Why I’m starting a blog
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 5:07 pm. 0 comments
I’ve thought a lot about school lately. It’s probably due to the fact that I’ve actually had time to sit around and think of something besides the impeding doom of comps. (It’s the test you take on everything you learned in grad school, which needless to say, you stress over for more than a year). Having relearned (and subsequently repressed) everything I’ve covered in my three previous years of grad school, it got me thinking about how much I know and how much I don’t.
I love grad school, and I’m very happy that I decided to go for my PhD. The problem is that I have a lot of schooling and theoretical knowledge and not a lot of application/real-world experience. We learn in class about things in ideal terms, and we generally don’t talk about how those things actually play out in the workplace. This is because most of the profs in our department haven’t spent a lot of time in industry and a lot of the literature that we read is focused on lab experiments. I definitely appreciate that perspective as it has gotten me to where I am, but it gets me thinking about what I’m missing on the practical application side of things. My concern is what business is actually going to want to hire me after I finish school when I’m "all talk and no action." Also, the only talking I’ve really been doing is in theoretical papers that have been published (or will hopefully be published) in the I/O literature.
The things I’ve written about at school aren’t the only things I care about. I just happened to have been lucky enough to be a part of some great research teams who have found good results and who are focused on publishing. My concern though, is that if someone looked at me as just a collection of the things that I’ve written and published so far, they wouldn’t get a full perspective of who I am.
After I finished comps, someone said to me that the most important thing you need when graduating with your PhD is a clear perspective. I think this is probably very true. The problem is, graduate school doesn’t really give you a chance to establish it and show it off to the world beyond the publications that you are able to get out there in the five years you spend in graduate school. Sure, you have more specialized classes than you did as an undergrad, but you still have to take a bunch of broad topic classes, some of which you aren’t really that interested in. And, since the faculty have certain types of expertise, you tend to get classes related to what the faculty are interested in, and not necessarily what you are. Plus, there’s no way to know 100% what you are interested in going in. Beyond the classes, there are several reasons why I think establishing a clear perspective is difficult in graduate school. These reasons elucidate some of the problems in I/O and why I started this blog.
1. Marketing
First of all, I’m working on a PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology. If you’ve never heard of that, I can’t say I’m surprised. We don’t do a good job of marketing ourselves to the average company in America, so when someone with my background graduates, no one knows what skills we have or how we could benefit a company. We should be out there explaining our similarities and differences to job titles that people generally know like Human Resources Managers, Organizational Development Specialists, Sales Trainers, and Executive Coaches. Since a good amount of I/O Psych people go in to industry (working internally in a company or consulting), not knowing exactly what we are trained in can be a problem. Not to mention the fact that people have different research interests that may or may not be relevant to a particular job. Those who might hire us don’t have a clear understanding of what it is we do based on the degree title. It is only if or when we get an interview that we are able to sell ourselves. It would be beneficial if those in companies had a frame of reference as to how to categorize I/O Psychologists.
When we try to define I/O to our friends, family, or potential employers, we usually say it’s applying psychological principles to the workplace. This, however, isn’t very telling of our skill set or what we actually do. Most people take that definition to mean "crazy people" in the workplace, which is NOT at all the point of I/O. I’ve also heard other people describe I/O Psychologist as "The Bobs" from Office Space. While this is probably the only pop culture reference to something remotely close to what we do, I don’t necessarily think it puts I/O in the best light (though it is pretty funny).
It’s hard to create a perspective when people have no idea where you are coming from.
2. Community
In I/O, we are a generally a tight-knit group of people. We have our own conferences, journals, etc. We aren’t particularly excited about moving beyond our comfort zone.
In my program, our classes tend to focus on articles from a particular person from a particular journal, etc. I think the problem is that we are too focused on reading pieces by experts that we aren’t trained on how to implement something in an organization. My program is pretty theoretical, so we focus on journal articles and not textbooks or case studies like other fields. This is good because it allows you to go to specific references when you go to write a paper for publication, but sometimes I think we lose sight of the overall picture when we focus on the pieces of the puzzle. For example, I have a lot of background knowledge on organizational change and development starting with Taylor in the early 1900’s. This is great, but when someone asked me if I know anything about developing an organizational development intervention, I had no idea what I was doing. It’s great to know what something is, but it isn’t good when you don’t know how to use it.
The point is sometimes our perspective is too narrow because we focus on the basic understanding of a subject. This is why I think it’s important for people with certain experiences to share them with others without having to write it up in a journal quality paper.
3. Technology
I/O Psychology as a whole is far behind when it comes to technology. I’m not sure if this is a due to a reluctance to try something new or whether we believe we will get different results if we present materials in a different way. We are still using paper surveys, which are coded by people. Not only is this time consuming, but it introduces issues with human error. I think this is partly due to trying to put together studies quickly and just going for what is easy at the time rather than putting the thought into it up front.
Another issue is that we are not programmers. We don’t understand software design, nor do we really have the time to learn it with everything else we have going on. This is the sort of practical thing we should be learning in class, but we don’t. Our department is fortunate enough to have our own "tech person" to help with some of that, but he has so much stuff going on, a student’s thesis data isn’t the first concern.
Tech people are missing out on a lucrative niche market because I haven’t found any great academic software for survey design. Most of the academic software I’ve used is either too simplistic for the job, too confusing (and no one to help you out), too restrictive with options, or the end result comes out looking ugly.
We just don’t use technology to convey messages to each other. Sure there are some job boards and linkedin groups, but the best people in I/O don’t go there because they don’t have to or they don’t see it as useful. I think this attitude needs to change. I feel like a blog post or informal message would, in some cases, be more useful than sifting through a hundred 30-page articles on the subject.
Who wants to go searching through all that, when a page or two works just fine?
4. Publications
In all academic literature, there’s a huge gap between when you start a research project, when you finish collecting data, when you submit something for publication, when it’s accepted, and when it’s actually published (if it ever gets there). This could take five or ten years. By the time your "perspective" reaches the world, you’ve probably moved on to something else. Plus, the only people you reach are those who care about your topic enough to invest time into reading 20-40 pages of technical text.
Since it takes so long for the whole process to be complete, it might take years before people really learn your perspective. I don’t think it has to be this way. I don’t think every perspective has to be written down with an introduction, methods, results, and discussion, and peer reviewed. I think there are other ways to get your perspective out there.
So what does all this mean?
The point of this slightly incoherent rant goes directly to why I started this blog. I do have a perspective of I/O Psychology, you just might not get it if you searched for articles, book chapters, and conference presentations (at least not yet). I hope that this can bring the idea of I/O Psychology to more people using my personal experiences as a way to put it out there. Technology should be embraced as a way to meet others who have a common interest, especially when you don’t have a common background whether it’s academic or otherwise. Let’s face it, publications are important, particularly for those people who go into academia after graduate school, but there’s more than one way to get your perspective out there.
