Influencing the future

By Richard McCarty
Executive Director for Science

During the late winter and early spring, the thoughts of those in academe are tied in one way or another to the future. Undergraduates early in their academic careers begin to consider a major field of study. Those about to graduate begin planning their professional careers. And within graduate departments, faculty must decide which graduate applicants to admit for next fall. Advanced graduate students contemplate their move to postdoctoral study, a faculty position or a position in industry or practice.

Amid all this decision-making, psychology departments have the chance to attract the best young people into the field?a talent search is essential for our discipline to remain vital. If we relax these efforts, we pay the price down the line.

Investing in the future

As a new staff member here at APA, I have heard many of my new colleagues frame issues by saying, ?What can a large professional association such as APA do to support the discipline?? In fact, I think many of us on staff always have this important question bouncing around somewhere in the synapses of our cerebral hemispheres. What I have come to appreciate quickly is that the Science Directorate is in a position to do many great things in support of academic departments. Some of our activities are conducted with a clear view toward the future.

A major success story in APA?s Science Directorate is the Summer Science Institute (SSI), a legacy of Bill Howell?s superb leadership. SSI attempts to attract the most talented undergraduates in the country who are interested in science but not yet wedded to any particular career path. A primary goal of SSI is to influence the career choices of these outstanding students by exposing them to the best that psychology has to offer.

APA held the first SSI on the University of Maryland, College Park, campus in 1996, and the second at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1997. Much of the credit for SSI?s success goes to professor Ludy Benjamin of Texas A&M University, who served as the institute director for the program?s first two years and established its superb academic framework. Guest lecturers over the past two summers have included APA President Marty Seligman and researchers Bob Sternberg, Linda Bartoshuk, Bob Cialdini, Sharon Nelson-LeGall and Jack Nation. Credit for the program?s success also goes to Virginia Holt, APA?s assistant executive director of science communications, who has devoted a great deal of time and energy to SSI and the 91 participants.

We will be tracking SSI participants to see if they major in psychology and eventually go on to graduate school in psychology or a related discipline. This is a classic small ?n? design: We are working with a very select group of students with unusual talents. But if we succeed in attracting only a few of these amazing students to our discipline, the return on our initial investment will be a hundredfold.

As the summer approaches, we are also excited about a new component to this program, ?SSI-Phase 2.? We are in the process of matching some of the previous SSI participants with leading faculty mentors who will provide the students with a full summer of intensive research experience. With any luck, this added laboratory experience and mentoring will interact with the SSI experience to yield a psychological scientist of the future. We will provide you with more details on SSI-Phase 2 later in the summer.

A personal confession

When I first heard about SSI several years ago, I had serious reservations about how effective an eight-day summer program could be in influencing career choices of talented undergraduates. I also wondered what type of meaningful laboratory experiences could occur over such a short time. Now that I have seen the program in action, I am glad no one was affected by my initial negative vibes. I even have the privilege of working closely with the SSI students this summer. Therefore, I think it is high time for me to eat crow. I prefer mine with a lemon vinaigrette, if you don?t mind.