Principal Investigators
Research is our number one priority as faculty. It is the primary basis for our professional evaluations, and it is the primary mechanism for securing funding for the lab. At any given time, we will be involved in writing several manuscripts. Many of these will involve colleagues at other universities. Many will not involve our students. There will be opportunities for us to invite our students to work on such papers, if we know that it is related to their research interests and if we believe they can contribute meaningfully to the paper. To facilitate this, it is important that students keep us aware of their research interests, especially as they change and grow during their graduate career.
To graduate students, we pledge to
- Be available in person and via email/Slack (see Communication) on a regular basis, including for regular individual meetings
- Provide timely feedback on writing (manuscripts, grant applications, conference abstracts, etc)
- Apply for external finding with the end goal of supporting you financially
- Share our perspective on the state of the field
- Support career development by attempting to connect you with other researchers, promoting your - work, writing recommendation letters, and financing conference travel (as our budget allows)
- Help you prepare for your next career stage, whether that’s in academia or industry
- Care for your well-being
To undergraduate honors students, we pledge to
- Guide you in preparing a structured project
- Help you find or collect data
- Teach you to analyze and interpret results
- Revise and edit your scientific report
- Meet regularly to discuss progress and pitfalls
To research assistants, we pledge to
- Communicate expectations around your role clearly
- Ensure that you are regularly checking in with either a PI or graduate student
- Compensate work, either monetarily or in the form of research credits
Graduate Students
Research is the most important activity you can engage in as a graduate student. You will learn more doing research than you will in classes or workshops, so do not think of research as something you do instead of or after you have studied an area or a skill. Regarding research, graduate students are expected to:
- Work on projects that help them explore/develop their interests
- Be careful – this includes checking and double-checking (even triple-checking… quadruple! … you get the idea) preregistrations, analytic code, and drafts. Seeking feedback from others (fellow students, PIs, friends) is part of this process.
- Always be working on manuscripts for publication. By the time you graduate, you should have multiple publications in the pipeline (published, in press, in review, in preparation). Ideally, you would have one first-authored paper for each year of your program plus a few additional co-authored papers. (Note that this is not the same as doing one paper every year – your first year will likely not end with you submitting a manuscript, but you should hope to submit multiple during your fourth and fifth years.) This is aspirational, and not often achieved, but doing so would make you competitive for whatever comes next.
- Develop your dissertation research. This is something to have in the back of your mind at all times, not just at the beginning of your fourth year. Think about the identity you want to have as a research scientist and work on projects that build that reputation. As you develop and work on studies, be thinking of the next research question(s).
Coursework is a necessary part of graduate school and, approached wisely, can be very productive. While the UO Psychology program has its course requirements, you can consider the following classes to be required:
- Social/Personality
- Clinical or Developmental Psychology
- Systems Neuroscience or Cognitive Neuroscience
- At least two advanced quantitative courses (including the Data Science specialization in the School of Education, Structural Equation Modeling, Hierarchical Linear Modeling)
Remember that the goal of coursework differs from the goals you had as an undergraduate. No one will look at your transcript, so getting an A is no longer a priority. Instead, your goals should be (1) to identify the information or skills that will be most useful in your research program, (2) invest in understanding that information or those skills to the best of your ability, and (3) do so while spending as little time as possible on homework. If coursework is getting in the way of research, it is no longer supporting your career… it is impeding it.
Teaching is both a requirement and an opportunity in graduate school. Unless we have mountains of funding available, you will be required to GE during most academic terms. This can be an excellent, low-risk way to practice communication, instruction, and working with groups, skills that will be necessary regardless of future career path. Students will benefit from GE-ing for multiple different classes – this may be more work but can expose them to different teaching styles and types of classes. As a GE, you should consider it your responsibility to attend the class you support, even if the instructor does not require it. Use these opportunities to reflect on what good and bad teaching looks like, how active learning can be incorporated into classes, and what tools or strategies you might implement in a future career. You may consider teaching a summer course as an opportunity for summer funding and also practice. Take this responsibility seriously, but as above, keep efficiency in mind. Please speak to us (David and Sara) if you find that teaching responsibilities are interfering with research.
Independence is a crucial skill for successful researchers. To be clear, independence does not mean that you can complete every stage of a research project perfectly by yourself. But learning how to “figure it out” on your own ensures that when you leave the lab, you’ll have the tools you need to face new challenges and acquire new skills moving forward. In general, we expect our students to do as much as they can on their own and seek us (Sara and David) out when they are stuck. Use your best judgement regarding when this should be. If you need input to move forward, it is your responsibility to seek us out or schedule a meeting (see Communication). Note that your level of independence will change across graduate school – we expect to provide more regular guidance to new trainees, but by the time you leave the university, you should be able to function independently.
Be collaborative, not competitive with the other students in our lab. Science is better when people work together, not tear each other down. Respect your fellow lab-mates. They have strengths and weaknesses that they bring to the table – you can help them, and they can help you. Respect their culture, their religion, their beliefs, their sexual orientation, their perspective on the world. See every way they differ from you as an opportunity to learn and make your science better. Support your fellow lab-mates. Help them out, even if you’re not a co-author on their project. Allow them to vent if they need it and create space for them if they need it. Help them, and you can expect help in return when you need it. Learn to view the wins of your fellow lab-mates as wins for the PIE lab.
Time Management is critical to success in research, not just as a graduate student, and in life more generally. We (Sara and David) will try to share strategies for time management during lab meetings, but you should feel welcome to ask for these discussions in individual meetings or lab meetings whenever they would be helpful. However, your time is your responsibility. We will neither create schedules for you nor will we tell you what to prioritize, although we may give you feedback when we believe a project is not moving along as quickly as it should. It will be up to you to decide when you work and what you work on. A good starting place is to think of your graduate work as a full time job: 40 hours/week. That being said, you may find that you are able to keep up with coursework and teaching duties while also moving research along in less time – that’s great! Also, you may find yourself working more than 40 hours and not experiencing any issues – that’s great too! The main thing is that you are able to meet your responsibilities, conduct your research, and maintain good mental health.
Curiosity helps you develop your research program, integrate advances in methods and ideas into your work, and provide meaningful contributions in your collaborations and to the field. Be sure to consider the role of curiosity in your research. Resist the temptation to look smart with answers and instead ask questions. Approach every situation you’re in with the goal of learning something new.
Have a personal life.
Other expectations
- Present your work at least once a year, ideally more often. Great places to present are departmental events (e.g., FYP talks, brownbags), other labs, conferences.
- Apply for grants. You can apply for an NSF award during your first or second year and NRSA awards during your fourth and fifth years. Seek out other opportunities to apply for funding or awards.
- Seek information about all kinds of careers. Consider academia (research and teaching), industry, scientific writing, government research. We (Sara and David) can only really provide you with insight into a few (narrow) - paths, so don’t rely on them for all your information about future careers. Communicate your interests and - values to us, so we can understand what a successful and meaningful career looks like to you.
- Keep track of your departmental deadlines – e.g., FYP, SAP, coursework, etc.
- Participate in weekly lab meetings.
- Attend the Social/Personality brownbag talks. Try to be an active participant, meaning think critically about the information presented to you. Identify the strengths and weaknesses of the study. Evaluate the claims. Be inspired to develop your own research questions out of the work presented. Maybe even ask a question.
Other things you might want to know about.
- Working in other labs is an excellent way to be exposed to new ideas, new ways of mentoring or doing science, and new people with whom you can form collaborations. This is directly facilitated by the Supporting Area Project, but you’re encouraged to create new collaborations. We recommend being upfront about your interest with other PIs – are you trying to form a collaboration on a new project or are you just interested in sitting in on lab meetings? Consider yourself a representative of the PIE lab in these collaborations, and be sure to treat the people in these settings with the same respect and curiosity you would treat your fellow lab-mates.
- Switching advisors is permitted for personal or professional reasons. However, such a change must be mutually agreeable to all parties: student, original advisor, and new advisor. Ideally, a change would occur relatively early in a student’s graduate career (first or second year), but this need not be the case. Additionally, students have the option of adding a secondary advisor at any point. Doing this could make a lot of sense if a student’s interests wind up aligning with another faculty member’s expertise, but the student does not wish to make a full change of advisors