https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=AYhAz9k008Q
Professor, just wanted to give you an early warning that some people may start leaving at around 6 because of class. Yeah, well that’s fine. I’m not going to be great till 7 anyways. Well, we might as well get started. This room, you people have an obvious preference for the right side of the lecture hall in 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 psychology in general. So 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, it’s something 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 9 to 5, then at 5 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 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. Or 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 a problem that is 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 their lives depend on you. So your responsibility level continues to climb. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a really good thing. People tend to think that responsibility is 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 children of burden or carrying a load. I guess it’s part of being a social animal. So it’s actually good if 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, anything else that you’ll possibly be able to find. Now, 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? Okay, so 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 who want to apply to graduate school, which is of course I suppose what you’re going to do, most of you, if you want to pursue psychology as a career, 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 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 they’re 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 your 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. Most 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 that 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 U of T 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, 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 grind 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. And God, they have the greatest statistics and they can be really good analytical thinkers, but their 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 the, I would say, top 15 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 fluent 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 setting yourself up for a six-year grind and then a dismal outcome. So students who are more intellectually powerful on the non-verbal 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 off 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 break them up. And so then they languish because no one else is going to do it. So 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% of all the GREs, 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 at small universities. But you might think, oh, I’d never go to Lakehead if I was small. 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’d want to go. Well, there’s a big difference between being in a 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 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 research interest too closely, because hardly anyone is doing that research. 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 staff 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 them, and I write for 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 resumes as going to do the same thing. So you’re already 50% of the people who applied thought they weren’t going to get in, and it looked likely anyways. That’s already a tough cut. You don’t want also to have a statement of interest that says, Well, I want to 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, could go look at that and say, oh, they don’t want to work with me. And then you’re out of the deal. You could say what you work on or are being interested in, but what you should do, and I’m not asking you to falsify your letter of intent because that’s foolish, but what I would beg 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 the contextual issues that surround that topic. So for example, if you are, say you’re 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. And so psychology, in a sense, it’s an amorphous field and there’s entry points, and all the entry points are narrow. But once you pass through the narrow entry point, 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, to me, it’s 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 an expert enough in psychology really to make the determined decision about what it is that you’re going to study. I haven’t 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. There 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 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. So 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, 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. I mean that technically. 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, that payoff is variable reinforcement, and research is like that. And statistics are exactly like that, because maybe you spend six months putting together a data set, and you erase the variables in the SPSS statistical machine, so to speak, and you pull the handle, and now you just learn 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 entity, and there might be information in it, and your job is to carve off the garbage and to pull out the information. That requires, it 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 know how to do them right until you’ve already done it. And so they’re a mess. Whether or not you’re going to be able to pull something out of that mess that constitutes genuine information depends on how skillful you are at using the statistical tools, and how carefully 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 into 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 gamble at the back of your mind that’s going to be pushing you 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 thing, because it warps the whole field, but it’s even worse if you happen to be the person that’s doing it, 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 papers right now, because this happens so frequently. 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 it occurs, 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, twenty 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. So 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 don’t adapt to being that. 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, and don’t sidetrack yourself off into something that’s in a sense of more arcane pursuit. So, okay, so do your stats and get good at it. And 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. 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 A’s, and take more stats courses than you think you need, because you’ll need them. 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 100, 100,000? Is it 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, 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. So it’s hard to get it. So then if you’re applying, and it’s 150, let’s say you’ve got a 1 in 10 chance, or a 1 in 20 chance of getting in and then you get into school. So let’s see, what would you pay for a 1 in 20 chance at 14 million divided by 20. Great! 700,000, something like that. So you’d pay 100,000. So let’s halve that, because you’re skeptical about your chances of winning. Fine. So then you’d pay 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 you. So take a big amount of time to do your applications, because they’re really important, and do lots of them. Many of them. Many as you can. If you can afford to think about going to the US, 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 any tuition. And that might especially be the case, you know, maybe you won’t get a little bit of a patented Harvard, although it might. But there’s lots of state schools down there that are excellent, big research schools, and maybe they’ll pay you to come down and study. So not only do you get your crack at 14 million, but someone will give you some money to help you get it. So that’s a pretty good deal. So don’t blaze out on 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 to have a good life? They have friends. They have a circle of friends. Some of whom they can talk to carefully about 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 more highly communicative than 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. Because it’s just like, you know, why is there sexual reproduction instead of clonal reproduction? Why is that? You guys have taken my old courses. It’s a pretty fundamental question. What’s the answer to that? Variations. Mm-hmm. That’s part of it though, right? Yeah. I mean, as a unit, if you call yourself, first of all, a parasite, you’d be in no time flat, but apart from that, 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 true if you also want to have children. And you’re foolish not to have children. I don’t know, you guys are under… Most 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. I’m not as bloody well dispensed with that foolish idea right now, because all that means is that you just haven’t… 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 of, 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. Like 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, they’ll pull in articling 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 they’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 having 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 your domestic responsibilities that go along with household. You have to have a nanny, 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 daycare 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 creating 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. So, anyways, back to the 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 1% pop, 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 proper. 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 because that’s when civilized people get up. And the people you’re competing with, who you’re really good at competing with, they’re only up at 6 and they’re working by 7. And they’ll work you right into the ground because the people who are at the top of their discipline, that’s basically what you’re talking about if you’re talking about doing something that requires PhD level of education as a career. They’re not walking 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 wait 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. You feel like a moron. For me it’s like a feeling like I need to take a shower. I’ve deviated from the appropriate path. YouTube hell. And that’s not good. So now you’ve thought about that. Typical day. How much time do you waste? All right, 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, take that. Please do tell me because maybe you’re efficient. Some people learn to be efficient. How many waste two hours? How about three? How many think they waste less than three hours? One person. I’ll come back to you. Four hours. Five hours. Jesus, you better wake up people. Okay, so let’s save five hours because I won’t embarrass you further. So let’s do a little mathematics. What’s your time worth? No, no. Come on. Let’s make it in money. That’s what we use to evaluate value. What’s your time worth? No. Wrong. Why is that wrong? That’s the 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. Okay, it’s not ten and a quarter. Why? Because you have a future. Ten and a quarter is what you’re worth 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 ten 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 of 6,000 a month or about 45 an hour. Okay, let’s assume that you’re worth 1,400 a week. How many weeks in a month? Four. What’s four times 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. 1,500. the money gets too much money when you know it’s too expensive. Sometimes in place, why is the money, what is it going to get in front of you? Pokey would go to the poor child’s house building a home. They want their cycle of money fixed, but there’s good Pennsylvania, there’s good But maybe you can learn to work harder. And one rule of thumb for that is how much time you waste. Now, you could do a little more in-depth analysis of waste become, because I could also ask you. I have students who come and see me, and they say, what else are you doing very well in this course? And I say, well, how much are you working on? They say, well, I’m in the library six hours a day. And I think, that isn’t what I asked. I asked how much time you’re spending working on it. Because first of all, you should be in the 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. 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 1.10 as hard as I can. I bet you 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 10 minutes, and you think, how can I do this 10 times faster? You can almost always figure out how to do it 10 times faster, and sometimes better and 10 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 humanly possible. And the way that you learn 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 billion. So how much money would the top 10 richest men in the US have? 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. So the top 100 richest men in the world have more money than the bottom 2 billion. So this is a Pareto 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 pop out the typical PhD student, tell them by the callers, and say, how many publications do you have? And you say, one. And I’d say, well, you’re not getting hired at one. Because one, that doesn’t count. It’s more than zero. That’s only one more than zero. OK, so then there’s going to be the top 1% of PhD students way 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 creating on the job market. So they publish the beginning of 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 is about 40 of them 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 high-level universities. And there’s hardly any of these people. And all of the science is done by these people. So the rest of them, they’re just not going to be. So all the people who aren’t way out at that tail end, they’re just keeping the institutions running. So what’s the typical profit margin for a typical corporation year after year? Pots. Well, 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%. 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%. Well, it’s around 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? Well, it helps with the spine. You guys, whoever’s talking, go in here. OK. 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. So the castle produced 65,000 pieces of art created 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. So Jay 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 you 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 stellar careers. So what do you do to do that? Well, it can’t be much about your intelligence, but we can learn to work. And work matters. Conscientiousness, which is a trait, is a big predictor of long-term life success. Conscientious people are ordinary people, which isn’t quite as relevant. And 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 up in the top 1 10th of 1%, which is only 1 in 1,000, right? So you guys are already probably 1 in 100 if you look at your IQs and your work ethic. So 1 in 10 of you is 1 in 1,000. 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 in 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 get 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 at these levels that are 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 really hard work to mold yourself into something that isn’t utterly useless. And there’s a big payoff associated with that. And I think that’s something you can do merely by wanting it and attending to it. And if you do that, well, first of all, you get disciplined. 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. We had 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 fun. When they were done their 10 hours, they’d make people 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. It makes your life more enjoyable and entertaining, not less. I mean, you really want to waste five hours a day. That’s 130 you’re wasting time. If you lived 90 years, you wasted 30 years. And if you waste 30 years, you’d be any wonder why you weren’t in it and where it’s such. Come on. That’s pretty easy to figure out. If you waste 30 years, you don’t get anywhere. And why should you? Because you’re just wasting time. So it’s best to really learn how to stop doing that. It’d be a terrible battle, especially for those of you who’ve lost people like that. You really have to rewire yourself and 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. OK, I’m going to stop for a minute 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 extracurricular activities, per se, something outside of the career will help you get into grad school or come to? None. Grades and GREs. That’s what happens. The rest of it’s fluff. I mean, if you hit it. 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. OK, I’m going to look over your application. Well, what’s going to determine whether I take you? Do I need a student? That would be number one. Do I have the funding? Do you have funding? If you can get SHERP or NSERP or MRC funding as a graduate student, that helps a lot. I mean, if you’re above threshold or even sort of that threshold, then you have funding. It’s really easy for a professor to say, yeah, yeah. I’ll take you. You’re not going to eat up graduate 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 will 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 threshold the same way, and one of them has extra lab experience and maybe knows some computer programming and has some useful skills or is good statistically, well, then I’ll certainly prefer that one. But I won’t even see the applications unless 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 you through your application through the door to see the professors unless you meet the minimum criteria. So students are desperate to get the extra experience that would get them to graduate school. It’s like a publication wouldn’t help. But they’re hard to get. So if you do an honors research project, for example, and it works well, you can write it up. Almost no one does that. Because by the time you’re done with your damn project and you’ve written up your thesis, you’re only 1 10th 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 and then, they’ll say, well, this doesn’t suck as much as it could. So if you really work 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 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 type 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 your journal is 95% to 99%, which is worse than your application, and your chances of getting accepted to a given graduate school. So just looking for reasons not to publish your damn paper. And it can be because there’s a mistake, and it might be because it’s too good. And it scares people, or there are 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. The answer is always, we don’t want your stupid paper. We’ve got 100 other ones. So. Professor Peterson, I know that you did some clinical work, as well as your research and teaching at UT. Can you explain why you or why one might want to work as a professor? Why a clinical psychologist might choose to work as a professor rather than full-time clinical work? Well, OK. So one of the answers to that is why you would ever want to be a professor. So here’s why 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 your 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, fundamental. 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, or those are fine things. Those probably means 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, fundamentally. And then you also have to ask yourself, would you like to teach? And teaching is brutal for people who don’t like it. You don’t have professors like this. They stand in front of the board. 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 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 rote, and it’s boring. 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 it by March. And I’ve 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. I really like ideas. And I really like mentoring graduate students. So being a university professor is perfect for me. And I got used to being rejected. The paper’s been 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’d 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 you can learn to tolerate that. 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. And I have other jobs. I think I have seven jobs. That’s what I stated 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 worried 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 over 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 and teaching junior high school kids. That’s true. 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 you to get rid of their problems. And so the trajectory is 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, 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 adhere them that way? Well, it depends on the grad program. There’s two kinds of, there’s actually three kinds of clinical graduate programs. There is 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 is to be a scientist and to be trained as a clinician. Now there are also PsyD programs that are more common in the US. They’ll charge you about 200,000 debt. Now, that might be OK. You might even 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 300 an hour, although that’s uncommon. 1,000 a day. So it’s about 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-oriented, you said that they were at universities that tend to be less research institutions. Yeah, well, there’s only about 40 large research institutions in North America. 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, 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 fiddle around with the dial. OK, 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 to 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 250. And business schools are hiring psychologists because they’re figuring out that we know what we’re talking about. Whereas business PhDs and economists tend not to. And that’s usually because their models of human beings are wrong and they don’t know their statistics very well. So anyways, the academic opportunities for experimental PhD are expanding. 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, and 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. Now, and then 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 it. 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. So I’ll take that guess in. If there’s another question that you want to keep that in, we should probably stop. So if there’s anybody who has a question that hasn’t been addressed, yes. Do you find as a clinical psychologist it can be hard to sort of leave cases behind you? No. 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, to figure out how to live properly. And so it’s ethically required of you to stay detached enough so that you’re not damaged by the encounter. And you’ll 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 have a basic question about, you said some graduate programs look beyond your last two years of undergraduate. So how do you know if they’re doing that? Do they discuss it? You don’t. So even if they specify, do they even look at your last year? This has only started happening in the last couple of years. Like, I had a student last year, an excellent two years, and she didn’t get in anywhere. She found out that it was because Dave looked early. 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 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. And generally, if you’re A or A minus 80th percentile junior reason above your credible candidate, you hit it hard enough, you’ll probably find a place to go take you. In the last two years? Yeah, in the last two years. So that’s still the rule of thumb. All right, well, that’s that. So let me start with you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And that’s our little token of appreciation. We’d like to thank you on behalf of everyone here and the College of Business and Education for being such an honor. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yep. My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, I have one more thing to suggest to you people. 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 to one. 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 tuition? Five grand? Seven. Seven. So 400 times 7,000. So you pay 150,000. That’s a high estimate. You double that for overhead, 300,000. You pay 10 times as much as you should per faculty seller. You’re getting screwed. And the reason you’re getting screwed is because you put up with it. It’s really not good because one of the things that would help you progress through your academic career as a psychologist properly is if you could actually get access to a professor now and then 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 one is appalling. 50 to one is decent. 450 to one? 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 past that, I don’t talk to students because I can’t. So it isn’t bothering me, except that it bothers me that it’s happening 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 3 million 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 would do that. See you. Hi, my name is Melissa. I email students about the professor’s job. About cleaning and mission stuff? You’re going to have a rough time tracking me down because I’m basically gone now. I know. Have you talked to Shelley Carson?