Research Experience?

❖ Purpose: Describe your research experience and interests. 500 words max. 

Tips for Writing:

1. Research Program: Discuss your research themes and experiences during graduate school.

2. Dissertation: Include current and expected completion status. (Proposal vs. Defended completion dates)

3. Clinical Implications: Explain how your research informs your clinical work with specific examples or theories.

● Research Interests: Highlight your interests in research training (if applicable).

● Integration with Clinical Work: Show the connection between your research and clinical practice.

Reviewers want evidence that you think empirically and can move between theory and the clinical room.

Instructions

1. Open with a claim, not a chronology. Lead with a statement about how you believe behavior or psychopathology actually works — your view of mechanism, etiology, or change. This is what separates a coherent program of inquiry from a list of projects you happened to be assigned. Everything after should follow from that opening position.
2. Present your work as a through-line. Group your graduate research by theme rather than by lab or by year. Even if the projects were scattered — many are — identify what connects them, whether that's a population, a construct, a methodology, or a question you keep returning to. If the connection is genuinely thin, say what drew you to each and what you took from it.
3. Report findings, not tasks. What did the work show? What surprised you? Where did the data complicate the hypothesis? Substance over labor.
4. State your dissertation's status plainly. Topic, and where it stands — proposed, data collection underway, defended, projected completion date. Selection committees care about this concretely; a vague answer invites concern about whether you'll finish before the year starts.
5. Bridge to clinical work. Give one specific instance where research changed your practice — a finding that altered how you assess something, a theory you apply in formulation, a measure you now use. This is the sentence that makes an item some applicants dread into an asset.
6. Address research during and after the year — honestly. If you want protected research time on internship, say what you'd pursue. If your dissertation is likely your last empirical project and you're headed for full-time practice, that's a legitimate answer; frame it as scientist-informed practice rather than apologizing. Do not manufacture research ambitions to court research-heavy sites, because it will surface in interviews.
7. Match the register to your site list. An academic medical center reads this item closely; a community clinic may weigh it less. The substance stays the same, but the emphasis you place on future research involvement can reasonably shift.
8. Trim the jargon. Not every reader shares your subspecialty. Findings stated in accessible terms demonstrate more command than dense methodological detail, and they cost fewer words.