Psi Betaopens in new window is the national honor society for community college students who have an interest in the discipline of psychology. Psi Beta’s mission is to encourage leadership, scholarship, service and research. More than 40,000 students have become lifetime members of Psi Beta since the organization was founded in 1981. For students majoring in psychology, Psi Beta provides learning experiences that align well with APA’s Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major: Version 2.0 (APA, 2013). APA’s guidelines outline the knowledge and skills undergraduate students are expected to acquire on the way to completing their baccalaureate in psychology.
Participation in Psi Beta can provide you with highly meaningful learning experiences — experiences seldom available in undergraduate psychology coursework that can help you satisfy APA’s learning goals. Here are several examples:
Leadership
As a chapter officer or committee chair, you’ll acquire and strengthen group leadership knowledge and skills. (APA Learning Goal 5 — Professional development.)
Research
Participate in Psi Beta’s national research project to learn a variety of research skills, such as participant recruitment, data analysis, hypothesis testing and preparing and presenting research posters at local, regional or national psychology conferences. (APA Learning Goal 2 — Scientific inquiry and critical thinking.)
Teamwork and communication
You can strengthen your teamwork and oral presentation skills by participating in Psi Beta’s new Giving Psychology Away (GPA) service-learning project. Beginning this fall, members of participating Psi Beta chapters will form student teams (usually three or four students per team) to prepare and present highly interactive, 60-minute workshops on self-control strategies. These strategies are based on the self-regulation research conducted by psychologists such as Angela Duckworth, Walter Mischel, Roy Baumeister and Nathan DeWall. The workshop module is developed to present to high school or college students. This project is ideal because Psi Beta students, who have already demonstrated academic success by qualifying for Psi Beta membership, can help equip other students with some of psychology’s most helpful strategies for thriving academically. Concurrently, in the process of learning about self-control and self-regulation research and teaching it to others, you will deepen your knowledge base of psychology and gain valuable teamwork and oral presentation experience. (APA Goal 1 — Knowledge base in psychology; APA Goal 4 — Communication.)
Community service
Psi Beta also encourages community service projects. Through these projects, you can learn teamwork and problem-solving skills. Some service projects enable students to perform volunteer work in workplace environments in which they have an interest as a possible career. (APA Goal 3 — Ethical and social responsibility in a diverse world.)
Related to the above, recent national research known as the Gallup-Purdue Index survey has studied roughly 2 million college graduates. When looking for factors graduates reported as having had a positive impact on their current well-being and workplace effectiveness, Gallup researchers identified several. Among those factors: a mentor professor taking an interest in them and encouraging them during college. Psi Beta’s faculty advisors serve as powerful role models and mentors to Psi Beta students. By becoming active in Psi Beta, you will have access to a powerful mentor.
The Gallup findings make it clear that it’s how you go to college that matters. Students who had been “extremely active in extracurricular activities” during college — such as actively participating in Psi Beta — reported much higher levels of well-being and workplace engagement when surveyed during their post-college years. So students who are thoughtful and proactive about engaging in extracurricular opportunities such as Psi Beta are more likely to benefit from a quality education and experience positive outcomes beyond college.
To learn more about Psi Beta, please email me.
References
American Psychological Association. (2013). APA guidelines for the undergraduate psychology major: Version 2.0. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/undergrd/index.
Baumeister, R.F., Gailliot, M., DeWall, N.C., & Oaten, M. (2006). Self-regulation and personality: How interventions increase regulatory success, and how depletion moderates the effects of traits on behavior. Journal of Personality, 74(6), 1773-1801.
Duckworth, A.L., Grant, H., Loew, B., Oettingen, G., & Gollwitzer, P.M. (2011). Self-regulation strategies improve self-discipline in adolescents: Benefits of mental contrasting and implementation intentions. Educational Psychology, 31(1), 17–26. doi: 10.1080/01443410.2010.506003.
Duckworth, A.L., Kirby, T.A., Gollwitzer, A., & Oettingen, G. (2013). From fantasy to action: Mental contrasting with implementation intentions (MCII) improves academic performance in children. Social Psychological and Personality Science. doi: 10.1177/1948550613476307.
Gallup. (2014). Great jobs great lives: The 2014 Gallup-Purdue Index report. New York: Gallup, Inc.
Mischel, W. (2014). The marshmallow test: Mastering self-control. New York: Little, Brown & Co.
About the author
Jerry Rudmann , PhD, is executive director of Psi Beta. His career background includes human factors engineering at Rockwell International, teaching psychology at Irvine Valley College and serving as the institutional researcher at Coastline College. Rudmann served on the APA Board of Educational Affairs Task Force on Psychology Major Competencies. Recently, he participated in APA’s Summit on National Assessment in Psychology. Rudmann’s professional memberships include: APA, Association for Psychological Science, Council on Undergraduate Research, Psi Beta, Psi Chi and APA Div. 2 (Society for the Teaching of Psycholog). He attended Mt. San Antonio College (AA), CSU Fullerton (BA), CSU Los Angeles (MA) and the University of Southern California (PhD).
