1st Summer School of Personality Science (SSPS)
July, 2018 in Zadar (Croatia)
We are thrilled and proud to announce that there will be a week-long Summer School of Personality Science (SSPS), to be held in Zadar, Croatia from July 9-15, 2018, just before the European Conference on Personality (ECP). The SSPS will be funded in large part by the European Association of Personality Psychology (EAPP) and is intended to become an annual or biannual event before major personality conferences (such as the ECP).
The overarching goal is to invest in the future of personality psychology by bringing together in a summer school 6-8 experts and 15 graduate students (master's and PhD) interested in personality, individual differences, and assessment. Down the line this may lead to building stronger international ties, increasing diversity within our field, and stimulating new collaborations (including larger-scale projects).
Students will have the opportunity to immerse themselves into a broad array of recent and trending topics in personality psychology, drawn from six domains: Methodology, Personality and Relationships, Personality Dynamics, Biology of Personality, Personality and Culture, and Personality Development. Each day in the SSPS will be devoted to one of the domains and cover different topics with four types of courses: keynotes (giving broad overviews and big pictures), seminars (providing an in-depth analysis of a topic), workshops (experiencing and hands-on learning of methods and statistics), and hot-topic panels (stimulating discussions with several experts). During breaks, students will have the opportunity to attend career mentoring lunches which are intended to discuss "meta-skills" (e.g., writing and publishing, grants and funding, reviewing and editing, etc.), socialize, and network.
This rich and diverse mini-curriculum of the summer school is intended to give graduate students the opportunity to experience current personality psychology, hone their skills, and network with each other and with the experts. Students can obtain insights and feedback from renowned experts in the field and start fleshing out their profiles as the next generation of personality researchers. In turn, experts might get a kick out of spending time with interested and passionate students, build new mentoring relationships, and maybe even identify future students and collaborators.
Details on the inaugural SSPS are being hashed out right now and will become available shortly (see https://osf.io/ts59d/ for first information and updates). The organization is still very much in flux, but if you have questions right now, please feel free to contact John Rauthmann (jfrauthmann@gmail.com). We are looking forward to this wonderful opportunity for (the future of) personality psychology!