Coding, Grad School, and Running Participants

The past week has been incredibly busy!

Last Tuesday we had our first professional development seminar. This hour-long seminar, run by Dr. Laurie Santos and Dr. Yarrow Dunham, gives information about graduate school to summer interns. Last week, they covered whether a PhD is necessary for our employment goals. In short, we learned that unless a job specifically requires a PhD, if you want to a professor, or are extremely interested in psychology, you should not get a PhD. We also saw the pros and cons of becoming a grad student or a professor, and one point was the salary:

Academic salaries compared to football coaches' salaries. (PhD Comics)

I spent most of the week coding the videos of data collection that we recorded at Stratford. The legend on those was a little outdated, which made everything much more complicated to code. I also coded an old video of a compensation trial, both to train myself and for Katie to check the reliability between my own coding and the last person's. I was very excited to learn how to code, but I did not expect how long and tiring the process would be - I watched in full dozens of videos that were often very loud or difficult to hear.

On Thursday, we had our first lab meeting where us interns gave short presentations on the studies we are conducting. It went well and I liked learning more about the studies that the other interns were involved in. A lot of the interns are responsible for creating stimuli, either via Photoshop or Inquisit. Since my studies don't require stimuli creation, I thought I'd learn how to code on Inquisit when there was time so that I could explore another area of research.

My last PowerPoint slide - Skittle themed.

But what occupied me the most this week was preparing and running the compensation study. We have started calling participants from the database to set up appointments, and we finally got formal participants for our studies. Preparing involved separating Skittles by color, putting cards in the right order, checking the counterbalancing data-sheet, and emptying containers of any old Skittles. I spend about half an hour before every appointment preparing the materials - just as long as it takes to run the experiment!

The result of the skittle-separation ritual.

At the end of the week, I went back to Worcester to spend the weekend with some friends at Clark. Even though I have enjoyed my time at Yale so far, it was fun to spend some time in familiar places and with familiar people. Even so, I am looking forward to next week at the SCD lab - we have many participants scheduled!