MILESTONES
Over the trajectory of time within the SP Psychology program, before reaching the dissertation stage, students must complete a series of milestones. These milestones are outlined below:
Log Project - First semester of first year
The Logs are completed in the first semester of the first year that students are in the program. It is a project that is worked on for a required lab course that supplements the Social/Personality Conceptual Core I course taken during the same time. This project involves looking at a decade of the students' choosing and tracking developments and other happenings within social/personality psychology, another scholarly discipline or social/personality psychology outside of the United States, and one other area of interest alongside each other. Journals are kept over the course of the logs development in order to reflect on the research process and keep track of how and what elements are included or eliminated from the timelines that the logs create. These logs are developed over the course of the semester in the lab and are presented at the end of the semester to the class.
First Doctoral Exam - Second semester into summer of first year
This paper is begun as a part of a required lab course that supplements the Social/Personality Conceptual Core II course taken during the same time. It involves writing about a concept of the students' choosing in social/personality psychology from its beginning across time and depicting its developments, critical turning points, and methodological approaches in research. An original source for the concept is chosen (a book or article where the concept first appeared) and then five additional sources depicting the concept's advancement through time are chosen as the sources to be discussed in the paper.
Second-Year Project - Second semester of first year to beginning of third year
The Second Year Project is an opportunity for students to conduct their own research before getting to the dissertation stage. Some Second-Year Research Projects are part of larger ongoing research projects conducted with faculty. Thinking about this project typically begins in the second semester of the students' first year with students ranging in their start-times of actual research for it. Some collect data for it during the summer between their first and second years, while others collcect the data during their second year. While the research, data collection, data analysis, and/or writing of the project is being done, students attend a required weekly Second Year Project seminar with their cohort. This seminar acts as a space for students and a professor to talk and support each other on their projects as they do them.
Second Doctoral Exam - Third year to beginning of fourth year
This is a critical literature review that is typically begun after the second-year project is completed (first semester of the students' third year) and must be completed within 8 months after that (usually by the end of September of students' fourth year). Course electives, participation in research groups, and research involvement on faculty projects often frame the topic of the Second Doctoral Examination and even the Dissertation. For some students, the second doctoral paper becomes the literature review for the dissertation, for others it serves as a broader review of a topic that leads the student to a more specific question and literature for their dissertation, and for other students it bears no relationship to the dissertation research.