Manage contacts for supervision

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what's up navigating academia family this is your buddy dr jay fenix singh coming at you to be able to answer a valued viewer's question now per usual before we get started guys you know that i love you please do me a huge favor and help the channel out for free by hitting that like button subscribing to the channel if you enjoy academic content and letting your friends colleagues and students know about the channel sincerely appreciate it if you guys want to support the channel in other ways you can go ahead and book a session with me down below so that i can help you one on one we have a variety of new hours that are now available and of course it has been so much fun and one of the true delights of my life to be able to over the last three years help you guys out get into grad school help you guys get your dream postdoc help you guys figure out how exactly to be able to get in touch with your dream mentors to be able to work with them and of course how to be able to get published via publication academy and be sure to check out publication academy as well which is the largest online suite of trainings developed by me last year to be able to help you guys publish in high impact journals so the website for that one is .publicationacademy.com so let's go ahead and get right into it today's question comes from maria maria thank you so much for watching really appreciate the kind words so let's go ahead and jump into maria's question guys and i'll answer it for you okay so here we go this is what marie has uh this was asked on a video of mine called how to approach potential graduate school supervisors okay so here we go thank you dr singh i'm from argentina and i will be and i will reapply to clinical psychology psyd and phd programs i subscribed to your channel and understood some of my mistakes last year i had not contacted any of my possible mentors and i didn't get accepted this year i start working with some important professionals in argentina who know some of my possible mentors in the us my question is when is a good time to ask my contact to refer me if the application deadline is december 1st your videos are really helpful for international students thank you so much again maria really appreciate you being a subscriber and for watching uh and guys if you guys have any questions for me please do feel free to put them down in the comments below especially if you're an international student remember that my doctorates are not from the us they're from oxford uh so over in the uk and university of constance which is in germany so i was in the same situation as many of you even though i was also a faculty member at universities in the united states so i understand how it works in the us as well same thing with the middle east since i was a fulbright scholar a senior fulbright scholar and law faculty member in israel so we can go ahead and talk about that sometime if you would like so maria there's a bunch of stuff to be able to talk about here first uh really proud of you the fact that you didn't get in but you still you don't want to reapply this year i think it's fantastic um one question guys that i get asked sometimes is that if you've been rejected from a program should you uh or does it impact you applying in the future right and this is definitely something that i'll cover in another video um what i would say is that you want to be careful if you don't have everything that i kind of mentioned on the channel uh and remember the uh the things that i mentioned on the channel you've got the five lies five lies are gpa median or above for the target program test scores median or above for the target program three amazing letters of recommendation clinical experience and practical experience so for example me being clinical psychologist it would be getting some kind of clinical experience why are they called the five lies because you're usually told that these five things will manage to get you into programs it does not it does not make you competitive these are the fundamentals everybody who's applying who will actually get in has at least these five if you don't have those five or you don't have one of them for example there must be an exceptional circumstance and the three exceptional circumstances one is really moderate it won't get you in but it'll definitely help you is to be able to have a conference paper a conference poster even better being the organizer conference symposium at a recognized national or international conference especially one where your target supervisor routinely goes to you can usually find out by taking a look at their cv see where they usually go people usually have their own pet conferences that they enjoy attending on an annual basis in addition to that publications and peer review journals or chapters and edited academic books and in addition to that personal connections with your target supervisor um so really what we're talking about here is the final one right so i think it's awesome that you're already thinking about this maria this is great right i'm going to give you a quick answer and then i'm gonna give you a long explanation okay so the quick answer is in terms of when you should ask your contact to put you in touch uh with the target supervisor as soon as possible as soon as you have built up enough social capital as it were with this person who your people that you've been working with in argentina fantastic right once you've built that up think about it like buying a house when you buy a house usually you don't buy it in cash usually you get a loan from the bank that we call a mortgage right and when you get that mortgage usually you'll put some percentage down so in the us for example you know it's not abnormal to see people put you know 20 down on a house the thing is if you put 20 percent out of the house you don't own 100 of the house you own 20 and then you've got the loan for the remainder and so because of that over time you need to pay back that principal as well as interest on the loan uh and so this is the same thing if you have just started working with this individual in argentina you don't know them very well and especially you have not kind of proven yourself to be an asset to their lab and you have not proven yourself to be somebody who is a great kind of you know a great soldier remember grad school supervisors don't want a general they want somebody who's going to follow orders and be innovative in their thoughts and such but they really are looking for somebody who is going to slide right in there with the work that they're already doing and not cause any problems people may sometimes tell you otherwise but that's the fact right so the idea here is that if you have not built up that much quote unquote equity in your relationship then getting that person to refu refer you will basically just be some generic email about this is maria she's interested in working with you maybe you guys can chat sometimes best wishes whatever their name is right that's not very helpful you want somebody who's going to literally stick their neck out for you in other words somebody who is essentially going to say maria is the best you should not even consider any other applicants she's been working in my lab for the last however long and she is a phenomenon you must take her forget about everybody else that's the kind of contact that you want i remember when i was an undergrad i did a summer internship specifically with somebody who knew my target supervisor exceptionally well and i'm not kidding she accepted a speaking like engagement at the university flew halfway across the country gave her talk and then had a full slide the final slide in her powerpoint deck which had a photo of me all my major accomplishments and that she handed out copies of my resume my cv to everybody who's in attendance and then she met one-on-one with my target supervisor and said those things that i just mentioned and the acceptance rate at the university that i applied to was 0.2 percent there were over 500 applicants one person was accepted to the program was a double doctoral program uh and let me tell you i i have no doubt that that was one of the probably top three big things that actually got me in uh to that exceptionally low acceptance rate university right um so that's the thing once you feel and it's going to be more of a feeling that you have proven yourself to this contact of yours in argentina that's when you should ask them to reach out otherwise it's not really worth it one thing that you said here is that last year's this is what you said last year i hadn't contacted my possible mentors and i didn't get accepted right so again um my recommendation guys if you're watching this is as soon as you can as soon as you know what that target program is and my recommendation i had my target program freshman year the sooner you get the target program the easier it's going to be to essentially structure your undergraduate years around getting accepted to that program or one of your top let's say three to five programs and remember i do not recommend applying to more than five programs honestly three is a great number three to five anybody who's telling you to apply to 10 to 15 or even more programs is out of their mind and if you need to know why just watch other videos on this channel i go into full details as to why right so if the application deadline is december 1st right so right now when i'm making this video guys it's the middle of may um trust me the sooner the better why because you want on an every quarter basis so every three months once the target supervisor knows that you're interested in applying to be part of their program to be one of their grad students you can essentially every three months follow up with them to be able to let them know about the latest and greatest with you what are the things maybe you're working on a senior honors thesis during that time maybe you're working on some publications and you want to let them know about it maybe they're going to be at a conference and you decide that you're going to make the financial investment to go to that conference as well even if you're not presenting and you ask whether or not you can buy them a cup of coffee buy them breakfast see them at lunch go to a poster session together where they have free drinks usually that happens depending on the conference i do recommend making financial investments in your future and a big one of them is going to visit your target supervisor in person whether that's at a conference whether that's at the target university i really do recommend that um somebody asked me the other day does it matter if you do like a site tour of your dream university no it does not this is not undergraduate there is no need to do a site visit of your target graduate school it does not get you brownie points at all okay so it's just something that you should know um and remember also that just emailing a target supervisor saying i love your work and i want to be your graduate student are you accepting students that is not a personal connection at all um i would say at least 25 to 50 percent of potential students do that is it better than nothing absolutely but that does not constitute out of the eight things that i mentioned earlier today that does not constitute a personal connection okay it will not make you stand out compared to other people not in a way that'll actually get you accepted to a program okay obviously another financial investment that you can make in your future regardless of where you are in your undergraduate career if you want to get into one of these doctoral programs which in the aggregate especially for the phd programs are harder to get into than medical school in the u.s please book one i seriously please book a one-on-one session with me because this is a situation where the earlier you can get started the better and people rarely have the right advice for them individually about what to do so that's the reason why i'd love to have a one-on-one session with you so go ahead guys check out the website below check out publication academy at .publicationacademy.com we give a massive discount for current students and faculty members you can ask me about that by emailing me so i hope you guys have a great rest of your week and i'll talk to you in the next one peace