I am Intrigued with Psychological Research and College Instruction :: Graduate Admissions Essays

I am Intrigued with Psychological Research and College Instruction. Having enjoyed psychology-related activities in both the academic and familiarity settings, it is with enthusiasm that I pursue a career in clinical psychology. An important part of this pursuit is attending graduate school. In order to concur the necessary knowledge and to define my areas of interest, I wish to enroll in a doctoral program in clinical psychology. Throughout my undergraduate constitute I have engaged in a variety of activities to help prepare my for graduate study. One such activity is my involvement in research. This ancient summer I participated in a research project with a UNI professor, Dr. Augustine Osman. Our research come to the examination of the psychometric properties of the Pain Anxiety Symptoms Scale (PASS) in a community sample. I performed basic data entry and ran SPSS-X programs for manova, correlation, and reliability. For two to three hours a day, over an eight week period, m y research experience involved discussions on issues of psychometrics as well as learning how to transcribe and run several programs used in factor analysis. Through this experience I have also become familiar with the process of research revision and yield. In fact, I leave be listed as a co-author upon publication of this work. Currently, I am involved in an independent research project investigating sex-role stereotyping in college classrooms. My advisor, Dr. Jane Wong, has been superintend by progress. After completing background tuition on this issue, I have decided to investigate the relationship between students sex-typed characteristics. I have developed six scenarios in which I manipulated the sex-typed characteristics of the instructor. Students will be asked to complete the Bem Sex Role Inventory and the Traditional Egalitarian Sex Role Scale (TESR) prior to reading a scenario. After reading the scenarios they will be asked to rate the instructor using a rating form developed by Leventhal, Perry, and Abrami (1977). I hope to present my findings at a regional psychology conference and, if possible, submit the work for consideration for publication. Aside from conducting research, I also have had the opportunity to experience the teaching aspects of psychology while function as a teaching assistant for a Research Methods course and an Introduction to Psychology course. As a TA for Research Methods my responsibilities included supervising five students research work. Specifically, I assisted the students in the library while they worked on a bibliography, summary and synthesis, and proposal project.