A NOTE BEFORE WE BEGIN

This document contains some advice that I think would’ve helped me in graduate school because
it articulates many of the challenges a lot of students face while they learn about work life in the
academy. The advice may not work for you and this is not an exhaustive list! If you have
comments or additions that you think might help, let me know as I would love to update or
amend the list. –Michael

APPROACHING THE ACADEMY

I. Be generous. Academia has many opportunities to measure yourself against others.
Going in with that mindset won’t (sadly) necessarily set you up for failure, but it will
negatively impact your colleagues and collaborators. Give generously to your colleagues,
share resources, exchange paper drafts, forge long term collaborations, and celebrate the
success of others. A corollary to this point is to also seek out and foster relationships with
people who are similarly generous and who celebrate your successes as enthusiastically
as you celebrate theirs.

II. Protect your (independent work) time. Because academia is self-paced a lot of the
work is independent and that creates tension between independent work and the
commitments and meetings that students are usually required to attend (e.g., lab
meetings, speaker lunches, seminar series). This tension leads many students to sacrifice
flexible independent work time in the service of making room for these other obligations.
Keeping a formal schedule for writing/analyzing data/study design ensures that the
mental work of research is prioritized.
III. Take notes during meetings. Academic study is like an apprenticeship and sometimes it
feels like you are having a fun conversation about research with a friend. That is great
and absolutely what a productive conversation about research can feel like sometimes.
Don’t forget to take some notes during that meeting though. Inspiration might strike
during that conversation and because you are juggling many responsibilities, you might
forget the points from the meeting that inspired you. Don’t underestimate your capacity
to forget really important insights!

IV. This is not an undergraduate degree. My undergraduate degree program had clear
deadlines, relatively few opportunities for collaborative work, less time for independent
study, far less work, and much more general knowledge. Your PhD will be nothing like
your BA/BS and the sooner you realize this the better. The biggest mental shift for me
was the sheer amount of critical thought that was needed for everything combined with
the astounding lack of scaffolding and direction for that independent thought. Be
prepared to develop new strategies for handling this new kind of intellectual work.

V. Ups and downs. Graduate school has a rhythm to it. It starts with a lot of hope and
energy in the early part of the 1st year. For some students this momentum can shift into
periods of significant uncertainty and anxiety that can afflict students anywhere in their
1st to 3rd years. If you develop effective coping strategies the weight of it all becomes a
bit more manageable. For me those strategies involved making things that I could control
more certain (e.g., scheduling writing time) and then doing non-academic things that I
 enjoyed (e.g., basketball). If that goes well, you might still feel like you have a ton of
work to do, but you might also feel confident that you can make progress on all of it. That
said, getting through the nadir of those first three years is not a guarantee, and being
intentional about how you cope is my general recommendation.

VI. Health comes first. Specifically your mental and physical health. A sharp mind usually
requires a body that is well-rested and a person who feels safe and secure. If aspects of
graduate school are impacting your mental/physical health the priority should be for you
to address your health first. If graduate school (or your academic advisor) does not
provide space for your health that is a problem. Solutions might include taking vacation,
unplugging from Email when necessary, and occasionally missing a deadline to protect
your well-being. Seek an advisee-advisor relationship and a graduate program where
discussions surrounding well-being are open and honest.

VII. Ask for tips. If you are ever in a position to sit down for lunch with a scholar you admire
ask them for some tips for navigating the academy. The amount of information I have
learned from scholars I admire in these situations is quite large! Don’t be afraid to ask for
tips.

STARTING A PROJECT
I. Research what is meaningful to you and the world. Reading a lot about others’
research can get you stuck on what other researchers find interesting or important.
Instead, you should ask what you think is important and meaningful to the world, and
then find some way to direct your studies in that direction. It helps to find colleagues who
think those topics are also meaningful!

II. Practice describing the why, what, and how of your research. I think social
psychology is about how situations influence the way people think, feel, and behave.
Understanding people means being able to describe, in words, how one set of factors ‘X’
influences, relates to, or predicts a second set of factors ‘Y.’ The ability to describe how
X  Y in writing and speech is important for researching, teaching, and speaking
broadly about social psychology. The ability to link ‘X’ and ‘Y’ to both the minute
details of a single research study AND the big meaningful questions you are pursuing in
your work is a big challenge. It takes repetition to master the explanation of
psychological phenomena.

III. Take ecological validity seriously. In experimental social psychology there can be an
outsized influence on controlled experiments in laboratory settings. That’s not wrong, but
researchers should also consider the ecological validity of the context under study. For
instance, if you are interested in the study of teams it might be nice to study real teams. If
you are interested in studying social class, it might be important to study people in the
population who are especially high or low in income. If you are interested in charitable
giving, you may consider studying giving in the context where it typically occurs.
Ecological validity makes the work we do applicable to the world we live in, and that, in
my opinion is an important point of research.
IV. Plan for a long trip. To truly understand even a simple X  Y involves years and
years of work in background reading, study design, data collection, data analysis, writing,
re-writing, responding to feedback, re-writing, more feedback, and eventual publication.
Plan to spend many years on each project you undertake to set realistic expectations for
your progress.

V. Stagger your projects. You should resist your urge to get everything going all at once. If
you are lucky like I became toward the end of my graduate career you have many ideas
for next research projects. Unfortunately it is difficult to give all projects the sufficient
mental space to develop a logical argument, a clear set of predictions, and a plan for data
collection. New projects need to be nurtured with time and thoughtfulness. Staggering
projects allows for new projects to get the mental space they need to flourish.

CONDUCTING THE RESEARCH

I. Be open. Other people have written a lot more about this and have a lot more knowledge
than I do on this subject so I will be brief: Open science has a host of advantages over
more traditional forms of science that include reductions of academic inequality,
enhanced opportunities for feedback and collaboration, greater reach for junior scholars,
and it aligns with my principle of generosity from above. Go all in with open science.
Share your data and materials, use pre-registration, join the Society for Improvement of
Psychological Science, analyze data using open sourced programs, and take us into the
future.

II. In the choice between simple v. complex designs, simpler is usually better.
Sometimes a complex 2 x 2 x 3 experiment feels like it accounts for all the factors that
could conceivably impact outcome ‘Y’ but then you get the data back and you realize you
were not actually sure which mean differences you were expecting and anyway, those
differences don’t show up in the actual means of the data. No experiment has perfect
control conditions that account for every conceivable alternative explanation. A better
strategy, I’ve found, is to conduct simpler experiments with fewer factors and to simply
acknowledge how that experiment controls for some alternative explanations and not
others.

III. Let the data tell you you’re wrong. We collect data because we want to learn more
about how the world works. This means that we are sometimes surprised by the outcome
of a study. Design studies where any result is informative and directly replicate
unexpected results to be sure that sampling error is not the cause of an unexpected effect.
I also recommend having other people reproduce your statistical analyses to ensure you
did not make errors prior to publication. If you have made errors it is best to catch them
before the world does.

IV. Pilot materials not effect sizes. Piloting to determine effect sizes is not likely to be
informative unless the pilot study is sufficiently powered. Small N samples can be fine
for determining if experimental procedures need to be tweaked, but for the purpose of
statistical power, you are better off estimating effect sizes based on larger N samples.
 One approach might be to determine the smallest effect size of interest and power your
study to detect that size of an effect.

V. Talk about your data with pictures. Pictorial representations of your data are superior
to most other means of data presentation because they draw the reader’s attention.
Because of this tendency to draw attention, you should use pictures strategically and with
the goal of accurately describing the central findings in your research. Don’t
underestimate the power of a figure to help lay people understand a complex research
study.

VI. Print before you submit. Writing at a computer can sometimes feel like you are in
automatic pilot. Often I find myself skipping over entire passages in my own writing
because ‘I know’ what that paragraph says. This can be fine when you are writing but it is
a recipe for errors when you are submitting for publication. There is something about the
writing context that, for me at least, makes me prone to awkward phrasing and
grammatical errors. I print everything and read it before I submit it for publication. For
my process, printing allows me to separate the writing and refining from the copyediting
and I am better able to catch the mistakes and awkward phrases.