Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Oct. 21, 2013 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

01:57:09

Jordan Peterson: Psychology as a Career

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Thank you.
	Professor, I just wanted to give you an early warning that some people may start leaving at around 6 because of class.
	Yeah, that's fine.
	I'm not going to be great till 7 at least.
	Well, we might as well get started.
	This room, you people have an obvious preference for the right side of the election hall here.
	I guess it's closer to the food, eh?
	Alright.
	So you're here to hear about psychology as a career.
	So I'm going to talk to you a little bit about careers in general.
	And then I'll talk to you about...
	The first thing you might want to consider is that a career and a job are different.
	A job is something that you do from, if you're lucky, I suppose, from 9 to 5.
	And it's a job where someone else tells you what to do.
	And then you do it, and you're done.
	And usually it's fairly similar from day to day.
	And the disadvantage to that is that Someone else tells you what to do, and it's the same from day to day.
	And those are also its advantages.
	Because if someone else is telling you what to do, then you don't have to figure it out.
	And if you work from nine to five, then at five you're done.
	If you have a career, then you're never done.
	And so one of the things that you want to give some consideration to when you're planning a career is how do you learn to tolerate Never being done.
	I think...
	I went to graduate school in 1985, and I think the first time I was caught up might be this year.
	But maybe it happened five years ago once or twice, too.
	So it took me...
	30 years to catch up.
	So I was behind for 30 years.
	And that's...
	It's hard on your nerves.
	So you have to accustom yourself to the fact that no matter how much you work, it's not enough.
	And maybe you're starting to accustom yourself to that in university.
	But the thing about university that's different from the rest of your life is that although you already are faced with the problem that there's way more to learn than you're ever going to be able to manage, the only person that you're responsible to, at the moment, fundamentally, Apart from your parents, to some limited degree, is yourself.
	Whereas once you start developing your career, you're going to be responsible for a larger and larger and larger number of people.
	And some of them will depend on you for actions that, well, if you're a clinical psychologist, sometimes that their lives depend on.
	So your responsibility level continues to decline.
	As far as I'm concerned, that's a really good thing.
	People tend to think that responsibilities A burden, and I suppose that's true, but what they don't realize is that human beings are like sled dogs or pack mules.
	We're not happy, generally speaking, unless we're shouldering a burden or carrying a load.
	I guess it's part of being a social animal.
	So it's actually good you have the opportunity to shoulder responsibility because it helps you Tolerate living with yourself.
	You have to be worth something in order to really tolerate the conditions of your existence.
	And so, you've got to pick up something heavy and carry it, because then that helps you develop some respect for yourself and also for other people, and that's a big deal, but that's worth more than anything else that you'll possibly be able to find.
	How many of you are in your first year?
	Put up your hands so I can see because I need to know who I'm talking to.
	Okay.
	Second?
	Third?
	Yeah.
	And fourth year?
	Most of you are in third and fourth year.
	All right.
	So you're thinking pretty hard about what to do.
	So, well, we'll start with the fourth year students.
	For those of you You better have A's.
	Because if you don't have A's, it's going to be rough.
	It might be rough even if you do have A's.
	But it's unbelievably competitive, especially clinical psychology.
	And it's increasingly the case, and this isn't such good news for those of you in your third and fourth years, that the graduate admissions committees in universities are starting to look before your last two years.
	They're really only supposed to look at your last two years, because everyone knows that big students It's reasonable to allow incoming university students a year or two to screw their heads on straight before you start determining whether their performance is actually an indication of their ability.
	So generally, graduate committees are only supposed to look at the last two years, but it's getting competitive enough so that they're looking farther back.
	Anyways, clinical psychology requires A's.
	And then, of course, as you probably know, you have to take the graduate record exam There's two of them.
	There's the standard graduate record exam, and then there's the psychology specialty graduate record exam.
	Many universities don't require the psychology graduate record exam.
	I would strongly recommend that all of you take it.
	It's your friend.
	If you're a psychology student from the University of Toronto, and you've done reasonably well, the probability is high.
	You'll just ace it, because it tests knowledge that you've acquired.
	As a psychology student, whereas the GRE, the general GRE, tests more general knowledge, including arithmetic and mathematical knowledge.
	And that's not as easy to acquire.
	But psych students at the UT ace the psychology graduate record exam fairly frequently.
	So even if the university or universities that you're applying to don't require it, you might as well take it and send it to them, because if you have a stellar 97th percentile, then You know, why not include the information in your package?
	So, if you score less than 80th percentile on the verbal portion of the general GRE, I would strongly recommend that you don't consider psychology as a career, because it's unbelievably writing-intensive, and it'll break you into the ground.
	Some people are pretty smart mathematically and analytically, so when they write the GRE, they do better on the non-verbal parts.
	And I've had students like that who are really powerful intellectually, but more non-verbally.
	God, they're great at statistics and they can be really good analytical thinkers, but the writing just killed them.
	You have to write all the time as an academic psychologist and you have to be very verbal as a clinical psychologist.
	And so if you're not up in, I would say, top 15th percentile of the people who are taking the GREs, it's going to be a real grind for you.
	You should think about that very seriously because the writing is the most difficult part of psychology as an academic career.
	And if you're not a fluid writer, you're going to have one miserable time.
	You're going to drag your way through graduate school and you're not going to be productive because writing ability actually determines research productivity more than anything else.
	And if you're not productive, you won't do well in the job market.
	And so, it's do something else.
	There's no sense of setting yourself up for, you know, a six-year grind and then a dismal outcome.
	So, students who are more intellectually powerful on the nonverbal sections of the GRE are often pretty good at designing experiments, and they can often learn how to analyze the data, too, and that's great, but What causes graduate students to stumble is writing up the papers.
	And so I often have students who maybe completed 10 or 11 studies, which is not plenty to finish their doctorate and publish several papers, but they just can't write them up.
	And so then they languish because no one else is going to do it.
	If you're verbally oriented, that's a good thing.
	Don't be thinking that you get to pick where you go to graduate school.
	Because you don't.
	And if you think that you get to pick where you're going to graduate school, unless you're a straight 4.0 student with 99 percentile UREs, then you're setting yourself up for disappointment.
	Because it's so competitive that what you do is you apply to every bloody place you have half a chance of getting into.
	Including places that you think you'd never go.
	I think Lakehead, for example, has a clinical program.
	Now, I've got nothing against Lakehead, by the way.
	And small universities have real advantages sometimes, because you're less anonymous in small universities.
	But you might think, well, I'd never go to Lakehead as well.
	You might be also thinking, then, that you'll never go to clinical graduate school.
	Because that could easily be the only place that you'll get in.
	So what you do, especially if you want to go to clinical graduate school, is you apply to every single place that you can in Canada.
	Whether you think you'd go there or not, you can always say no if they accept you.
	But maybe it'll turn out that one place accepts you and that's a place you didn't think you want to go.
	Well, there's a big difference between being in clinical graduate school and not being in it.
	It's the difference between zero and one.
	And so if you go off to Lakehead and you come out with a clinical PhD, then you're a clinical psychologist.
	So who the hell cares if you have to spend five years, you know, in somewhere that isn't a trendy urban setting?
	You're going to be sitting in a box most of the time anyway.
	It's made out of cinder blocks doing your experiments.
	And most of your life, they'll be the social life of graduate students anyway.
	So it's not like you're going to be missing anything.
	One thing you might want to do, if you're fortunate enough to get accepted, And you're not sure whether you want to go, is to go talk to whoever's going to be your supervisor.
	Because more than anything else you ever do in your life, I would say, if you go to graduate school, you're an apprentice to a supervisor.
	You're not a member of a department.
	So your relationship with your supervisor basically determines whether graduate school works for you or not.
	So you want to find out ahead of time, if possible, whether the person who wants to work with you is someone who Who you think you can get along with.
	What they're working on is less critical, I think, because none of you know what you want to do research on.
	You might think you do, but you don't know enough to know.
	So I would also strongly suggest that when you write your applications for graduate school, you make them personal.
	Tell the people who you're writing to who you are, but don't specify a And why give people an excuse not to take you?
	They're looking for an excuse not to take you.
	Anyway, so if I'm looking for graduate students, I have a stack of 100 applications, or maybe 150.
	I get rid of 75 of those so fast that they might as well have not even applied.
	They're just gone.
	Usually what I do is I make a spreadsheet.
	I put in The grades and the GRE scores, and I code the letters of reference, and I sum across, and I record them, and I knock off the bottom 50%.
	And everyone else does that, too, even though they might not do it in such a quantitative way.
	They should, because that's the most efficient and accurate way of doing it.
	But everyone else who looks at that file of resumes is going to do the same thing.
	So you're already 50% of the people who applied, well they weren't going to get in and it looked like anyways.
	That's already a tough cut.
	You don't want also to have a statement of interest that says, well, I want to, you know, look at left hemispheric language specialization for second language learners who are children.
	But there's probably one person in North America studying that.
	And so anyone else who might be interested in your application because of your qualifications is going to look at that and say, oh, they don't want to work with me.
	And then you're out of the way.
	interested in, but what you should do, and I'm not asking you to falsify your letter of the tent because that's foolish, but what I would bade you to consider is that you don't know that much about psychology, and what you do when you specialize
	as a graduate student is you start to develop, in a sense you narrow, because you start to develop a lot of knowledge about one specific topic, but as you narrow, there comes a time when you start to broaden out again, because you get into the single topic deeply enough, so you start to have to consider because you get into the single topic deeply enough, so you start to have to consider the
	So, for example, if you are interested in neuroscience, but you end up studying language developments, well, at some point you're going to run into the brain, right, because language development depends on the brain.
	So, psychology, in a sense, it's an amorphous field, and there's entry points, and all the entry points You're in the field.
	And so it doesn't matter that much specifically what you'll be doing your work on for your master's degree in particular, because you don't know enough to specify that at all.
	And if you're fortunate, your supervisor will basically tell you what to do for your master's degree.
	It only takes a year, right?
	Well, it takes you two months just to clue in when you first start a new program, and then you're already a quarter of the way through the first semester.
	Somebody pretty much has to hand you a project.
	And you have to walk through it.
	And so what it's about is nearly as important as the fact that it's at hand and you've done it.
	I'm not saying as well that what you're interested in doesn't matter.
	It matters an awful lot.
	But you don't want to prematurely and narrowly specify your domain of interest when what you're relying on is information that's not all that reliable and you're not expert enough in psychology really to make it.
	The determined decision about what it is that you're going to study.
	I've ended up studying all sorts of things I never thought I would study.
	Things I didn't think were worth studying.
	That turned out to be wrong.
	They were plenty worth studying and they turned out to be necessary.
	So, learn your bloody stats.
	You should be a wizard with SPSS or some other computer program.
	From an economic perspective, there's nothing that you'll learn as a psychology graduate student that's more valuable than statistics.
	If you use statistics, All sorts of things open up to you, not only in experimental work, and you have to be a statistical expert really to be a good scientist, but cross-disciplinary collaboration, because most other social sciences don't have near the statistical expertise that psychologists do.
	Consulting for businesses.
	There's all sorts of value in doing statistics and understanding them.
	For those of you who are in your earlier years, don't shy away from statistics, especially the more practical end of it, which would be the computer, you know, the PC or Mac programs, I would say PC generally, PC programs that enable you to do statistics.
	You should get good at that.
	Find someone who will teach you how to do statistics.
	Statistics is actually extremely interesting once you start looking at your own data, because it's a lot like gambling.
	And I mean that technically, you know, if you pull a slot machine's arm, There isn't much of a chance that you're going to get a good outcome, but there's some chance, and so it's exciting.
	The payoff is variable reinforcement, and research is like that.
	And statistics are exactly like that, because maybe you've spent six months putting together a data set, and you've arranged the variables in the SPSS statistical machine, so to speak, and you pull the handle, and now you've just learned whether you wasted your time for six months or you hit the jackpot.
	So it's actually pretty exciting.
	It's different when you're doing a class or working on someone else's data set, because what the hell do you care?
	But when you've got something in the game, it's an entirely different process.
	I should also tell you that statistics is not arithmetic, and it's not mathematics.
	It's more like surgery, and it's a moral endeavor.
	Which is funny, you wouldn't think that about statistics, but it is a moral endeavor, because there aren't any real rules for doing it.
	A data set is an amorphous and vague And your job is to carve off the garbage and to pull out the information.
	That doesn't require the automatic application of a set of statistical rules.
	That just won't work at all.
	Your job is to figure out where the truth is embedded in this messy thing that you just produced that's a typical study.
	Because most studies, they're complete disasters.
	And you never learn how to do that right until you've already done it.
	And so they're a mess.
	And whether or not you're going to be able to pull something out You make your decisions ethically while you're attacking the data set.
	Because, for example, you're going to be pretty damn highly motivated to come up with something where p is less than 0.05, right?
	Because otherwise it's not technically publishable, even though that's a rather foolish criteria, but that's still the point.
	So if you put six months in the study and, you know, you have to decide where the outliers are and where the mess is and who to throw out and what to concentrate on, There's the little career dabble at the back.
	Your mind is going to be pushing pretty hard in the direction of playing with the data in a way that makes what you want to come out of it.
	And you can bet that 40% of published studies, science studies at least, are of absolutely no utility whatsoever because the way they were produced was biased by the fact that the person who wrote them wanted to publish the study.
	And so that's a terrible Because you'll fool yourself into discovering something that isn't there.
	Then you'll convince yourself that it is there.
	Then you'll spend the next 15 years chasing something that doesn't exist and trying to prove to yourself and others that it's real.
	And that accounts for a big chunk of what passes for psychology researches.
	It's a scandal in some ways.
	And the journals are changing the way they accept paper So one of the things you want to do, if you want to be an academic psychologist, if you want to be a scientist as a career, you have to decide what it is that you're doing.
	And one thing that you might be doing is building a career, which is a social enterprise.
	It's a primate dominance hierarchy enterprise.
	And it means that what you're focusing on is climbing up a primate dominance hierarchy.
	That's not the same thing as trying to pursue truth in science.
	Those are completely different things.
	If you pursue truth in science, you might also generate a career.
	If you generate a career, you might also pursue truth in science, but the probability is relatively low.
	Now, I would suggest that you pursue truth in science, and the reason for that is, well, first of all, you won't get corrupt, and second, you won't corrupt other people, but perhaps more importantly, from an existential perspective, 20 years down the road you won't look back at your life and be disgusted by the whole thing and cynical and unable to teach or to talk to students or to be a good graduate advisor because you're sick and tired of the whole business.
	And that's exactly what happens to people who do things in a corrupt manner.
	They get cynical and why the hell wouldn't they?
	They should be cynical because they're the sorts of people that you should be cynical about.
	So the other thing you should decide too is if you want to pursue experimental psychology as a career, Do you actually care about scientific truth?
	Does that matter to you?
	If the answer is no, I would say, go into business.
	And no, no, no.
	It's not a joke.
	There's nothing wrong with going into business.
	Business is important.
	It's not easy.
	But if what you're after is the sort of status that comes along with a business career, don't be an idiot and go into academia.
	You might as well just go into business and do that.
	You're not going to make much money as an experimental psychologist.
	So if you're after status, and the sort of status that comes along with business, and the sort of productivity and social relations that come along with business, just go into business.
	Don't do it.
	Don't sidetrack yourself off into something that's, in a sense, a more arcane pursuit.
	Okay, so do your stats and get good at it.
	And, you know, you might be resentful about having to do it because a lot of people who are sort of oriented towards the humanistic end of psychology are pretty irritated about statistics.
	And I was certainly one of those people because it didn't come naturally to me.
	But if you can't hack it, get a tutor and get aids and take more stats courses than you think you need because you'll need them.
	So, and if you go into graduate school and you're sort of Crippled in terms of your ability to approach statistics, you'll pay a big price for it.
	You won't be able to understand the papers.
	You won't be able to do your own analysis.
	It's bad news.
	Okay, so, apply everywhere.
	Now, you might say, well, I can't afford to apply everywhere because each application is $150, or I don't know what it is.
	What is it now?
	$100?
	$150?
	That's silly.
	That's not a cost, it's an investment.
	And you need to distinguish between costs and investments.
	And if you get in, what do you think an experimental PhD is worth?
	Let's say you get an academic job, what do you think that's worth?
	Yes.
	Economically.
	Come on.
	Is it $100,000?
	Is it $50 million?
	What do you think it's worth?
	Anybody?
	Ballpark estimate.
	70,000 a year.
	Okay, that's good for how many years?
	40 years.
	Maybe, yeah.
	Okay, so that's $3 million, right?
	What's your pension worth?
	Another two?
	And you underestimate the salary in the latter part of your career.
	So it's probably $7 million, something like that.
	Okay, so now you know what you're aiming at.
	You get that acceptance letter in the mail, it's worth $7 million if you play it, right?
	And if you're a clinical psychologist, it's probably worth twice that.
	So you're after a $14 million price.
	You ask, well, why is it so competitive?
	Well, now you know.
	That's why it's so competitive.
	Lots of people would like to have $14 million.
	So it's hard to get it.
	So then if you're applying, and it's $100, $150, let's say you've got a 1 in 10 chance, or a 1 in 20 chance of getting in at any given school.
	So let's see, what would you pay for a 1 in 20 chance of $14 million?
	How would you calculate that?
	$14 million divided by 20.
	Right!
	$14 million divided by 20, so you'd pay about $700,000, something like that.
	So you'd pay $700,000, not $100,000.
	So let's half that because you're skeptical about your chances of winning.
	Fine, so then you pay $350,000.
	Well, don't balk at $200,000.
	It's a bargain.
	And don't get too irritated about the application process.
	It's annoying.
	They're trying to annoy you.
	Because if you get annoyed and quit, then they won't have to look at your damn application, and that's the end of use.
	So take a big amount of time to do your applications, because they're really important, and do lots If you can afford to think about going to the U.S., throw some applications down there.
	That's especially true if you're a hot student.
	And you're a hot student if you've got basically an A average and a GRE of 90 percentile or above.
	People will be interested in you.
	And that means that you might get a scholarship to an American school and you won't have to pay the tuition.
	So, and that might especially be the case, you know, maybe that won't happen to you at Harvard, although it might, but there's lots of state schools down there that are excellent, the big research schools, and maybe they'll pay you to come down and study.
	So, not only do you get your crack at $7 million or $14 million, but someone will give you some money to help you get it.
	So that's a pretty good deal.
	So don't laze out of the bloody applications.
	It's really important.
	Alright.
	So, now we'll go back to more general things for a minute.
	So, now we might want to talk about what makes people successful.
	Okay, and you want to also think about what success means, right?
	And what success means, I can give you a couple of rules of thumb about that.
	I mean, the first thing is, if you want to be successful, let's put that, let's use a different phrase.
	We can say, well, let's say you want to have a good life.
	And I don't mean good in that it's happy and easy, or any of those things.
	I mean sort of good classically, if you want to have a platonically good life.
	Okay, so how would one go about doing that?
	Well, the first thing I would say is, do what other people do, unless you have a really good reason not to.
	So what do people, what do human beings do that have a good life?
	They have friends.
	They have a circle of friends, some of whom they can talk to, Carefully about the important things, so you need that.
	People have an intimate relationship with someone that is stable across time.
	Why?
	Well, without that, you're kind of chaotic and lost, and plus you only have half your brain, because people are pair-bonding animals, and we're highly communicative, and if you have a partner that you can trust, who's got your back, that you can talk to, and plan with, then you're twice as wise as the person that you're competing with.
	Why is there sexual reproduction instead of clonal reproduction?
	Why is that?
	You guys have taken by all the courses.
	It's a pretty fundamental question.
	What's the answer to that?
	Variation?
	That's part of it, though, right?
	Yeah.
	As a unit, if you cloned yourself, first of all, to parasites, you're being in no time flat, but apart from them, You have a bunch of strengths and a bunch of weaknesses, and they're kind of random.
	And then you'll pair up with someone who has a bunch of strengths and a bunch of weaknesses, and they're kind of random.
	And hopefully, when you pair up, most of the places you're weak, that person will be strong, and vice versa.
	So that makes you a much more properly solidified unit.
	Sometimes your weaknesses will match, and that's where you'll fight nonstop.
	And so, you know, that can be a problem.
	But still, you're a lot better off with somebody, and that's especially And you're foolish not to have children.
	I don't know.
	You guys are under me.
	Most of the women in here, most of you would be under 25.
	So there's probably a fair number of people who think you're not going to have children.
	Must bloody well dispense with that foolish idea right now.
	Because all that means is that you've been war.
	That's one thing it means.
	And second, it means you don't know who the hell you are.
	Because my experience has been that virtually, I think this is virtually without exception, Every woman I've ever met, whether they thought they wanted children at the age of 21 or 22 or 23 or 24, if they were basically mentally healthy, they were desperate for children by the time they were 30.
	And that kicks in about 28.
	And so expect it.
	Because it's going to happen.
	And you might think, well, no, it's not going to happen to me.
	Well, you can think that if you want.
	But basically what I'm telling you on my work, I've done a lot of work with really high-achieving Most of these were female partners, senior partners of big law firms.
	And being a senior partner of a big law firm, that's as hard as being a successful clinical psychologist.
	If you have to be at the top of your class as an undergraduate, then you have to get into a really good law school, then you have to be really good at that law school, then you have to go off an article and you have to be kept as an articling student, and generally you're not, because the big law firms You have an article to students, work them to death, and throw away all the ones that don't make it.
	So if you make it, well then you get to be an associate, and then you'll get rid of most of those too, and then if you're really good at it, you'll be a senior partner.
	And so that's tough.
	And if you're a female and you've done that, you're bloody well committed to your career.
	It doesn't matter.
	By the time you hit 28 to 30, and you're working 70 hours a week, you're going to be thinking, what the hell am I working 70 hours a week for?
	Which is really, by the way, a good question.
	And your attention is going to turn to happy children, as it should.
	And the way you solve that if you're a female and you want a career is, A, you have a partner who's got a clue and can provide some support, and B, you outsource most of the domestic responsibilities that go along with the household.
	You have to have a man.
	Maybe you have to have a cook.
	You don't do any housework.
	You pay attention to your kids with the little bit of time that you have.
	And that'll work.
	Daycare doesn't work.
	Your bloody law firm isn't going to...
	Take care of your children.
	They're not going to set up a take care in your firm.
	That doesn't work anyways.
	But a nanny will work.
	And so you might as well be thinking about things along that line.
	Because if you want to have a career, and you're smart and you're hardworking, and you should have a career, and you want to have children, then you have to set up your life so that you can do those two difficult things without dreading yourself, start craving that, or exhausting yourself, or destroying your relationship.
	And that's about the only way that I've seen so far that it's possible to do that.
	Anyways, back to career.
	Okay, so now we've already established that what you're after is worth a lot and it's hard to get.
	And it's hard to get because it's worth a lot and there's lots of people chasing it.
	Now the question is, what can you do to give yourself an edge?
	Okay, well, what makes you good for something from a career perspective?
	Well, one is IQ. Well, you're pretty much stuck with what you've got.
	You can maintain it by exercising.
	It turns out physical exercising is the best way to maintain your intelligence across time.
	It starts to plummet pretty precipitously after you're about the age of 24.
	And it's downhill to 70, and then, well, after that, things get worse.
	So exercise now.
	So if you keep yourself in good physical condition, that's going to make a big difference.
	I would also say if you want to play a sharp game, so if you're going to be on the edge of things, Competing with people who are, say, in the top one percentile.
	You better get your drug and alcohol use under control, because that'll compromise you.
	You better make sure that your sleeping is well-regulated, and you better make sure that you eat properly.
	And those are, they're not small things, they're big things, because you do them every day.
	And so I would say, you can start to look at yourself now.
	Get up at the same time every day.
	Start learning how to do that.
	I would say get up at 8 or 7.30.
	And the people you're competing with, who you're really going to be competing with, they're already up to six, and they're working by seven.
	And they'll work you right into the ground.
	Because the people who are at the top of their discipline, and that's basically what you're talking about, or if you're talking about doing something that requires PhD level of education as a career, they're not mucking around.
	Okay, so here's a question.
	Think about this for a minute.
	So think about your typical day.
	Now think about this.
	How much time do you waste?
	And so, you can define waste any way you want to define it, but I would say time is wasted when what you're doing isn't what you plan to do.
	You know what it feels like to waste time.
	For me, it's like a feeling like I need to take a shower.
	I've deviated from the appropriate path.
	I mean, you know, YouTube hell.
	And that's not good.
	Okay, so now you've thought about that.
	Typical day.
	How much time do you waste?
	Alright, so let's find out.
	How many people waste more than half an hour?
	Is there anybody here who thinks they don't waste half an hour?
	And if you do think that, please do tell me, because, you know, maybe you're efficient.
	Some people learn to be efficient.
	Okay, how many waste two hours?
	Alright.
	How about three?
	Okay, how many think they waste less than three hours?
	Okay, one person.
	Okay, I'll come back to you.
	Okay, four hours.
	Five hours.
	Jesus, you better wake up, people.
	Okay, so let's say five hours, because I won't embarrass you further.
	So let's do a little mathematics.
	What's your time worth?
	No, come on, let's make it in money.
	That's what we use to evaluate value, right?
	What's your time worth?
	No.
	Wrong.
	Why is that wrong?
	That's minimum wage.
	No, no, no.
	We're going to play capitalist here.
	It's not invaluable.
	I'm not going to pay you an infinite amount of money to do anything.
	Okay, so we're just talking about economic value here.
	That's all.
	So it has to be quantifiable.
	We're going to quantify it.
	Okay, it's not ten and a quarter.
	Why?
	Because you have a future.
	Ten and a quarter is what you're worth if your time isn't If what you do now isn't contributing to who you're going to be in the future.
	So it's more than that.
	How much is it?
	Okay, well let's look at it this way.
	Let's say you manage your career goals and it's 10 years down the road and you're making the amount of money you should be making.
	So we've got a rule of thumb here a while back, $75,000 a year.
	So that's about $6,000 a month, or about $1,500 a week.
	And so we'll assume 40 hours.
	So that's about $45 an hour.
	Okay, let's assume that you're worth $35.
	Because you're still a baby.
	You're not worth that.
	But the time that you spend now is an investment, right?
	So even though you might not be being paid for it this second, you're banking what it's worth so you'll be paid for it later.
	So you can't be thinking it's $10.
	So we'll say $40 because it makes the math easier.
	So how much time do you're wasting in A? Five hours.
	What's 5 times 40?
	200.
	Times 5?
	1,000.
	Let's multiply it by 7, because after all, you're wasting time on the weekends too.
	So that's $1,400 a week.
	How many weeks in a month?
	Four.
	What's four times $1,400?
	$5,600.
	So we'll say five for the same argument.
	$5,000 a month.
	How many months in a year?
	You're wasting $60,000 a year.
	Right.
	So maybe you should stop doing that.
	$60,000 a year is a lot.
	And there are people, the people they can be competing with, they're not going to be wasting that time.
	Or maybe they're going to be wasting $30,000 or $15,000 of it.
	But if you're wasting five hours a day, you better get your act together.
	Because you're going to pay for that in a big way.
	It's a foolish waste of time.
	Now, IQ, there isn't much you can do about it.
	We already said that.
	You can exercise.
	And maybe you can read.
	And you can read as broadly as you possibly can.
	So you should read every day.
	That would be helpful.
	And maybe you should read non-fiction, especially if you want to be a scientist.
	But maybe you can learn to work harder.
	And one rule of thumb for that is how much time you waste.
	Now, we could do a little more in-depth analysis of ways to become, because I could also ask them.
	I have students who come and see me, and they say, well, I don't seem to be doing very well in this course.
	And I say, well, how much are you working on?
	And they say, well, I'm in the library six hours a day.
	And I think, That's what I ask.
	I ask how much time you're spending working on it.
	Because, first of all, you should be in your library six hours a day.
	That's just completely insane.
	Because I don't know anyone at all, except for a very small fraction of people, who are extremely disciplined and well put together, who can concentrate on difficult material for six hours in a row.
	You're lucky if you can manage three, like real work.
	So the first thing you do is half your time in the library, and then double your discipline.
	So let's say we can look at a typical hour that you're working, and I might say, well, how hard are you working during that hour to how hard you'd be working if someone pulled out a gun and said, look, if you don't work as hard as you can for the next hour, I'm going to shoot you.
	And then you might think, well, I'm working about one tenth as hard as I can.
	Right?
	I betcha that's about right.
	I bet you that's about right.
	The reason I use that figure is because I figured out a long time ago that if you have a given task to do and you sit for five or ten minutes and you think, how can I do this ten times faster?
	You can almost always figure out how to do it ten times faster.
	And sometimes better and ten times faster.
	And that's also something to really know because what you'll find as you mature into your career is that you'll be asked to do way more than is human You know how to do that is you get way faster than you think you could be.
	And just using the 10 times marker as a rule of thumb is an excellent one.
	It's remarkable how much you can do in a very short period of time if you set yourself up with that expectation.
	So then when you remember what your time's worth, well then you might think, by $40, by the way, it's an underestimate.
	Your time's actually worth more than that because you're young.
	Every hour that you have now to shape yourself pays off through the whole course of your life.
	You know, like what I do now doesn't affect what I did when I was 20.
	But what you do now that you're 23 is going to affect you when you're my age.
	So, your time is actually worth more even though you can't get anybody to actually pay you for it at the moment.
	So, the other thing you might really think about learning to do is to figure out how to get efficient.
	then you've got to be ruthless with yourself to be efficient.
	And you've got to be efficient, because if you're going to pursue a career, efficient people win.
	And they don't just win a little bit.
	I don't know.
	You know, you guys have probably learned that most things in life are normally distributed, right?
	No.
	Height.
	Well, you should have learned that.
	If you're a psychology student and you haven't learned that, then there's really something wrong.
	Because that's like the basic, that's the basic premise of statistics.
	So, of most statistics, anyway.
	So, alright, so, you know, maybe the average man is 5 foot 10.
	And then there's...
	A standard deviation around that of maybe, I don't know, it's probably something like 6 inches.
	And then 85% of men, no, it's not, 68%?
	65% of men fall in that range.
	Okay, so, and heights like that, and weights like that, and intelligences like that.
	Most things are distributed according to the normal distribution, but life outcomes aren't.
	They're distributed according to a Pareto distribution.
	And that's a free distribution.
	Anybody know how much money Bill Gates has?
	About $40 billion.
	How much money did the top 10 richest men in the US have?
	$300 billion?
	Something like that.
	So that's $1,000 for every single person in the United States.
	This is more than the average family has in savings.
	So, the top 40 men in the United States have more money than all the rest of the Americans have put together in savings.
	Okay, so the top 100 richest men in the world have more money than the bottom 2 billion.
	Right.
	So, this is a credo distribution.
	You see the same thing with creative production.
	So, let's say you're looking at PhD students, and you want to know how many publications they have.
	Well, the median number is 1.
	The median is...
	The number that most people have.
	It's not the means.
	It's if you popped up a typical PhD student, held them by the collar, and said, how many publications do you have?
	He'd say, one.
	And I'd say, well, you're not getting hired with one.
	Because one, that doesn't count.
	It's more than zero.
	But it's only one more than zero.
	Okay, so then...
	There's going to be the top 1% of PhD students weigh the hell out here.
	And they're going to have 20 papers by the time they graduate.
	Which is about as many as the typical associate professor has at tenure.
	And those are the people you'll be competing with on the job market.
	So they publish.
	They'll be in their PhD for five years.
	They'll publish four papers a year.
	And they'll come out and they'll be hired.
	And so just for the sake of comparison, the typical professor at a top-rate research institution, there's about 40 in North America, publishes between three and four papers a year.
	So there's graduate students that are hot prospects on the job market, and that makes it likely that they'll get an academic job, although not certain, are out-producing technical associate and assistant professors at Iowa universities.
	And there's hardly any of these people.
	All of the science is done by these people.
	So the rest of them, they're just pointing to the gate.
	So all the people who aren't way out at that tail end, they're just keeping their institutions running.
	So, what's the typical profit margin for a typical corporation year after year?
	Approximately.
	We'll guess.
	How much money do you get?
	How much kind of interest do you get when you put your money in the bank?
	Max?
	2%?
	Okay, so obviously a company would have to make more than 2% and no one would ever invest in one.
	So it's got to be more than 2%.
	Okay, well it's around 5%.
	5%.
	So a really efficient company runs on a 5% margin.
	That means it spends 95% of its time just existing.
	Everything is like that.
	Most things spend almost all of their time just existing.
	All of the power comes at the top end.
	How do you put yourself in the top end?
	while I'll be smart.
	Let you guys see where we're going.
	Thank you.
	Okay, so if you want to put yourself up at this end of the distribution, how so if you want to put yourself up at this end of the distribution, How do you do it?
	Well, I can give you an example of the differences in people's productivity.
	Picasso produced 65,000 pieces of art.
	Created it for 65 years.
	And the median number of pieces of art that people produce is zero.
	So that's a huge difference.
	But almost all fields of creative production are like that.
	Almost everyone does nothing, and a few people do everything.
	Okay, so, Bach, J.S. Bach, he wrote so much music that if you took all his manuscripts and you just copied them for eight hours a day, it would take 40 years.
	And he was actually writing the music, not just copying it out.
	So people can get unbelievably productive.
	And they're the ones who have the stellar careers.
	Okay, so what do you do to do that?
	Well, you can't do much about your intelligence, but you can learn to work.
	And work matters.
	Conscientiousness, which is a trait, is a big predictor of long-term life success.
	Conscientious people are orderly, which isn't quite as relevant, and industrious.
	Industrious people, when they put their mind to something, they do it.
	There's no wasting time.
	And the people I know who are really successful, and so they're often taught One tenth of one percent.
	Which is only one in a thousand, right?
	So you guys are already probably one in a hundred if you look at your IQs and your work ethic.
	So one in ten of you is one in a thousand.
	So people like that, they don't waste any time.
	And I really mean that.
	They'll make five minutes.
	Be productive.
	They'll do more than five minutes than most people do in a week.
	And that's not an exaggeration.
	Because they learn to be bloody efficient.
	They do not waste time.
	So they think, how can I do things 10 times faster?
	They think, how can I do this one thing so it does five things simultaneously?
	And also I kill five birds with one stone instead of two.
	And that way they make maximum use of their time.
	And they discipline themselves enough so that they're not in a constant battle with themselves about doing what they should be doing.
	They just bloody well do it.
	And that's why they can produce...
	Really almost beyond human imagination.
	So discipline really matters.
	So if you're wasting time and you want to pursue a difficult career, you better learn how to get that under control.
	The best way to do that, as far as I can tell, is to pick something that's difficult, you know, that you'd like to do that's difficult.
	Something that's kind of beyond you.
	And do it.
	Bang your head against it.
	It'll probably take you a couple of years of, like, really I think that's something you can do merely by wanting it and attending to it.
	If you do that, first of all, you get discipline, and that's really useful.
	That's why it doesn't matter so much what you study when you first go to graduate school.
	What really matters is that you study something, and you really study it hard.
	Now when I went to graduate school, I went to graduate school at McGill.
	We had a great time.
	I had a great social life at McGill.
	We spent a lot of time going to restaurants and going to bars and playing softball at a blast.
	But all the people I went to graduate school with, they worked like 10 hours a day and they worked like mad dogs.
	And so that was fine.
	When they were down there 10 hours, then they could go off and have fun.
	But there was no knocking about during the work period.
	And whether they were hungover or not, they got up and they did their work.
	And so, that's what you have to learn to do.
	And it makes your life more enjoyable and entertaining, not less.
	I mean, if you really want to waste five hours a day, that's one 30-year wasting time.
	If you lived 90 years, you wasted 30 years.
	And if you waste 30 years, you'd be, and you'd wonder why you weren't in anywhere at lunch.
	Come on.
	That's pretty easy to figure out.
	If you waste 30 years, you don't need to get in.
	And why should you?
	Because you're just wasting your time.
	So it's best to really learn how to stop doing that.
	It can be a terrible battle, especially for those of you who cross, you know, lost people like that.
	You really have to rewire yourself to get that out of control.
	So if you want to be successful at a high competition career, then that's what you have to do.
	Okay, I'm going to stop for a minute and ask and take questions, and then I'll tell you a little bit about what options you have if you choose psychology as a career, what sort of things lay themselves open to you.
	So, if you have any questions, now's the time to ask them.
	What kind of, I guess, extracurricular activities, per se, something outside of the career will help you get into grad school?
	None.
	Grades and GREs, that's what matters.
	The rest of it is fluff.
	See, the thing is, it's a multiple threshold cutoff system, eh?
	So first of all, you have to have A's.
	If you don't, you're out.
	Then if you have A's, you have to have certain GRE levels.
	And if you don't, you're out.
	If you have certain grades and certain GRE levels, then you're in.
	Then it's random factors that determine whether or not you're going to get chosen.
	Which is partly why you want to maximize your probability of success by applying to many, many places.
	Because let's say that you're a threshold student.
	Okay, I'm going to look over your application.
	Well, what's going to determine whether I take you?
	Do I need a student?
	That'd be number one.
	Do I have the funding?
	Do you have funding?
	If you can get SHIRT or NSIRT or MRC funding as a graduate student, that helps a lot.
	I mean, if you're above threshold or even sort of that threshold, and if you have funding, it's really easy for a professor to say, yeah, yeah, I'll take you.
	You're not going to, you know, eat up grant resources.
	So that's really helpful.
	So you can apply for graduate school fellowships.
	You have to still have the same level of attainment.
	Some extracurricular activities can help with that.
	If you have lab experience and you can write a decent research proposal, that would increase the probability that you can get a fellowship.
	So laboratory experience helps there.
	Lab experience also helps when you get to graduate school because you know what the hell you're doing and you can get a jump on it.
	But it's not going to help you get in much.
	Now if I'm looking at two students who basically cross thresholds the same way and one of them has extra lab experience and maybe knows some computer programming and has some useful Those first two things are met.
	And I probably am not even deciding that.
	Because usually what happens when you apply is that there's a committee of administrators that does the first pass.
	And they don't even let your application through the door to see the professors unless you meet the minimum criteria.
	So, you know, students are desperate to give the extra experience that would give them to graduate schools.
	Like, a publication wouldn't help.
	But they're hard to give.
	So, if you do an honors research project, for example, and it works well, you can write it up, but almost no one does that.
	Because by the time you've done your damn project, and you've written up your thesis, you're only one-tenth of the way to having it published.
	And that's something else to think about, too, if you want to be an academic psychologist.
	Everything you ever do will be rejected.
	And not just a little bit, either.
	You'll work for something for six months, like you'll write your first research paper, And you'll send it out, maybe not to even a very good journal.
	And you'll get three reviews back, and they'll say, this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen, and you might as well quit.
	And you'll get those letters throughout your whole career.
	Now, now and then, you'll say, well, this doesn't suck as much as it could, so if you really worked hard on it, and you do this part again, and you address these 30 concerns, then we'll be willing to look at it again, but don't get your hopes up.
	And that's when you go have a, you know, a pint at the local bar, because that's the best news you're going to get this month.
	So that's another thing to think about, too, when you're thinking about whether this kind of career is for you.
	Because if you're rather high in negative emotion, you're going to get punched in the stomach a lot.
	And you've got to ask yourself whether or not you can learn to tolerate that.
	It's just a function of the business, because it's hard to get published.
	The rejection rate in the journal is 95 to 99%.
	Which is worse than your application, you know, your chances of getting accepted to and getting in graduate school.
	So just looking for reasons not to publish your damn paper.
	And it can be because there's a mistake in it.
	It might be because it's too good.
	You know, and it scares people or their clinical reasons or whatever.
	But there's a lot of rejection.
	And that's true for most careers.
	So you have to be used to that.
	But in academia, I think in some ways it works because you're always trying to publish.
	And the answer is always, we don't want your stupid paper.
	We've got a hundred other ones.
	Professor Henderson, I know that you do some clinical work as well as your research and teaching at UBT. Can I ask why you or why one might want to work as a professor, why I think a psychologist might choose to work as a professor You might want to be a professor.
	One of the things you might watch about yourself.
	You want to see, when you're talking with other people, is there a tendency to turn the conversation to ideas?
	That means you're open.
	That's a trait, openness.
	If you tend to turn the conversation to ideas, then you're an intellectual.
	Fundamentally, you're open.
	That's a good reason to be a professor.
	You like ideas.
	If you're not like that, like if you talk to your friends and what you do most of the time is talk about people or maybe what you did last night, those are fine things.
	Those probably mean more that you're extroverted.
	Or maybe you talk about relationships and that means more that you're agreeable.
	That's not really the kind of temperament that is suited for an intellectual pursuit because it's about ideas.
	It's fundamental.
	And then you also have to ask yourself, would you like to teach?
	And teaching is brutal for people who don't like it.
	They look down.
	They mumble.
	They're so bloody terrified of the students, they won't even look at them.
	And everyone there is like checking Facebook.
	It's awful.
	So, you know, if you don't like to engage an audience, you're going to spend the most exhausting part of your career teaching.
	Because teaching, writing is very exhausting.
	So is doing clinical work.
	But right up there is teaching.
	Because a lecture is a performance.
	It takes a tremendous amount of energy.
	Unless you do it by rope, then it's boring.
	But otherwise, it's like spontaneous jazz for 90 minutes.
	It's very tiring.
	And when I teach three courses in the spring, I'm just bloody wiped out by March.
	And I got a lot of energy.
	So you also have to decide if you want that.
	And then you have to decide, do you like mentoring students, graduate students?
	I really like lecturing, and I really like ideas, and I really like mentoring graduate students, so I got used to being rejected, the papers being rejected.
	I learned how to deal with that in about three or four years.
	It used to just piss me off.
	I'd be mad for like three months after I got a rejection letter.
	I get the envelope and I wouldn't even want to open it because you know what it says.
	It says, "Up yours." You don't want to see that.
	But you learn not to think that personally because it's not personal.
	They don't hate you.
	They just hate everybody.
	So, if you can learn to tolerate it, that's good.
	Now, you asked me why you would be a clinical psychologist as well as a professor.
	Well, that depends to some degree on what kind of breadth of experience you're inclined towards.
	So, for me, life is better if I'm doing a lot of different things.
	And so, being a clinician, I'm a clinician.
	I do consulting with businesses.
	I'm a professor, and I run a little testing company that evaluates employees.
	I have other jobs.
	I think I have seven jobs.
	That's what I figured at one point.
	It fluctuates between five and seven.
	And the reason I do that is because I learned how to do things flat out all the time.
	It turns out I'm kind of wired for that, so it's better.
	For me, that's better.
	I love doing clinical work.
	Sometimes people wonder, too, how you can do it, because you say, well, people bring their problems to you all the time, right?
	But it isn't like that, because social work is like that.
	I think you're insane to be a social worker, if any of you are thinking about that.
	I think of all the jobs that will just hammer you to death over a five-year period, that will teach Because, see, the thing about being a clinical psychologist is the people who come to you have problems, but they don't want to have them.
	That's why they're coming to see you.
	And so what you're doing isn't dealing with people who have problems.
	You're dealing with people who want to get rid of their problems.
	And so the trajectory's uphill.
	And it doesn't really matter how bad the current situation is if there's hope in the future, right?
	Because you're oriented towards the future.
	So if you're working with your clients and they want to have better lives and you're helping them do that, that's, it's a fine thing to do.
	It's a great thing to be able to do.
	Do you think that perhaps a lot of clinical psychologists pursue the professorships instead of full-time clinician work because grad programs hear them that way?
	Well, it depends on the grad program.
	There's actually three kinds of clinical graduate programs.
	There's the graduate programs that are characteristic of large research institutions.
	So say like McGill.
	And McGill is mostly a scientific institution with a side bar of clinical training.
	And most research institutions are like that.
	And so most APA-approved, that's how it used to be anyways, APA-approved, American Psychological Association approved programs, tend to be research-oriented, and they provide clinical training.
	So what they expect of you if you're a student there, They're more common in the US. They'll charge you about $40,000 a year.
	And they'll train you basically just as a clinician.
	And then there are clinical programs that aren't in major research institutions, but are still in public universities, where most of the emphasis is on clinical training and less is on experimental work.
	And they're usually not designed to...
	They're not geared at producing academics who could train clinical psychologists.
	And yeah, often when you go there, like at McGill, if you were a successful clinical student, you became a professor.
	It was the unsuccessful clinical students who became clinical psychologists.
	And you could say, well, that's because that was all they could do.
	Well, that's a cynical way of looking at it.
	But in some ways it's true.
	Because to be a professor at a research institute like the UT and a clinical psychologist, you have to be able to be a scientist and to do everything that's associated with that.
	So, it's a good option if you can pull it off because you have all the stability that goes along with being in a university.
	Plus, you have all the undergraduates and, you know, if you like undergraduates, if you don't like undergraduates, you really don't like people.
	You know, because, I mean, undergraduates, they're all shiny and clean, and, you know, they're all happy about their futures, and they're all probably going to be reasonably successful.
	And if you can't deal with undergraduates, you might as well go take a hold and climb into it, because that's about as good as it gets among human beings.
	You know, so...
	Anyway, so, if you're a professor, you get to stay in that milieu.
	And then, you know, I do my clinical work and my consulting work as well, so it's sort of like the best of both worlds.
	But there's a lot of...
	There's a lot of...
	Preparation goes into doing all those things.
	So, for example, you have to do, I think I had to do 2,000 hours of supervised practice when I came back to Ontario after I was in Massachusetts, even though I was licensed in Massachusetts.
	So, it takes quite a bit of work to keep your...
	Because just after you get your clinical PhD, you're not a psychologist yet.
	You have to do another 2,000 hours of supervised practice.
	And to do that as well as to do what you need to do in order to pursue an academic career means, you know, you better be efficient.
	So, other questions?
	Yeah?
	I've heard from a lot of people that you should look for supervisors who are working on different areas that you're interested in.
	You should do whatever you want.
	If you don't, apply everywhere.
	And I would say even if you do apply everywhere, you can only say no.
	You know, what a delightful deal.
	You apply to 40 places, let's say, or 30 places, more realistically, and four people give you an offer.
	And you fly out there and they try to tell you how wonderful you are and try to get you to come in.
	You get to say no to three of them and pick the best one.
	That's a deal.
	So that's what you want to set yourself up for.
	So, you know, if you really know what you want, which is doubtful, but maybe you do, because sometimes people do, and you can specify who you'd like to work with, and they're interested, and you can target that carefully, hey, more power to you.
	But that's very rare, and for most people it's not a good strategy.
	Look, I've had lots of students asking me about how to get into, well, let's say specifically clinicals, graduate school, and I say, apply to lots of places.
	Then they go, they apply to like four places, and they're threshold students, and they don't get in.
	Well, that's pretty rough, you know.
	They languish for a year, sometimes two years, as they try again.
	Usually by the second year of not getting in, then they listen.
	Then apply to 30 places, and then they get in.
	And then they think, geez, you know, if I had done that the first year, I would have been, you know, waiting at the local bar for two years while I was trying to get into graduate school.
	So, if you're 100% credible, and you've got an inside trap, You know, normal rules don't apply to you, and that's fine, but it's a numbers game, and with most things that are low probability, the way you maximize your chance of success is to do it a lot.
	That's, you know, if you have a 1 in 10 chance of getting in somewhere, and you apply to 20 places, you know, you're probably going to get into 2.
	But if you apply to 8 places, you might get unlucky and get into none.
	So...
	Not here.
	Not at St.
	George.
	Scarborough, possibly.
	They're working on it.
	But it's hard to set up a clinical program.
	You need a lot of clinical faculty.
	And you need to be tied in with hospitals.
	It's a multi-year process.
	So, not in the foreseeable future.
	But York has a good clinical program.
	Ryerson has a clinical program.
	We don't know.
	Is there a clinical program at OISI or counseling?
	I think it's child clinical.
	Is it clinical?
	Child clinical.
	Oh, yeah.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	Other questions?
	Yeah.
	Does any of what you said change for advising students who are applying to social psychology in grad school?
	Not at all.
	It's easier to get into graduate school if it's not clinical.
	That doesn't mean it's easy.
	It's still hard, but it's not impossible like it is with clinical.
	The problem with that is that although the The difficulty comes a little later.
	The difficulty then becomes getting a job.
	Because it's just as hard to get a job as a social psychologist, as it is to get a job as any other, I mean an academic job, as any other kind of psychologist.
	So the entry barrier to graduate school is less, but the entry barrier into the job market might even be higher.
	And so what you have to do is...
	All you're doing...
	This is something to remember.
	You are not going to graduate school for the classes.
	What you want to do is barely pass.
	Because otherwise you're working too much on the classes.
	Because the classes are useless.
	You're not going to learn a damn thing.
	And all they do is take you away from what you should be doing.
	And what you should be doing is publishing papers.
	Because that's all that matters.
	If you publish enough papers, you'll get a job.
	Assuming that you're not flawed in some remarkably obvious other way.
	So you want to remember that when you go to graduate school.
	If you pass a graduate course, you get an A. That's how graduate courses work.
	Anything other than an A is a failure.
	So there's a bunch of complicated reasons for that.
	To pass a graduate class, you have to do a decent job.
	They're easier than undergraduate classes.
	But they don't matter.
	You have to pass them, because if you don't, they'll pick you on the program.
	But if you pass them, it's irrelevant.
	No one cares.
	No one's ever going to look at your bloody graduate transcript for grades.
	Except for maybe the fellowship granting agency.
	So that's the one exception.
	But if you pass the course, you get an A anyways.
	The reason you get A's if you pass the course is because if you don't get an A... Let's say I give 30% of my graduate students B's.
	Then they don't get graduate fellowships.
	Because the graduate fellowship programs will only give graduate fellowships to students who have A's.
	So the way the university suggests to that is you get A's if you pass, otherwise you fail.
	So you have to work hard enough for your graduate course to pass.
	Having done that, then you have to work really hard to get your damn publications out.
	Because that's what will determine how hot a prospect you are when you graduate.
	And you want to be...
	In social psychology, each year there's going to be five or six graduates in North America who everyone wants.
	So they're the guys on the tail here.
	And then there's everyone else.
	And everyone else has a hell of a time.
	Those top five students or six students, they have their pick of jobs.
	That's where you want to be.
	And to do that, you need to publish.
	The bar keeps going up, because even though it's hard to publish, because people tell you no, Have made the process more straightforward.
	Right?
	It's...
	The journals are right at your fingertips.
	You don't have to spend a day looking for each journal like you did when I was a graduate student.
	And then the journal wouldn't be there anyways because you can get them instantly.
	And you can do your stats on your laptop.
	Whereas I had to use a mainframe in 1985.
	And I tell you, the manual for that mainframe...
	And I knew I'd have used a computer.
	I didn't know anything about statistics.
	The manual was as long as this table.
	It was one book on...
	Metal rods.
	That long!
	It's like, to do in a NOFA was a nightmare.
	Now you can just click.
	It's done.
	So some of the barriers to publication number have fallen.
	But the consequence of that is the talk student's published form.
	This hasn't got any easier.
	You just...
	You have to spend exactly the same amount of time as you would have before, except now the output's higher.
	But you're going to need 10 to 12 publications and a couple of book chapters.
	Most of those should be first author.
	You should be the first author on five or six of those papers, and two of them should be in good journals.
	And then you're set, but I'll tell you, to hit that, you better de-run it, because it's not hit by very many students.
	And the problem with graduate school, and this is something else to understand, people will leave you alone in graduate school.
	And what that means is you can float around vaguely for five years, graduate with one publication, and disappear.
	So it's dangerous.
	Graduate school's dangerous that way.
	Because no one will be on your case to make sure that you're one of the top students.
	So you have lots of freedom, but you've got to also ask yourself, you know, do you want freedom?
	And can you tolerate it?
	So, do you want it?
	Well, people float and drift if they have too much freedom, and then can you tolerate it?
	The question there is, can you discipline yourself enough to be successful without someone basically, you know, watching your big hitting you in the back of the head?
	It's not easy to become that future-oriented and that disciplined.
	So that's the social...
	The other thing I would also mention about social psychology is learn your psychometrics.
	Because most of social psychology is nonsense.
	And there's a reason for that.
	The reason is that social psychologists don't know measurement very well.
	And they're starting to clamp down.
	All the journals have adopted a new code I don't necessarily see how it makes sense Hypothetically.
	What percentage of classes have you taken in the last year that were good?
	Okay, so there you go.
	It's worse than graduate school.
	So 90% of the time your classes will be a waste.
	If you want to learn to be a clinician, you can start now.
	Read Carl Rogers.
	Read Abraham Maslow.
	Read Carl Jung.
	Read Sigmund Freud.
	There's lots of great clinicians.
	Read them.
	Read them.
	That'll help a lot.
	Doesn't that mean the system is flawed?
	Yes.
	All systems are flawed.
	Really flawed systems are murderous.
	If you're in a system and it's not stomping you to death, it's actually working not too bad.
	These people are supposed to be smart.
	That's smart.
	The people who made the system.
	The professors, everybody.
	They are.
	So why is it fun then?
	Well, I remember earlier in the lecture I talked to you about businesses, right?
	I said businesses run on a 5% profit margin.
	That means they spend, and that's an efficient business, because most businesses fail.
	So really well-run businesses produce 5% profit year after year.
	That means they spend 95% of their time just existing.
	Bad systems spend only 95% of their time existing.
	Bad systems spend about 125% of their time existing.
	Which means that not only do they not produce anything of any value, they suck resources from other things that are producing things of value.
	Look, it's really important.
	I know you're skeptical about this, but that's because you don't know what you're talking about.
	And you should listen to me.
	Most systems don't work.
	And a lot of them are murderous.
	And so if you go off to graduate school, it's not going to point off because you don't listen.
	I don't listen.
	No, you're not.
	Yeah, well.
	Thank you.
	That's what you think.
	Okay, another question.
	When would you recommend to take the GRE?
	Most people usually take it, say, in the summer before they start to apply.
	And that's probably about right, because I wouldn't push it too close to when you apply.
	Because the application process is stressful, and you probably don't want to clutter those things up too much.
	I would also say, people do a lot of studying for the GRE. It's not that helpful.
	The one thing you can study for is the psychology GRE, and the best way to do that is probably read the introductory textbook.
	Or two.
	But I wouldn't kill yourself studying for the GRE, because it's not going to help that much.
	So, partly because, like the vocabulary, let's say.
	You build up your vocabulary over maybe 25,000 hours of study.
	Add another 100 hours to that.
	It's drop in the bucket.
	So, do it in the summer, in the early fall.
	And then you probably have to apply from November to January.
	So, anyways, back to your question.
	What you have to do at university, and this is what you have to do at graduate school as well, is what the institution does is it opens up a space of identity for you.
	And the identity is, you're a graduate student.
	Okay, what does that mean?
	Well, it means any number of things.
	It means you can languish for five years if you want.
	But what it does mean is now you have a stamp of approval on your forehead.
	And so you can sit around and read and learn things, and you don't have to worry about whether or not you're useful, because everyone has said, by all possible measurement, you appear to be useful.
	So that means you get to have the luxury of educating yourself.
	Now, you'll go off to an institution and 90% of the courses won't be worthwhile, just like they are in every institution.
	But some of them will be really worthwhile.
	And so your job is to discriminate between the things that are worthwhile and the things that aren't, and to really focus on where you can get educated.
	And there's lots of places to get educated.
	So, for example, you'll have your placements.
	And you'll have clients.
	And you'll learn.
	Like, that's an opportunity right there.
	To learn.
	Because that'll be the real thing.
	And you'll need people who know what they're talking about.
	And you want to stick to them like blue.
	Because they'll teach you things.
	But...
	And you...
	It's okay that systems don't work very well.
	Because they have to spend most of their time just existing.
	Because they're complicated things, you know?
	So...
	And the reason I used a business example is because...
	Businesses pay a big price for inefficiency.
	They just nose dive into the ground and disappear.
	And so if even a business can only manage 5% genuine productivity, that gives you a rule of thumb against which you should judge institutions in general.
	It's hard to make something work.
	And when you look around the world, most countries don't work.
	Most governmental systems don't work.
	And a lot of them get so out of control that they So, what you hope for is you hope you can get in somewhere that has a possibility.
	It opens up a space for you to do what you can do if you're disciplined and ready to go.
	And that's good enough.
	And so, the classes, a lot of classes, they're not going to be worthwhile.
	That's okay.
	You put in as much effort as you need to to pass them, and you bloody well pay attention to the things outside of that where you're actually learning.
	Why is there so much focus on publishing?
	Well, it depends on the institution that you go to.
	Like if you go to a PsyD program, which is just professional training, They won't care if you publish.
	They're not trying to produce people who are scientists.
	The idea with the APA programs is that you can't be a good clinician unless you're a scientist.
	And there's some real truth in that.
	And bad clinicians really hurt people.
	Like, you can mess up someone's memory with no trouble.
	If you're a foolish clinician, you can cause a lot of misery and grief.
	Because people, especially confused and vague people, they'll open themselves up to you.
	And you can...
	Then whatever boneheaded biases and lack of clarity you bring to the situation has every possibility of making things worse for them.
	So the big research institutions, they want to train you to think critically.
	And a critical thinker is someone who's good at getting rid of what isn't necessary and keeping what is.
	I mean, often when you think of critical thinking, you think of criticizing things.
	You know, like, this isn't good.
	That isn't the point.
	The point is to say, well, that's not as good as this, so I'll keep this, and that isn't as good as this.
	It's what you do when you edit the paper.
	You get rid of what's not perfect, and you keep the rest.
	And that's what you have to do when you go to get educated as a graduate student.
	I would say, if you want to be a clinician, read the great clinicians.
	You'll learn more from them than...
	Than from anyone else except your clients.
	And with your clients, the best thing to do with them is listen to them.
	And this is something that Carl Rogers, that's one good reason to read Carl Rogers.
	One thing about Carl Rogers is he really figured out how to listen to people.
	And people love to be listened to because most people don't have anybody to talk to.
	And because they don't have anybody to talk to, they can't organize their brains.
	Because the way people organize their brains is by talking.
	They say, well, I've got this problem.
	I don't know what to do about it.
	So you say, well, what's the problem?
	And they say, well, it might be this, it might be that, or that.
	It might be this.
	Maybe it's this.
	It reminds me of that.
	It's like they're laying out the situation on the table.
	So you say, okay, well, you keep telling me.
	Let's lay the whole problem out.
	And then they're afraid of that because they don't want to lay the whole problem out.
	So you convince them.
	It's okay.
	Lay the whole problem out.
	We'll worry about sorting it afterwards.
	So they lay the whole problem out.
	And then they look at it and they think, oh, well, this isn't really the problem and neither is this.
	And this isn't the problem and neither is that.
	This is the problem.
	You know, what do you want to have happen?
	And they say, well, I'm not sure what I want to have happen.
	So they lay all that out.
	And then they push away what isn't necessary.
	Now they have the problem.
	Now they have what they would like as a solution.
	And then you say, okay, well, you know, what steps can we institute?
	Little steps that you'd actually do to transform this problem into this solution.
	And that's very entertaining.
	It's very useful for people.
	And so one of the things you can do right off the bat is in Just ask them.
	Say, look, I didn't get that.
	It's not clear.
	Or maybe you say, you just said that, but ten minutes ago you said this, and they seem to be opposites, and I don't understand how those two things can both be true.
	And by doing that, you walk them through the process.
	Like, your brain is organized at the highest level linguistically.
	And so if you walk people through a process of carefully articulating their situation, it organizes their brain.
	And you can do that as a pretty junior clinician.
	As long as you're listening.
	Yes.
	What would you say is the biggest motivator for these English very efficient people and who you say understands?
	That's a good question.
	Well, I think there's two things you need to be motivated.
	One is, you need to have a clear conception of what your life could be like if it was really good.
	So I can say to you, and this is, oh by the way, here's an exercise you guys can do.
	If you do this, it will help you a lot.
	You can go to this website.
	And there's four exercises there.
	They're writing exercises.
	And if you do them, by the time you're done, you'll be, like, three times as efficient as you are now.
	It's hard.
	One exercise will ask you to write autobiography.
	And another exercise will ask you to do some personality.
	And how you might overcome them.
	Another one will ask you to figure out what your virtues are, and how you can capitalize on them.
	And then the last one will ask you to figure out, and here's what I'd ask you to do, basically.
	It says, you've got to get yourself in the right state of mind.
	So here's the state of mind.
	Imagine that you were charged with taking care of yourself.
	Okay?
	So now you're someone that you're supposed to take care of.
	I don't care what you think of yourself, because people are...
	They don't take care of themselves very well.
	We're going to put that aside.
	We're going to assume you're going to take care of yourself, so you're going to figure out what would be best for you.
	Not what you want, or what would make you happy, or any of those things, but what would be best for you.
	So you need to have a vision of that, and you can ask yourself that.
	Three to five years down the road, if I had the best life I could have, what would that be like?
	Well, the fourth exercise kind of steps you through that.
	It asks you to think about people you admire or anything.
	To think about your friends and your family and your career and the way you structure your life day to day.
	And to try to meditate on what that would be like if it was optimized.
	And then the exercise steps you through a process of clarifying that.
	So now that's your little vision of heaven.
	So now you've got that.
	You know what your life could be like.
	If you were living it proper, okay, now you need to do the opposite of that, which this program, by the way, also asks people.
	Everybody has a sense of how they can fall apart.
	All you do is look at how you already have fallen apart, and then you multiply that out.
	And you think about the people that you see on the street, or that you see in devastated marriages, or who have terrible relationships with their family.
	And you think, okay, what would my life be like if I really let it fall apart?
	And if you meditate on that proverb, that should really scare you.
	And it should scare you deeply.
	So you should think, there's no way I'm doing that.
	Whatever happens, I'm not doing that.
	So then you've got your little heaven, and you've got your little hell.
	And you know the difference between them.
	And then you can start to conceive of your day-to-day life in relationship to those two things.
	And you can decide which one you want.
	If you do that properly, it's a deep process.
	Because if your life really gets out of control, not only are you miserable beyond comprehension, but still perfectly capable of making it worse.
	You're a little source of community pathology, and everywhere you go, you make it worse.
	And that's hell.
	That really is hell.
	And I would recommend that stay...
	I would recommend that you stay as far away from there as you possibly can.
	So you need to know those extremes, because those are like the extremes of human existence.
	And you need to know that they exist and what they are for you.
	And then you can construe your existence in relationship to those two things.
	And that can help make you motivated.
	And it's good to do it as a meditative process.
	Thinking meditatively is different than thinking in a directed way.
	So here's a meditative exercise.
	You can try this.
	This is a very useful exercise.
	Try this tomorrow morning.
	If you do this regularly, it'll change your life.
	But it's a simple thing to do technically.
	Sit on the edge of your bed when you wake up.
	And ask yourself, like you were asking a friend.
	Not someone you knew well, but someone you have positive feelings towards.
	You'd like for things to go well for this person.
	Ask yourself what you could do to Make the day progress in the best possible manner.
	So you ask yourself what you could do to do that, and then you ask yourself what you actually would do.
	And you'll get an answer, and the answer will drift up from the depths of your unconscious.
	You'll say, well, here's things that I've been avoiding.
	I should, you know, chip away at those a little bit.
	Maybe I do this little thing without getting all resentful about it.
	And then, tonight, my life will be one-tenth of one percent better.
	Which isn't very much.
	It's a good admission for someone who isn't very disciplined.
	But one-tenth of one percent is a lot.
	You know, in a thousand days, that one-tenth of one percent, if no compounding, it's a hundred percent better.
	So, those things can be motivated.
	One of the things I've learned from my own research, because I did a lot of research into totalitarianism, because I was very interested in why people We're motivated to do terrible things to other people.
	And the reason they're motivated to do terrible things is because they let their lives fall apart.
	And your life is hard, right?
	I mean, your life is basically tragic in its essence.
	So life is a difficult burden.
	And if you don't carry that burden properly, it'll make you resentful and then it'll make you cruel.
	And so if you don't want to be resentful and cruel, especially if you know what that means, Then you'll do what you can to put yourself together, because then you'll be a force for good rather than evil.
	And that's a lot better.
	It's a lot better.
	There's almost no limit to how much people can suffer.
	It's stunning to see, which is also one of the reasons I really like being a clinical psychologist.
	I mean, being a clinical psychologist keeps you very much in touch with the actuality of people's lives.
	And that's very, unbelievably useful.
	And it's so useful.
	I spend 25 hours a week, every week, helping people walk through their most difficult problems.
	You can't imagine doing anything that is more possibly useful for informing you about how to straighten out your own life.
	It's worth doing it seriously.
	These exercises, look, we've been doing research with this suite of exercises.
	We used them first, a future offering on a group of students at McGill who were academically struggling, so they were on academic probation.
	But they were smart, right?
	Because you have to have a 90 average to get it to McGill.
	But they were failing, so we had them all go through this program.
	We used a balanced control group.
	It was a perfect experimental design.
	We raised their grade point average 25% and dropped their dropout rate from 30% to zero.
	Massive change.
	Now we've been using the same program.
	The future part of this, at a business school in Rotterdam, we've used it on two consecutive cohorts of 800 incoming students.
	And we dropped their dropout rate from 50% to 30% and raised their grade point average 25%.
	And I mean, I've used the future audit program regularly on People I know, and also clients, can it change your life?
	So, people very seldom sit down.
	First of all, you have to think through who the hell you are, right?
	Where you come from, how did it shape you?
	And that's a really useful thing to do if you're going to be a clinician.
	It's like psychoanalysis, right?
	It kind of gives you a sense of who you are.
	And then you also have to take some time and think, well, what do you want from your life?
	Like, what sort of creature do you want to be?
	Because human being is an amazing thing.
	We can be just the most wretched of creatures.
	Murderous and corrupt beyond belief.
	But the person who has their act together is like a force of nature.
	And that's a lot better.
	So you might think, well, do you want to be a force of nature?
	Because you've got the opportunity, you guys.
	You're smart.
	You're young.
	I imagine you're healthy enough so you can at least manage university.
	It's like, what the hell are you waiting for?
	Hammer yourself together and see what you can do.
	It's worth it.
	Make your life...
	Way better.
	Unimaginably better.
	So, if that's what you want, it's a good thing to do.
	I don't know any other way to be motivated.
	I do one other thing that's useful.
	As you step through your life, you'll see that there are certain things that sort of call out to you, that grab your attention.
	Involuntarily.
	And that's a very interesting thing, because people think that they're sort of the masters of their own destiny, you know, that you own you.
	People often make that argument about suicide, for example.
	It's my body, I can do what I want with it.
	It's like, well, no.
	Neither of those things happen to be true.
	And if you act out that, Those are the forces the psychoanalysts identified as unconscious.
	And unconscious forces are the things that make you interested in things.
	Because you can't control that.
	You know that if you're reading some blood-boring paper.
	Some other person might find that the most thrilling thing in the world.
	You?
	You can't even concentrate on it.
	You'd rather do the dishes.
	Or you're thinking about the girlfriend you had in grade 8 or something.
	Your mind wanders.
	You can't focus on this.
	You say, well, I haven't He doesn't care.
	It's like, no, we'll go vacuum the carpet or clean the dust bunnies out from underneath the bed.
	Anything but read this paper.
	And then there'll be another paper that's twice as difficult and you're compelled by it and you'll stick to it like glue.
	And you'll remember it right away.
	And you think, well, why is that?
	Why is the one thing so easy for you and the other thing so difficult?
	And even worse, why can't you chew?
	That's a strange thing.
	Because you think, well, if you were in control, you just say, well, I'm going to be interested in this paper, and, well, good luck with that.
	And so if it isn't you deciding what you're interested in, well, then you've got to ask yourself, what the hell is it?
	And when you start asking yourself that question, that's when you start to become a clinical psychologist.
	Because that's a hell of a question.
	So anyways, in terms of motivation, one of the things you can learn is how to follow those things that compel you.
	And you have to be careful when you're doing that, because you also have to balance that with a certain degree of honesty.
	Because if you're dishonest and deceitful, then you'll corrupt the workings of your neural mechanisms, and then the light will be shining from places you don't want it to shine from.
	So if you're going to pursue the things that compel you, which you can do, which I think is a very good thing to do, that's a quest, by the way.
	You also have to straighten yourself out ethically, because otherwise you'll end up taking some bad turns.
	And you can get ridiculously motivated if you do that, because you'll end up living in a world where everything is so interesting to you all the time that you can hardly stand it.
	And that's a good place to be.
	I was just wondering whether a gap year between your undergrad and grad school would be looked up down upon?
	No.
	Definitely not.
	Now, it's going to depend to some degree on what you do with it, but I think it's a good idea, actually.
	You know, and if you can make use of the time.
	And so you have to decide if you have something to do with during that year that's productive, and that will further your development, that will make you more mature, that would be the best thing to do.
	So it doesn't actually necessarily be beneficial directly to a graduate school, but something that is productive towards yourself?
	Like, if you wanted to do a specific thing before a graduate school, whatever that thing is doesn't necessarily have to be related to...
	No, no, no.
	And, you know, you remember, like, anybody you want to work with is going to be reasonably sensible.
	Because why do you, unless you want to work with someone who isn't.
	And anybody who's reasonably sensible is going to think, well, you know, this person's young, they should go kick around a little bit.
	One of the problems with the place, like the University of Toronto, for example, is it lost the students here living at home for their whole undergraduate career.
	It's like, well, that's not preparation for graduate school.
	So, if it will foster your independence and make you more disciplined and broaden your experience, no one with any sense is going to look on that as anything but positive.
	Is medical a choice if I wanted to pursue a career in psychology?
	Sorry, say that again?
	Is medical school a choice if I wanted to pursue a career in psychology?
	Well, if you're going to go to medical school, you'd probably pursue a career in psychiatry.
	Yeah.
	And the difference between a psychiatrist, by the way, and a psychologist is that, well, a psychiatrist is an MD. A psychiatrist can and does prescribe drugs.
	And there's nothing wrong with that, by the way.
	If you're a clinical psychologist, What you tell them is, well, you know, we're not going to make a lot of progress in the next two weeks, so you might want to think about taking some antidepressants so that you've got enough energy to put your life back together.
	You don't want to be dogmatic about any of these things, so drug therapies can be extremely useful, but generally, if you take the medical Well, you can't prescribe directly, but that doesn't really matter, because you'll learn enough about pharmacotherapy in graduate school.
	So, I mean, what I do with my clients, I just write them a letter to take to their, to their generator GP. You know?
	So you'll know, you'll learn what the basic antidepressants are, and those will be the drugs you use most often, that you recommend most often, because they're broadly effective for most conditions that involve excess negative emotion.
	Now and then, Somebody will need an antipsychotic, but if you're a clinical psychologist with a private practice, that won't happen very often.
	Medical school is a long haul, so if you're interested primarily in working with people in a problem-solving capacity, it could be that clinical psychology is a better choice, but you might be medically oriented.
	Lots of people are medically oriented, and if the more If the more physiological element of care appeals to you, then medical school is a good option.
	Some people do both.
	I don't know about that.
	But, you know, some people do both.
	You mean first year graduate school?
	First year undergraduate?
	Well, what you should really do in your first year as an undergraduate is you should take a wide variety of courses.
	You should sort of find out what you might be interested in.
	And you should learn to work and learn to socialize.
	Because those things are, you know, the things that make people successful.
	So I talked about two of them, right?
	Intelligence, conscientiousness, that's discipline.
	Creativity is another one, but that's pretty hard to develop if you don't already have it.
	But the fourth thing that makes people successful across time is breadth of social network.
	And so learning to socialize and to develop a large connection, a large social connection, that's unbelievably useful.
	So you should get good at those when you're in your first year.
	So if you come out of your first year, you're still in university, you've got five courses under your belt, you've done decently, you have a circle of friends, you've sort of started to establish what you might be interested in.
	Good.
	And it was successful.
	What do you think is the time that you ought to decide what you want to do?
	Well, the first thing I would say is it's always better to do something than nothing.
	So don't wait around.
	And what I mean by that practically is, if you're not sure what to do, take a guess and do that.
	And do it hard.
	And as you do it, you'll learn what's good about it and what isn't, and then somewhere down the road, six months, you'll be in a better position to figure out what you want.
	If you keep doing that, sooner or later you'll figure out exactly what you want.
	But don't wait around.
	Waiting is...
	You don't learn anything when you're in a limbo way.
	Because then you actually inform yourself.
	And other than that, there's no real rule.
	It takes people, you know, it takes people of varying amounts of time to establish an identity.
	If you don't have a well-catalyzed identity by the time you're 30, it's starting to not be good.
	And if it's really not, there are still by 40.
	That's really not so good.
	So, if you're confused, get some credentials.
	You want to have something to show for your effort.
	But if you pay attention and you focus and you work hard, you'll figure out what you want.
	But as I said before, The schools that you attended before you went to university, they were established.
	Their basic structure was established in the late 1800s.
	And they were originally set up to teach the children of factory workers to be factory workers.
	They're factories.
	You can tell just by looking at them.
	Even this, to some degree, is still a factory.
	It's the wrong model.
	The problem with factories is you're not going to work in a bloody factory.
	You're going to have a career.
	And to have a career, you have to figure out who you want to be.
	And so one of the things you want to be doing over the next while is getting...
	This is why a liberal arts education is so useful.
	Because a liberal arts education helps teach you what a person could be.
	And that's not the same as getting a job.
	A university is not for getting a job.
	A university is for figuring out what sort of person you could be.
	And so it's also useful to take philosophy courses and to take literature courses and to broaden yourself so that you get a better idea of what the difference is between a great person and a trivial person.
	I mean, that's not a very modern idea because we like to think that all people are the same.
	If all people are the same, you might as well just stop doing what you're doing right now because you're as the same as you're ever going to get.
	If there's differences in quality, then you should aim for what's high in quality.
	But you should also know what that is.
	And so in your first year, it helps to do some thinking and to be guided by people who the culture recognizes as great thinkers.
	Because they've thought about what it means to be human and why that matters.
	And then you might as well aim as high as you can aim.
	And that would be a good thing to start sorting out the first couple years of university.
	So?
	I'm looking at some graduate programs.
	I'm not sure I should go straight for a PhD right off for a master's long way.
	It doesn't matter really.
	Masters are useless.
	Fundamentally.
	I mean, for most places, for clinical, most places you can't practice with a master's degree anymore, and most clinical programs have scrapped the master's.
	I think you can still practice in Alberta and Quebec, but I'm not even sure about that anymore.
	For an academic career, generally, it depends on why you want to take the extra education.
	If you're going to go into business or something like that, a master's degree might help you a bit, might discipline you, but if you're after the academic career, it's the PhD that's the degree that you want.
	And then it probably doesn't really matter whether you take a program that has a master's and a PhD or just a PhD.
	yeah well I'm less I'm less informed about those sorts of things so I mean as long as you can practice with the master's degree then that's no problem
	and if you know I don't That's a different career path.
	I mean, that'll sometimes put you as a school counselor or something like that.
	And that's a perfectly fine occupational choice.
	I would say in some ways it's a more defined and less demanding life.
	And that can be extremely useful.
	An academic career or a career like that, it's kind of all-consuming.
	And that isn't necessarily And it shouldn't be for everyone.
	You have to be compelled in that direction for it to be the proper choice.
	What about becoming registered in Ontario if you wanted to study somewhere else?
	I know.
	You'd have to be more specific in the question.
	I don't know exactly what you're asking.
	Like, if you wanted to say you're going to have a conference in the states, but wanted to ultimately work in Ontario, Your best bet is to contact the college and find out what their registration rules are.
	Good luck with that.
	Because the registration rules are pretty vague and it's hard to pin them down.
	But that is what you should do to protect yourself.
	And you should get it in writing.
	Because on the phone, that's nothing.
	You need to get it in writing.
	And I can't really give you any more specific information than that.
	You also mentioned, because you mentioned CIDE programs and programs that were less reduced or less reduced or less reduced or less.
	Could you perhaps have a good one?
	I can't tell you a lot about them because the whole CIDE street is outside of the academic They're professional schools.
	They're mostly set up in the U.S. They take a large number of students.
	The acceptance criteria are much lower, but the price you pay for that is You'll rack up a $200,000 debt.
	Now, that might be okay.
	You might be able to pay that off, because being a clinician can be relatively lucrative.
	The typical hourly rate is, maybe for us beginners, maybe to get your practice going, would be perhaps $100, $225 an hour.
	That can go all the way up to maybe $300 an hour, although that's uncommon.
	$175 is probably more typical.
	And so if you see six clients a day, let's say five, that's $1,000 a day.
	so it's about $250,000 a year so you can pay off a $200,000 debt pretty fast if you set up a successful clinical career afterwards and there is quite a demand for clinical psychologists there's no glut on the market although people have to pay you privately or through their insurance companies because it's not an all-hit service and clinical psych programs that are sort of like less music
	or if you said that they were at universities that tended to be less research institutions yeah, well there's only about 40 large research institutions in North America and you can find them on the web They're the ones you already may know about.
	And then there's a sprinkling of smaller institutions and their emphasis on research productivity is a lot less.
	They're not as competitive.
	So, you can attend those places and get a decent training as a scientific thinker at the same time that you acquire your clinical license.
	It's a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
	So, that's why at the beginning I said, you know, apply broadly, because there's a big difference.
	There's some difference between universities, and the differences aren't trivial, but there's a massive difference between being at a university and not being at one at all.
	So, if you have the privilege of being able to choose which university you're going to go to, well, great, but you don't want to sacrifice the binary choice, the positive binary choice, just to, you know, fiddle around with the dial.
	Okay, so I'm going to close up, so I'm just going to give you a very quick overview.
	So here's what you can do as a psychologist.
	If you're an experimental psychologist, generally you're heading for an academic career.
	However, there are opportunities in research enterprises outside of that.
	So in businesses, for example.
	Also, the academic market for psychologists is really opening up, because psychologists are increasingly being hired in economics departments and in business schools.
	And as a junior professor at a psych department, they'll start with a salary of about $80,000, but at a business school, they'll start with a salary of about $250,000.
	And business schools are hiring psychologists because they're figuring out that we know what we're talking about, whereas business PhDs and economists Anyways, the academic opportunities for an experimental PhD are expanded, so it's a good time to be a psychologist.
	So, it's relatively hard to get in, and when you're in, you better be productive, because you won't be a credible candidate if you're not, so you've got to get disciplined.
	On the clinical side, there's almost nothing more valuable than a clinical degree, because you can work as a clinician, you can work in a hospital, you can work in academia, and you can work as a consultant.
	Or you can do any combination of those things.
	So you have a vast range of possibilities open up for you if you have a clinical PhD.
	It takes a long time.
	It's a six-year PhD, and then there's two years of training after that.
	And it's hard to get in.
	And when you're in, it's competitive.
	Then you have to work.
	But if you can pull it off, it sets you up for a vast range of possibilities in your future.
	To conclude that, personally, if you want to set yourself up for this sort of thing, learn not to waste time.
	Because that's the one thing you can do that's sort of under your control that will make you more competitive.
	And start to think about, think hard about how you want your life to be and how you don't want it to be.
	Because that can increase your motivation to do things properly.
	I'll take, I guess, if there's another question that you won't take that, then we should probably stop.
	So does anybody have a question that hasn't been addressed?
	Yes?
	Do you plan as a clinical psychologist that can be hard to sort of leave cases behind you?
	No.
	It doesn't.
	Here's what you have to realize.
	It's not your suffering.
	You have your own suffering.
	Your client is entitled to their suffering.
	It's part of their life.
	Adding your own misery to theirs is not going to help them.
	All it does is muddle up your thinking.
	And it encroaches on their territory.
	You're not there to take on their burden.
	You're there to help them attain clarity and figure out how to live properly.
	And so it's ethically required of you to stay detached from them so that you're not damaged by the encounter.
	And you learn to do that.
	Everybody learns to do that in graduate school.
	You'd be surprised.
	Because it's a perfectly valid question, and everybody wonders about it.
	But you learn how to do that.
	And normally, do you learn how?
	It's the right thing to do.
	So one more question?
	Yes?
	I just want to face a question about, you said some graduate programs look beyond your last two years of undergraduate.
	How do you know if they're doing that?
	You don't.
	This has only started happening in the last couple of years.
	I had a student last year, an excellent two years, and she didn't get in anywhere.
	She found out that it was because they looked earlier.
	She had a pretty bad early two years, which, as far as I'm concerned, is irrelevant.
	Hopefully she'll solve that by applying to more places.
	But as the number of applicants grow, then The reason, you know, the methods by which people will be dispensed with get more general.
	I don't think it's reasonable, but that's irrelevant.
	Reasonable has nothing to do with it.
	But your best bet is, just like I said, is to apply to more places.
	So, and you know, generally, if you're A or A minus, 80th percentile G or reasonable, Bob, you're a credible candidate.
	If you hit it hard enough, you'll probably find a place that will take you.
	In the last two years?
	Yeah, in the last two years, yeah, yeah.
	So that's still the rule.
	Alright, well, that's that.
	So please talk.
	And for our little token of appreciation, we'd like to thank you on behalf of everyone here and as a college student association for the university.
	Thank you.
	Oh, I have one more thing.
	You may or may not know this, but the faculty, the student-faculty ratio at the University of Toronto on the St.
	George campus is 450 a month.
	Okay?
	That is outrageous.
	And you guys put up with it.
	And so one of the things you might consider doing is not putting up with it so much.
	Some letters to the dean about the fact that there are 450 of you to each faculty member.
	How do you pay in tuition?
	Five grand?
	Seven.
	Seven.
	Okay, so 400 times 7,000.
	So you pay $3 million in tuition for each professor.
	And they have a salary of maybe $150,000.
	That's a high estimate.
	You double that to overhead, it's $300,000.
	You pay 10 times as much as you should per faculty salary.
	You're getting screwed.
	And the reason you're getting screwed is because you put up with it.
	And it's really not good, because one of the things that would help you progress through And talk about things.
	So, I would highly recommend you to do this with the PSA. Do something about it.
	You're getting ripped off.
	There's no excuse for it.
	100 to 1 is appalling.
	50 to 1 is decent.
	450 to 1?
	You're subsidizing the whole bloody university.
	And there's no excuse for it.
	And it doesn't bother me, because what I do about it is I just don't talk to students.
	Right?
	Because I have a certain amount of time.
	And I'll talk to as many students as I can and pass that.
	I didn't talk to students because I can't.
	So it isn't bothering me except that it bothers me that it's happened to you.
	But you should do something about it.
	Because there's no excuse for it.
	And unless you push on the university, they will not move.
	So you're paying three million bucks per professor.
	You should just hire three million dollars worth of professors.
	But it's not good.
	It's like it's the worst student to faculty ratio.
	Of any department at the University of Toronto, by a huge margin.
	And among psychology departments across North America, it's about the worst.
	So, you should do something about it, because no one else can do that.
	Hi, my name is Melissa.
	God, you're going to have a rough time tracking me down, because I'm basically gone now for a moment.

▲