Adding to this, the ability to compartmentalize and/or low emotional reactivity. A lot of people go into psychology because they want to help people and empathetic and struggle not to take on their clients’ problems as their own or become emotionally invested in their success or setbacks. We’re often seeing people at their worst and hearing about their most difficult or traumatic experiences - many aren’t ready for the daily reality of this exposure and it impacts their own mental health. I may be biased, but I also think a degree of emotional distance is necessary for clinicians to be able to make the best decision for their patient both in the moment and long term vs what feels best (e.g., challenging cognitive distortions at the risk of damaging and having to rebuild rapport vs “client is always right” support). In many ways, I’m not the typical psychologist because I’m not in touch with my emotions (which I’m working on separately), but this has also helped me be more willing to try “scary” clinical techniques and maintain my wellbeing during grad school.
Being a lifelong learner is really important. Some clinicians will stagnate because they stop consuming journal articles, stop going to conferences, etc. For the clinicians who continue to learn and evolve, they then have the opportunity to really develop and often contribute to the field.
This is a great point. One of the things I found most freeing about graduate school was being freed from some of this. I could pick the challenging paper topic and not the one I thought would be easiest for me to get an "A" on. I could run a high-risk study that might fail because that's the fun of science (OK, maybe I should have waited til tenure but I'm there now!).
I mean, most systems today punish failure pretty harshly. Anything below a perfect score is considered failing, etc. As a behaviorist, if we want to change that, we need to change the contingencies that we reinforce.
The field to field comparison is interesting. I had similar comments from others in my program after my thesis defense and, although the faculty had certainly asked some difficult and thought-provoking questions, it was less aggressive than the average conversation I found myself in at any random party when I worked in finance. Hedge fund people really know how to challenge every aspect of what you say at every level of abstraction and then make comments about how your answers reveal your intelligence (or lack thereof) and ability to do your job. A part of me still misses the intellectual stimulation of that environment and I catch myself frequently cushioning what I’m about to say so I don’t get completely ostracized for being blunt.
I think it’s worth at least acknowledging that some past cohorts tolerated/lumped things that they should have been angry about, and that they should have reported to the uni (sexual harassment, etc etc). I do agree that the pendulum has swung too far, though I’m not sure about the usefulness of a nostalgia narrative.
Well as I know, and as you already know this is already happening in healthcare. There's pros and cons.
Our cohort had a saying, Bs get degrees. The original saying is of course "Cs get degrees" a la undergrad , but most doctoral programs will put a student on probation with one C and likely out the door with another. But it's been over 5 years since I graduated.
Nothing I heard in residency held a candle to some of the feedback I got on assignments as an undergraduate, although to be fair it was not in the States.
I have not perceived it to be the “nerdy” ones myself. Tbh some of the most whiny students I’ve had to manage were also the ones who seemed to care the least about their academics.
So you'd think, but I saw two people lose their academic merit full rides during undergrad (dropping below a 3.0).
I think these dynamics interact. So student was in HS, where they got endless retries, never wrote more than a paragraph about something, had feedback on everything until it was an A, etc. Then they get to college and get none of that, expectations are much higher, etc, and do badly. They see that for vastly more money they are getting drastically less support and complain. I’m not sure they’re in the wrong in the perspective, when HS wasn’t prepping them for college work and universities expect it to magically appear in the summer before college starts. Combine that with college faculty who use teaching methods that are outdated by 500 years, write syllabi that are bad descriptors of the class, have ephemeral grading schemes, etc, and I’m not sure it’s entirely on the students (as you said).
A semester and/or year if you're lucky.
Yeah, for states wanting to participate in lotteries (as in Powerball, Mega Millions, etc.), that's often a big selling point--to use some of the money to fund scholarships to state schools (e.g., full tuition waiver for having and maintaining a 3.0). Not a bad deal overall.
You also need to accept that 'good enough' is good enough. It is not your magnum opus.
I'm not sure if you need to be emotionally detached as much as accepting of the fact that suffering and adverse circumstances are a part of life. We will all suffer from some disease and we will all die. This is not a tragedy, it is inevitable.
Agreed, very well said.
You need a sense of humor, the ability to delay gratification for long periods, a good grasp of simple statistics and research design, and a good dose of empathy.
