists do basic research in pretty much every area of psychology. My department has clinical psychologists who do neuroimaging, endocrinology, electrophysiology, as well as all manner of behavioral methods, etc. as part of their basic research toolkits. They difference between them and the rest of us is that they are typically focused on understanding psychopathology, whereas (say) a non-clinical cognitive neuroscientist might be studying attention without necessarily working toward understanding its role in ADHD etc.

What complete bullshit. This is a fucking troll, and a bad one. If you were for real and paid any attention to the subject matter at hand, you'd have recognized APA's latest assessment of the demographics of the field from Monitor. And even a half assed troll would have noticed I said I was quoting APA. I knew what I was talking about, I knew where it came from, and if you have a problem with it that just proves you're so deficient in clue receptors that you can't possibly be real.

Sure, the arrangements you suggest are possible but by no means common. The arrangement of departments and programs are more different than similar, and vary at each place over time, because they're based on the people, not a predetermined structure. And when people come and go the arrangement changes more or less according to their contribution to the department's structure and functioning. And in case your dipstick still shows a quart low on your attention neurotransmitters you do realize I am talking about department structure and not program requirements imposed from outside, right? You see, I said that but I've said other things you completely failed to notice.

And don't try to give me that shit about they "study" all those fields. They get one 3 hour class only in most of them. That's not studying a field, that's familiarization. It's so they can recognize it as something they've seen and not just stare blankly and drool like some dizzy twit sitting around white knuckling a ten year tenure at some little 4 year paper mill with 7th year students.

You know why you're such a bad troll? Because you don't realize you are one. You probably think you're not. You're wrong.

You know, maybe I did miss out on seeing some of the possibilities of departmental and program structure because I didn't spend all my time in academia. For a while I did intra-opertive neural monitoring. Me and my programmable electrophys amps because a whole different set of eyes in the OR. The neurosurgeon relied on me tell him where and when to cut or not cut. But hey, I could have been a perfesser of psychology at a "research university". There's no such thing. There's places where you teach and places where you teach and do research, and they're all schools and there's virtually none of the former. "Research university" is a bumper sticker for your vita and ego so you can hear yourself sound like you're a step beyond your plain vanilla garden variety university, when the truth that even your podunk, backwoods, just crawled out from under the community college rock and managed to get two whole departments running, home grown outfit requires its people to do research too, just like a "research university". It may be Stroop cards and reaction times rather than dipole localization using 128 channels each of concurrent MEG and EEG, but it gets done and it gets printed. And if you ask someone from a "research university" exactly what criteria must be met, you'll get vague, mumbled weasel words as they try to wiggle away, thinking "aw shit, they're not supposed to ask, they're just supposed to be impressed."