We received our first respective peer-reviews in what seems like last century, shedding copious tears when reviewers asked basic questions like if we knew the difference between mg and ug. When invited to be associate editors, we loftily imagined dismantling systemic inequalities of peer review[i][ii][iii], offering sage advice to budding scientists, contributing to the communication and promotion of excellent science in our disciplines, and illuminating enlightening insights to lightly castigate reviewer 2. Broken down by the challenges of keeping up with manuscript submissions and reviewer recruitment, our sights are perhaps more realistic. Below, we offer catchy idioms and 15 hypothetical retorts we’d say to those wondering how to help editors as they decide whether to click "accept" or "decline" in that invitation to review. 

Full of Pomp and Prestige, most conference business meetings are – let’s be honest—a total snooze fest. No amount of free gut retching coffee and stale pastries can ever give you back that hour. This year's SRA meeting felt different, though. I’m wondering if the conference organizers and leadership got into the spirit of laissez les bon temps rouler of the crescent city. 

Hello SRA community! Are you looking for another opportunity to get involved with a great new initiative on adolescent development? We are the newly formed Committee for Adolescent Girls (CAG), a committeebased in APA Division 35 (Psychology of Women). The CAG is a diverse and dedicated team of researchers, practitioners, and educators working collaboratively to promote the mental, physical, and emotional well-being of adolescent girls (and female-identifying youth) through conducting and disseminating scholarly research, resources, and ideas. The following lays out our primary objectives, as well our preliminary plans to address them, which we believe will be of interest to many SRA members:

School is one environment which may help facilitate youths’ exposure to a variety of attitudes towards race and diversity, and such attitudes may impact adolescents’ educational experiences in both positive and negative ways. It is therefore vital to understand how attitudes towards race are expressed in school settings, particularly by White teachers towards youth of color. Dr. Alexandra Davis’s recent article, Understanding racial attitudes among students and teachers in a ethnically/racially diverse high school, examines the role of racial attitudes among teachers within the high school setting.

Studies suggest that adolescents’ cognitive development may be impacted by elements of socioeconomic status (SES) such as family income, educational attainment, and social status. Dr. Alexis Brieant’s 2020 paper, Socioeconomic Risk for Adolescent Cognitive Control and Emerging Risk-Taking Behaviors examines how SES might impact youths’ cognitive control and, subsequently, youths’ problem behaviors.

Among adolescents, a strong sense of belonging seems to be linked to important psychological outcomes. However, parental divorce may impact adolescents’ sense of belonging not only within the family but within other social contexts as well.

So, it’s time to prepare the personal statement for a research-heavy graduate school program (e.g., a Ph.D. or general/experimental Master’s) and you are faced with the daunting question: “How do your research interests align with those of our faculty?” Although some applicants may have their responses ready as if they have been preparing to put pen to paper all throughout their undergraduate studies, other applicants may have a harder time answering this question. Regardless of the ease with which one comes up with their response, the fit of the applicant’s research interests with the research agenda of their prospective mentor is key to getting accepted into—and succeeding in—graduate school. After all, mentors want to work with graduate students who are passionate about the field, at least in part because the collaboration will be more enjoyable, and the student will be more motivated and successful, when the topic is of inherent interest. For those who could use some guidance in figuring out their area of interest, below I review what constitutes a “research interest”, some reasons why the research interest fit is so important in graduate school applications, and some suggestions for how to identify research interest fit in the personal statement.

Because professors litter lectures with curated pop culture references and stale dad-jokes, my job requires versing myself with DC and MCU and it has nothing to do with Thor’s biceps. So, for work, I binged the latest animated incarnation of Harley Quinn: a brilliant exploration where HQ severs her identity as joker’s girlfriend, yet struggles to be taken seriously because she’s a girl.  Love the feminism, but come on: give the emancipated anti-hero her academic accolades! Dr. Harley Quinzel, PhD from Gotham University in Psychology (or MD since she practices psychiatry?  Batman should check her credentials).

As an academic, it’s no surprise that I have great childhood memories of being ensconced in a big chair reading a book I couldn’t put down. Perhaps less predictable is that I gained as much joy from being physically active. I have many happy childhood memories of playing hopscotch, kickball, tag, or spud; of bike riding or ice skating on the local pond. Fast forward a few decades, and exercise remains critical to my self-care, my sanity. When I step onto the trail or dip into the pool, I am still the academic, and I find myself pondering lessons I’ve learned from my experience with physical activity that apply to the academic life. 

Recently, #freebritney, a social media movement protesting the rockstar’s Overprotected conservatorship became quite the Circus as Britney Spears revealed to the world that she is more than a broken celebrity or wounded tabloid victim.  Fans unearthed a satirical gem where the Womanizer singer found herself the Femme Fatale of scientific scrutiny. The esteemed journal Nature published “When Britney Spears Comes to My Lab” in early 2008 when Britney Spears was navigating and ultimately overcoming a heavily publicized mental health crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many changes to our personal and professional lives. Among these, for students who started graduate school in the Fall 2019 semester, the pandemic has created a (somewhat unique) experience of an entire year of acclimating to graduate student life followed by a year of separation from mentors, cohorts, and departments. Going into my third year of graduate school, I can now confidently say that I have learned a number of valuable lessons that apply to the graduate school experience both pre- and mid-pandemic—though these lessons were particularly emphasized during the height of COVID-19.  Here I share three of them:

I would like to thank the students from the University of Nebraska who took the time to come up with these questions.  They’re great questions I wish I had thought to ask before I went to my first conference because I remember feeling pretty overwhelmed my first time.

My first faux pas as a faculty member happened in my first semester during a department meeting. We were having an animated discussion about our curriculum and it became clear the room was split on the issue. As the meeting approached its end, I, being helpful of course, quipped, “will we be voting on this before we leave today?” I then learned that in my department, we made most decisions by consensus— a revelation of department culture.