Please provide a brief description of your STEP Signature Project. Write two or three sentences describing the main activities your STEP Signature Project entailed.
For my STEP Signature Project, I attended the Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychologists (SIOP) annual conference in Chicago. While there, I attended several workshops, seminars, and other sessions. I also met and exchanged contact information with dozens of industrial-organizational (I-O) students, researchers, and practitioners.
What about your understanding of yourself, your assumptions, or your view of the world changed/transformed while completing your STEP Signature Project? Write one or two paragraphs to describe the change or transformation that took place.
Before the SIOP conference, I was a bit wary of networking. I wanted to leverage the opportunity to make connections but didn’t know how to do so without making it feel one-sided and transactional, since I had so little to offer an established career professional. However, the dozens of conversations I had over the course of the conference transformed my perception of networking by proving the extent to which I-O psychologists are willing to support newcomers like me.
Additionally, I began the conference with only a vague notion of how curriculum differed between master’s and doctorate programs in I-O psychology, and the specific practitioner roles to which these degrees could be applied. Throughout the conference, I heard from dozens of I-O psychologists on these subjects, building on my basic knowledge in sometimes radical ways.
What events, interactions, relationships, or activities during your STEP Signature Project led to the change/transformation that you discussed in #2, and how did those affect you? Write three or four paragraphs describing the key aspects of your experiences completing your STEP Signature Project that led to this change/transformation.
My SIOP conference experience began with a pre-conference workshop on people analytics. There were about thirty other people in the room, and I sat at a table with several of them. I had no idea whether the people around me would be cliquey, elitist, or otherwise uninterested in engaging an ignorant undergraduate, but I was determined to start conversation, nonetheless. As soon as I did so, all my worries about networking vanished for the remainder of the conference. I was overwhelmed by the amount of warmth and support I received from every single I-O psychologist at the table, and these only increased when I confessed my undergraduate status.
During the remainder of my time in Chicago, I made dozens of connections, including five which I expect to last for years to come. These five are comprised of a talent development specialist for a manufacturing company in Georgia, a professor leading the master’s program at a Connecticut college, a first-year master’s student from California, an organizational development consultant for one of the highest-performing hospitals in the world, and a senior manager for the largest consulting firm in the world. None of these new relationships feel transactional, because it’s so obvious they’re fulfilled through helping me realize my professional goals. I have no idea why this is the case, but I’m extremely grateful for it. This experience has transformed the way I view networking, and I plan to be much more proactive in the future.
Additionally, the assorted conversations I had with I-O psychology professionals gave me additional insight into the diversity of education and career paths in the field. I had been under the impression that assistantships were available for master’s and PhD programs alike, and that PhDs were almost exclusively for academics. On the contrary, only PhD programs offer assistantships, and not all PhDs go into academia. However, it’s more common for practitioners to hold only a master’s degree, and some universities offer a combined MS/PhD (or MA/PhD) program in I-O psychology that includes assistantships throughout the master’s degree. Before this conference, I also believed that I-O practitioners were all external consultants. Now I know that many large firms employ internal consultants, and that psychometricians creating employee assessments often have an I-O psychology background. This has greatly expanded my view of what’s possible with a graduate or doctoral degree in I-O psychology.
Why is this change/transformation significant or valuable for your life? Write one or two paragraphs discussing why this change or development matters and/or relates to your academic, personal, and/or professional goals and future plans.
One of my major goals for this conference was to learn more about I-O psychology and confirm whether I’d like to pursue continued education and a career in the field. The sessions I attended and the people I met reaffirmed by passion for the subject, and I’ve decided to continue down this path. At present, I’m unsure whether I’d like to pursue a master’s degree or a PhD, and the answer would likely depend on whether I’d like to be a practitioner or an academic. The connections I made in Chicago will be invaluable in learning more about each route, so I can choose which one to follow. Alternatively, a combined MS/PhD or MA/PhD program would offer me the flexibility to stop or continue after receiving my master’s degree. Such programs would also allow me to pay for school with an assistantship, a major benefit not often found in traditional master’s programs.
My new connections will also provide insight, advantages, and opportunities in I-O psychology to which I may not otherwise have access. This will be enormously useful as I research and apply to graduate programs, internships, and full-time roles moving forward. My experience making these connections also increased my networking confidence and competence dramatically, so I expect to proactively meet many more professionals in the future.