Speaker 1: Welcome to Almost Dr. Armas. If you're new to this channel, thank you for checking it out and if you're already a subscriber, thanks for being back again. In this YouTube channel, I talk about my life as a PhD student in clinical psychology and bring you information about the mental health field. In today's video, I'm going to be sharing my number one tip for staying organized if you're applying to graduate school. In order to do that, the format of today's video is going to be a little bit different, but I promise you'll still enjoy it. Okay, so here is the grad program Google sheet that I used to stay organized while I was applying to programs. There are lots of columns and a lot of information that you can enter here as you find it on the website for the programs that you'll be applying to. I'm going to go through how you would fill out all this information. So let's say you're going to apply to psychology university, which is obviously a fake school. You can put the type of program, PhD or PsyD, the deadline December 1st. Application fee is $150. That's pretty standard. Financial aid deadlines. So a lot of times programs will have scholarship deadlines and they'll have separate things that they want you to submit. So I'm just going to add a column here for scholarships. So you may have to submit another essay or an extra recommendation letter. Here's where you would write in both the deadline that that's due. Sometimes it's different than the date that your application is due and whatever else they want you to submit. So for now, I'm just going to put an essay, five page essay. So GRE cutoff. So not all schools do this, which is why you don't need to fill out this column if it's not applicable to you. But some programs use GRE scores as a way to filter because they get so many applications and it goes by quant, verbal and writing scores. So I'm just going to leave that blank for now. The GRE code is a four digit number that you will enter after you take the GRE to send it to the school. Every school has a four digit code. Number of rec letters, three. Writing samples or supplemental materials. So some programs will want a sample lab paper or a sample review paper. You'll put that there. Personal statement will probably always be yes. And you'll add the prompt there, whatever the program has on their website for how they want you to write that. Resume or CV. Most programs want a CV. Faculty members. So you should have at least two to three people that you're interested in working with at a given program. So for now, I'm just going to put Dr. John Smith and Dr. Mary Jones. So let's say these are the two faculty members that you're interested in. You'll have their email addresses listed. And this you'll find on the program website. You'll be able to see a list of all the faculty that they have and what they're working on. And that's how you'll decide what you're interested in. You'll also want to include the name of their lab, any grants or any other activities that they have going on in their lab, their main projects. So let's say Dr. John Smith is working on trauma and immigrants. Dr. Mary Jones is working on trauma in the LGBTQ community. So you want to make sure that you have this here so that you remember who's who when you're applying. Most personal statements will have you put the name of the faculty member you're interested in. Another thing is nice to see is the money that they have coming in. If you're going to a program where you're working directly under one faculty member for five years, you want to double check if they're grant funded. If you're not going to a program that that takes that model, then you're fine. So here you would add their research area. Obviously if you're interested in trauma, the people that you have on your list will also be interested in trauma. Both of these have a trauma emphasis. And then you'll have questions about the program. So for example, one thing you might be interested in is the APA internship match rate. So what percentage of students get matched to an APA accredited internship? Another question you might have is the average number of years that it takes for students in this program to graduate. Is it five years? Is it six? Is it seven? On average, how long does it take students at this school to finish? So that's everything. It's a lot of information. It seems overwhelming at first, but this is super helpful and I really relied on this spreadsheet. You can organize it in a number of ways. You can go by school preference. So you can put your top schools at the top and your other schools at the bottom. Whatever your favorites are. You could also organize it by deadline. So some schools have the applications due December 1st, others December 15th. So in general, this is the way that I stayed organized. And I also love that you can share it with any faculty that you are working with, whether they're a letter of recommendation writer or they're a mentor who is helping you out. You can share this spreadsheet with them and they can help you stay on track. So that's great too. So that is it. That is my number one tip for staying organized while you're applying to graduate school. I know that it's a really stressful process, but you want to do everything that you can to keep yourself on track. So in the description for today's video, I'm going to have a link for getting access to this template and I really hope that you'll use it. And I wish you the best on your graduate applications. Again, my name is Almost Dr. Armas. My goal is to inform you, to inspire you, to spark an interest in you, and hopefully also entertain you. And I hope you'll check back in for future videos. To do that, the format of today's video is going to be a different...