Greetings ARP Graduate Student and Post-Doc Members!
Kathryn Bollich and Michael Boudreaux
Washington University in St. Louis
It was great to see everyone at the ARP conference this summer in St. Louis! There were so many excellent talks and posters presented by graduate students and postdocs-it's definitely a bright future for our field.
Our mentoring lunch was bigger than ever, with five excellent faculty mentors sharing their time and thoughts on how to be successful personality psychologists, and ~40 students and post-docs in attendance. Thanks again to Richard Lucas, Brent Donnellan, Simine Vazire, Mike Furr, and Mitja Back for spending time with us! We look forward to continuing to organize mentoring lunches for future conferences, and finding ways for additional mentees to be able to attend.
With the mentoring lunch now in its 3rd year at ARP, we're looking for new ways to serve you as your graduate student and post-doctoral representatives. We want to hear your ideas!
Given that ARP conferences happen only every other year, one idea is to build an online presence. For example:
- Are you interested in an ARP student and post-doc blog? Published once a month-more or less, depending on interest-this would give you a public place to share your thoughts. Maybe you're new to blogging and want to test it out, or want to share your thoughts in a new, potentially broader forum-this would give you that chance. Personality Psychology has many vocal bloggers (check out the ARP Meta-Blog!), but unfortunately few of those are a part of the incoming group of personality scientists. The entire field would benefit from hearing your concerns, suggestions, diverse perspectives, jokes, and tips.
- Would you like a website compilation of statistics resources, curated by and for your personality psychology colleagues? Maybe you or your lab has a method for best sharing data and code with each other that you wish others knew about, or you finally figured out how to run that super cool graph in R and want everyone to know. Statistics training is never-ending, and having a wiki in which we can all add useful resources as we learn and train others could be incredibly valuable for students and faculty alike.
These are just two ideas. We'd love to hear your thoughts about these or any others you might have! Please take 5 minutes to complete the following the survey to let use know your thoughts, so we can best serve you:
https://wustlpsych.az1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_5gx9GtxnkHfF3Dv
Finally, it's time for our next election! We are shaking things up a bit, and planning to have student representatives serve staggered terms. Both representatives would have the opportunity to serve for two years, but they would overlap with each other for only one year. This might provide greater continuity, as each new representative would join the committee when the other representative has been in the position for one year. So, be looking for an email in the coming weeks for nominations!
We hope everyone's fall is off to a great start!
- Kathryn Bollich (kbollich@wustl.edu) & Michael Boudreaux (m.boudre@wustl.edu)