Graduate Student Corner

Erin Lightman (left)

Hillary Schwarb (right)

Another school year is again upon us with campuses across the country brimming with students, activity and many new faces. As such, you may have noticed upon opening this edition of the Graduate Student Corner that the pictures greeting you look suspiciously unlike Tom Redick and Jim Broadway. As happens in this (hopefully) transitory period that is graduate school, they have moved on to new and different things and we thank them for their poignant insights over the past three years and wish them every success.

We hope with our first edition of the Graduate Student Corner to take the opportunity to introduce ourselves and lay out the ground work for what we hope to do with this column. As has been the case since the column’s inception, we seek to address those issues facing graduate students today and provide information that might help ensure a smooth and successful graduate student career as well as prepare us for life beyond graduate school. As readers of the Graduate Student Corner, we have found it particularly interesting and useful when topics have been addressed by scientists who have already achieved success in the field and have advice to offer, and so we would very much like to continue this tradition. Additionally we hope to provide you with a somewhat different perspective than in previous issues not only as women graduate students, but also experimental psychologists with a focus in cognitive neuroscience. Finally, we intend to keep this column both entertaining and enlightening, as Jim, Tom, Rich, and Nash have in the past.

Here’s a little bit about us:

Erin J. Lightman. This is my 3rd year of grad school, although it seems like I just started. I spent my first year of college as a performance theatre major at the University of Memphis, my second year at a non-traditional hippy college in Vermont, and the rest of college as a psychology major back at the University of Memphis. After returning from the dystopia that was the Vermont liberal arts college, I worked for Dr. Danielle McNamara in the Cognitive Science and Educational Practice Lab where I worked on projects in psycholinguistics and artificial intelligence. It was there that I discovered a love for research. After graduating in 2007, I was ecstatic to move to Atlanta and begin work in Dr. Eric Schumacher’s lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I’m currently working on my master’s thesis, which involves dual-task interference and emotion regulation. My research interests also include thought suppression and whether or not the mechanisms that mediate cognitive control are modality specific. Outside of school, I watch TV, paint, read, and try to maintain a decent social life.

Hillary Schwarb. Originally from Troy, Michigan on the north side of Detroit, I graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2005 with a degree in both Psychology and French Literature. It was at Notre Dame that I was first introduced to the world of Experimental psychology and was given the opportunity to work in both Dr. Bradley Gibson’s Attention and Perception Lab focusing on perceptual orienting in visual search tasks and Dr. Robert West’s Cognitive Neuroscience Lab where I used ERPs to investigate the effects of aging and frontal function on the regulation of cognitive control. With the experience and guidance gained from these undergraduate research opportunities, I packed my bags and headed south to begin graduate school at the Georgia Institute of Technology working with Dr. Eric Schumacher. I received my Master's Degree in 2008 in Experimental Psychology with my work on stimulus-response rules and sequence learning. I am currently a PhD candidate in the Cognition and Brain Sciences program and plan to begin my dissertation work this fall. I am interested in using both behavioral and cognitive neuroscience techniques to study human cognition. Generally my focus is on learning and memory as they relate to skill acquisition and multi-task performance. Perhaps surprisingly, I really love being a graduate student. In my spare time I like to eat out, run my dog, read historical fiction and enjoy all Atlanta has to offer.

To ensure the success of this column, we invite you to become actively involved in the Graduate Student Corner. We would love to hear from you and welcome your feedback. Please feel free to email (elightman3@gatech.edu  and hschwarb@gatech.edu) us with questions, comments, concerns, grievances and ideas that you would like to see addressed in future issues. We also ask APA members to make this column available to their students who may not otherwise stumble across it.