In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked, what’s it like to be a bat? I am not sure that this question has been answered satisfactorily, so maybe we should focus on a slightly more circumscribed variant of the same question: What’s it like to be a chess grand master? Cognitive scientists have been addressing this […]
If you’re still in graduate school, there’s a lot you can do to help prepare for the possibility of a non-academic career down the line. The most frequent piece of advice given by our respondents was to do an internship at some point in your graduate school career. This could be a summer-long experience or […]
Our respondents engaged in a perspective-taking exercise that we hope will be valuable to you as you’re thinking about your next career stage. We asked them to imagine when they were still in academia, and to give advice to someone in the same position. First, respondents offered some thoughts on morale, which may be low […]
Everyone “has an accent”—even if you think you don’t. Most likely, your accent is influenced by both your cultural identity, socioeconomic status, and other social processes, as well as more cognitive processes like emulating another person’s style in a conversation. Accents are such a strong indicator of social factors that they get associated to stereotypes, […]
Once you’ve decided to make a transition out of academia, and you’ve considered what kind of new career field you’d like to enter, how do you find a job in that field? Our respondents shared four routes by which they found their first jobs after academia: through programs to transition academics to industry positions, through […]
In the first half of our digital event on experimental psychologists working in non-academic careers, we covered the experience of pursuing a new career outside of academia. Our respondents explained what their motivations were for pursuing a new career, what skills acquired in academia they use in their new careers and what new skills they […]
During the first part of our #beyondAcademia digital event on careers outside academia, we introduced our respondents in their professional contexts. Today, we reconvene our digital event to address the following questions in the posts during the remainder of the week: What should you consider when choosing a non-academic career path? How do you […]
Yesterday’s post by one of our Digital Associate Editors, Melissa Vo, will be her last one for quite a while. Mel is now on maternity leave in the beautiful Trentino and has stepped aside—but not down!—from her duties as Digital Associate Editor. I think I speak for the entire team when I say that our […]
Cognition is so interesting that we might never realize it. Most of the time we don’t think about our cognition, although we are constantly thinking, seeing, attending, memorizing, and deciding during our waking hours. When teaching my first-year student “Intro to Cognitive Psychology”, the greatest joy for me stems from seeing their faces when they […]
Have you ever had the experience of hearing a new song repeatedly on the radio and when you first heard it, you strongly disliked it, but after your favorite radio station played it over and over and over again, it eventually grew on you? Bruno Mars’ “24K Magic” is a recent example for me. As […]