Hello SPSSI grad students!

This year I have the pleasure of serving as the SPSSI Graduate Student Committee (GSC) Chair.  While I am excited to serve and work with you all for my third year on the GSC, I am equally enthused to be a part of an organization as respectable and social-justice focused as SPSSI.  There are many psychological organizations that we are all members of and attend conferences for, but I know SPSSI is a sort of home for many of its members because of its presence not only in the academic realm, but in the world of policy.  I think this is the case because the values of SPSSI serve to remind graduate students of the reasons why we do the research we do, and pull us out of the ever-present pressure to publish and strive for academic success.  This focus is imperative for engendering the empirically-supported social change that our country is yearning for more now than ever.  SPSSI is an organization which aims to disseminate our research on a variety of levels—local, state, federal—by providing its members the resources and outlets to do so.  Equally important for me, it represents a community of like-minded individuals who care passionately about integrating their research and social justice goals, who I can communicate with, collaborate with, and learn from.  My goal as Chair is for all our graduate student members to make all of what SPSSI has to offer more accessible and tangible to graduate students!

One way to connect you with the larger SPSSI community is through the projects and programs the GSC has to offer.  As we have for the past few years, the GSC will continue to put on our student research methodology webinar series (created by Angela Robinson and brought to you this year by Meghan George), which aims to give graduate students both a platform to present on specialized methods, and to acquire new methodical skills from their peers.  Also, don’t forget to check out the quarterly newsletter (written and edited by Laura Hooberman), which should help update you about graduate-student upcoming events, grants/awards, and programs.  Our graduate student symposium-collaboration initiative is also available as a means for graduate students to connect and collaborate over shared research interests and potential symposiums!  Of course, I should also mention this publication, The Rookie (compiled and edited by Kristan Russell), as a graduate student resource intended to be an outlet for student-to-student publications and academic discourse. 

We also have some exciting new changes to bring to your attention.  One of the most exciting is our new Diversity Member-at-Large GSC position (filled by Jaboa Lake).  This position has been in the works for a couple of years, and we hope that it will help pave the way for new initiatives focused on our diverse student members—stay tuned for when these debut!  On another note, the Mentorship Program from the past two years will be experiencing some revamping due to your feedback.  This year it is re-launching as the peer meet-up program, aiming to help SPSSI graduate students meet and connect with multiple student members.  Finally, this fall we started the expert policy webinar series.  We will continue to offer these webinars hosted by experts in the field, but will also open it up to graduate student speakers for a policy webinars series (conceptualized by last year’s Chair, Kristen Hackett, and brought to you by Noelle Malvar), similar to the Methodology Webinars.

For more on these initiatives/work of the GSC, and for opportunities to get involved and network, be on the lookout for our Quarterly Newsletter.  Also be sure to check us out on Facebook and Twitter! We look forward to being in touch with you soon, and hope to see many of you next summer in Pittsburgh!

Best,

Ashley Weinberg

SPSSI GSC Chair 17-18

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