You know, the funny thing about the snarkiness here is that it comes from both sides. While some may be rude in giving advice, often others here will disregard advice much more easily and with a tone that one would never chose to express in real life if speaking to an advisor, professor, or someone with years of experience. While everyone is entitled to an opinion, I think the question that gets lost is where are these opinions coming from and what assumptions are being made. For example, if majority of people that are out in their careers are of one opinion and students, interns, post-docs, and applicants are of another then perhaps that needs to be noted. I was dismissed several times in this thread and the previous one as not knowing anything about the OP's region, training, and payscales for the area. Yet, I lived and worked in that area for years, and I know several Adelphi grads and faculty members actually. If I invited you into my practice, sat you down, and gave the same advice to a would-be doctoral student, would I be dismissed out of hand or treated similarly? Even now, we are talking about males ( the assumption being white ) needing more exposure to race, culture, gender, etc and to not be tone deaf. Who says we are all white? Would you walk up to a black, Hispanic, Asian ,etc male and say this to their face? The truth is that no one here asking advice knows all the details of another poster or their life. That is part of the problem, people assign qualities to other posters without any real qualification. What is a joke to one person is rudeness to another.
As I said before, few people who find this board ask open ended questions and truly want the best advice. They often want us to assure them that they are going to be okay. However, the harsh truth is that you may not be. There are fewer tenure track and staff positions for psychologists than there used to be. Often those positions that exist are exploitative because they can be. People are welcome to take whatever chances they want. If someone here is willing to step up and talk about their experiences going to an expensive program, switching programs when already admitted, or geographically limiting themselves and how it all worked out great than go for it. However, sometimes there are reasons that the opposition is quiet. As for advising people more gently and being more aware of everyone, I do that plenty in real life and work plenty of hours, I come here to blow of stream. The quality of the advice you get from anyone is worth exactly what you pay for it.
