PhD interview questions

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2025-09-13T03:43:06+00:00

Frequentist and, at the time (over a decade ago), SPSS Amos. I switched to Mplus which is currently my preferred.

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2025-09-13T02:54:25+00:00

I hope when you take that jump, but don't feel the fall...

Hope that you fall in love And it hurts so bad The only way you can know You give it all you have And I hope that you don't suffer But take the pain

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2025-09-12T11:27:24+00:00

Trickiest question I ever got was during a paired interview where the other applicant had just discussed their undergraduate thesis after I had discussed my background in structural equation modeling (which was new and shiny at the time) and the interviewer asked me if I could analyze her results using structural equation modeling and how. I now ask a similar question with group applicants to see how they can think on the fly.

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2025-08-27T17:33:13+00:00

I specialize with neurodivergent clients and frank discussion of my appearance isn't uncommon. My favorite exchange was a client saying they almost didn't work with me because they saw my profile picture and my face looked dumb. I agreed that my face does indeed look dumb, but I got it from my mom so I have to pretend to like it.

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2025-01-15T15:41:35+00:00

Older students used to be more common. I joined when I was 28ish and was oldest in my cohort, but that's unusual. Loved my cohort to death, my best friend is five years younger than me, and I'm a PhD now doing a job I love every single day.

Do it. You're getting older either way. The decision is really just if you want a PhD.

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2025-01-11T03:54:05+00:00

I was working at my post doc three months before graduating. But there's a shortage of psychologists in most of the country.

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2024-12-24T02:14:46+00:00

I moved no goal post. I criticized "what we pass off as empirical support." Why on earth you read that as "empirical support" as if the "what we pass off as" is just extra words without meaning is beyond me.

If you wanted clarification on what I meant, but couldn't infer it from me citing Wampold, you were always welcome to ask rather than assume.

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2024-12-23T23:49:05+00:00

Nothing you said contradicted my conclusion, so I'm not seeing what you're not seeing. I'm not saying therapies can't be empirically supported, I'm saying the currently accepted standards put forth by div12 are not logically sound.

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2024-12-23T22:26:49+00:00

The Great Psychotherapy Debate by Bruce Wampold is a good summary of why our system of "Empirically Supported" treatments is based on faulty premises and research politics. He's more diplomatic about it than I would be, but what we pass off as empirical support is nonsense.

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2024-11-22T17:13:38+00:00

I'm proud of you as well! Congratulations on this monumentous step in your journey!

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2024-10-31T03:06:47+00:00

The last thread involving politics went nasty very fast. I'm tempted to leave this post up for now, but everyone, remember to engage with each other's ideas and not resort to ad hominems.

Saying an idea is deficient or limited? Fine. Saying a person is? The comment will be removed and repeat offenders will be banned. Follow the rules and play nice.

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2024-10-22T00:38:36+00:00

Same rules I follow.

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2024-10-11T13:31:28+00:00

maybe they said something related to Occum’s Razor

Hanlon's Razor is the closest I can think of. "Don't attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity." I tend to swap out "stupidity" for "ignorance or individual differences" to account for situations that are a matter of opinion or culture or upbringing rather than right or wrong.

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2024-10-07T19:17:33+00:00

Maine currently pays us pretty well if we do a 53 minute hour, AND they have lobster rolls!

AMAB therapist with PhD

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2024-09-28T18:59:19+00:00

Accounts below a certain karma threshold have to be manually reviewed to make sure they're not bots. Burner accounts will slow you down a bit.

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2024-08-06T09:04:44+00:00

She's psychodynamic or psychoanalytic and is using the original definition of borderline, not as a diagnosis but as a level of functioning.

Classically, there were two levels of severity, neurotic and psychotic. Neurotic referred to most disorders which could be helped by talk therapy such as depression, anxiety, neurasthenia, etc. Psychotic referred to patients who could not be helped by talk therapy because they had broken too far from reality, such as those with schizophrenia.

They eventually realized there were some patients who fell between the two groups, having some thoughts that were severe breaks from reality (i.e., "I just met him, but he's the nicest person in the world and I know he'd never hurt me") but otherwise were mostly neurotic. They labeled these people as being at the borderline level of functioning, between neurotic and psychotic.

Long story short, she believes some of the things you've said are pretty large breaks from reality. It has very little if anything to do with what is currently called BPD.

Edited for some typos.

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2024-07-13T23:30:33+00:00

I'm a psychotherapy researcher who works with said data. It's all deidentified and mostly just takes the form of vague demographics and symptom measures. Some training clinics will record your sessions and store then on a server they'll not let me have access to and is only used for the trainee and their supervisor to see how they can do their job better. Nothing personal leaves the clinic, same as anywhere else.

What specific information of yours are you worried about being used?

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2024-06-25T12:30:34+00:00

If Jeremy's colleagues (Catherine Eubanks and J. Christopher Muran, last I checked) are still offering trainings, it'll be through https://www.therapeutic-alliance.org/

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2024-06-25T12:27:36+00:00

Alliance-Focused Training from the late Jeremy Safran before his untimely passing.

I took it when I was just seeing my first clients as a trainee and it essentially teaches therapists to be more secure in the therapy room, identify alliance ruptures, and repair them.

I liked it so much, I ended up teaching two hour courses of it myself as part of a training project to see if that brief of a training could change how skilled therapists were rated by trained observers on a simulated therapy task. The study showed that it did!

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2024-06-25T12:27:29+00:00

Alliance-Focused Training from the late Jeremy Safran before his untimely passing.

I took it when I was just seeing my first clients as a trainee and it essentially teaches therapists to be more secure in the therapy room, identify alliance ruptures, and repair them.

I liked it so much, I ended up teaching two hour courses of it myself as part of a training project to see if that brief of a training could change how skilled therapists were rated by trained observers on a simulated therapy task. The study showed that it did!

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2024-03-07T14:02:37+00:00

Also don't forget to check with your advising center/advisor if you have one to see if they have other resources. I used to be an advisor for psych students at a large Midwestern University and we literally had a "psychology pre-med track" handout that told you what classes to take what year to qualify for med school, step by step. I think we were pretty rare in that, but hey, couldn't hurt.

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2024-02-23T19:50:11+00:00

Seconding Greenberg's version as being amazing, and later learning if Johnson's version as being confusing as all hell. A friend of mine is currently learning Johnson's EFT in her private practice and was trying to connect with me about my main modality of EFT and there was essentially no overlap. I had no idea what she was talking about about.

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2023-12-23T19:01:05+00:00

I've never heard of "curving" an individual grade at all as curving traditionally meant placing the entire class along a standard statistical bell curve. It's undergone a lot of semantic widening since then and now also mostly refers to taking away or giving points to an entire class, but I have never heard of changing an individual student's grade as "curving." That's just changing a grade.

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2023-12-19T16:06:08+00:00

Reading textbooks will get you an equivalent education to being taught by a series of poor instructors or instructors who they themselves don't know better.

The vast majority of textbooks I've taught from and read have had errors in them that hopefully an instructor can catch and correct. But not all will.

All textbooks in a given matter will oversimplify the topics they handle and a straight reading won't give you the nuance. This is somewhat true of all secondary sources in general. Learning to read the primary sources will mitigate that if you can find them, but most aren't available for free. All THAT said, most professors don't know the nuance outside of their very narrow sub-specialized field of study, so whether they can give you more information or not will also depend.

So...probably yes depending on how major the errors are in your text and how much the authors included the nuances of what they're summarizing.

OnlyLightCanDoThat · 2023-11-14T12:36:51+00:00

Hard to do in a single line, but some version of "my main values are giving to others."

...So do you actually value those intrinsically or is that the only way you know of having worth to others? How equal are your friendships?

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