In order to help students develop state-of-the-art research skills and competence, the Program requires two research projects in the first two years of Doctoral study in addition to the research assistantship that is typically completed in the first year. (Please note that the timing for these projects is the same for MA-admit students and direct admit students.) The projects are designed to furnish students with opportunities to develop research questions and to construct means of responding to these questions. Students may (and indeed are encouraged to) use data that have been collected as part of their research assistantship. Ideally, these requirements will also culminate in publishable manuscripts that can be submitted to national journals and professional conferences.
First Year Research Requirement:
First year Doctoral students will generally work at least 10 hours of their assistantship in a research capacity with a member of the faculty in the department. In addition, students will be enrolled in a year-long course entitled Research and Evaluation in Counseling Psychology (PY841). These two activities function in tandem to help students develop research skills that can be used to generate and respond to a wide array of questions in psychology. During the course of the first year, in fulfillment of PY841 class requirements, students are required to develop research questions that can be responded to with an existing data set or with a data set that is easily accessible. Alternately students can develop their own small data set. Each student will present the results of a small-scale study they designed and for which they collected data or analyzed “archival” data. Students will both present a 25-30 minute in-class presentation, as well as turn in to the instructor a written 25-30 page APA style paper (including title, abstract, references and tables).
The goals of the first year research requirements are:
- Provide students with an experiential way to enhance the scientist aspect of their professional identity
- Give students an opportunity to learn about the connection between theory, practice, and research in counseling psychology
- Furnish students with the tools to develop independent research ideas and the ability to implement these ideas
- Provide students with an opportunity to develop a line of research that may inform dissertation projects and post-Doctoral research efforts.
SECOND YEAR RESEARCH PRESENTATION
The faculty expects that students will be involved in a line of research throughout their training that will culminate in an independent dissertation and a lifetime of scholarly contributions. To this end, students are paired with a faculty member in the first year, generally in their assistantship, as a means of helping students to become immersed in a research program that is relevant to the Program’s training and scholarly mission. As a means of helping students to consolidate their learning and to develop professional presentation skills in the scholarly world, the faculty have instituted a required research presentation that will take place in May of the student’s second year.
Students will be given approximately 10-15 minutes to present on a research project that they have been involved with for the past year or two of their studies at Boston College. Although the nature of the presentation may vary, the project needs to be linked clearly to theory and previous research. Ideally, the project that a student presents should be the type of study that would result in a publishable article or a presentation at a national conference. (This suggestion does not mean that the study will be publishable; rather, it represents an aspiration to help students develop independent skills in the production of new knowledge in counseling psychology.) Students are expected to present their work using a PowerPoint format.
Specific features of the presentation are outlined below:
- The research presentation may come from a faculty member’s research program or can be developed independently. If the project is developed independently, it would be prudent for the student to review the proposed project with her/his advisor prior to the formal presentation.
- If a presentation is derived from a faculty member’s research, the student needs to identify his/her own contribution to the specific scholarly project.
- Ideally, the student presentation should encompass a project that will form the foundation for the student’s research program as a Doctoral student and as a professional counseling psychologist.
- The presentation does not need to convey a completed body of research; students can provide an outline of a project that is underway or planned.
Students can also present a clinical case that has fostered a research question; the focus of the presentation, however, needs to be on the study that is engendered by a given clinical problem.