This is the story of one student's path to graduate school, from the initial curiosity about the subject through the application process.

I entered college with the goal of majoring in molecular and cellular biology and earning a certificate to teach high school biology upon graduation. Midway through freshman year, however, I heard about a class taught by two psychology professors entitled "Human Behavioral Biology." After sitting in on a lecture and receiving the syllabus, I immediately decided to enroll, ecstatic that my college offered us credit for learning about behavior—something my high school had almost completely lacked.

Towards the end of this semester, I realized that my interests were beginning to lean towards behavioral research. I therefore decided on a dual major in psychology and biology. Thus began the road to my present Ph.D. research in psychology. After earning my Ph.D., I aim to continue in psychology research and teaching, first securing a postdoctoral position and eventually obtaining a professorship.

Although my first foray into scientific research was in a neural genetics laboratory during my freshman year, I had joined a behavior lab better suited to my interests by my sophomore year. There I began assisting a graduate student with his dissertation project. After a year, I devised a plan for my senior honors thesis. This independent research included a defense of my proposal to a committee of professors and culminated in a poster presentation to the department. I also obtained a first-author pulication in an international professional journal.

The thesis process was extremely rewarding, and the autonomy a welcome change from normal undergraduate work. It was the first time I had been primarily responsible for a research idea, took charge of and worked with a team of undergraduate collaborators to implement it, and gained positive and interesting results. Furthermore, the unique methodology I developed and employed has since served as a novel way for researchers in the lab to address other questions. I also came to realize that funding is a constant issue in researchers' lives: I went through the grant-writing process multiple times during these years, obtaining three grants from the college for my undergraduate research. As a side note concerning funding, I did not know about National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships until after I had already applied for graduate school, but I highly recommend that anyone applying to graduate school apply for one of these simultaneously (although you can also do it during graduate school).

After I completed my B.A., I was confident that I would be most successful and would derive the most satisfaction from a career working on problems in the general field of behavioral research. To determine exactly what kind of research I wanted to pursue for my graduate studies, I embarked upon three different projects in a variety of subfields that all appealed to my education as a joint psychology and biology major. By exploring a broad range of problems, I obtained a better understanding of the outstanding questions in the field that best fit my background and interests.

My first project was to assist another graduate student, this time in the anthropology department, on a local project that solidified my interest in behavioral research. Next, I joined a research team from another university as a field assistant collecting data abroad. Although I was thrilled to gain this field experience, I decided that my future research career would involve a setting with more experimental control over my research subjects. Thus, my final project before applying to graduate school was to join another research team at a different university as their lab manager. In this role, I was responsible for training and testing subjects, generally maintaining the lab, and supervising undergraduates.

These varied research experiences helped me decide to specialize in my current field of psychological research. In preparation for my graduate school application, I also made it a priority to mentor younger students. I therefore served as a Big Sibling to entering female students in a Women in Science program throughout college. After graduating, I also served as a host for my school's Spring Break Externship Program, which aims to pair undergraduates with alumni of similar academic interests for the duration of spring break. At the time, I was a lab manager, and I relished the chance to provide another student interested in psychology research with the opportunity to work hands-on in a lab for a week.

I also involved myself with teaching science to younger elementary school students during my undergraduate years. Specifically, I joined one of my school's community service programs and taught a public fourth-grade science class with a fellow undergraduate every week. With the help of a regular classroom teacher and our own ideas, we developed a curriculum that focused on multiple scientific areas (geology, biology, chemistry, etc.). We provided the class with a weekly lesson followed by an interactive experiment or set of experiments, and we organized field trips to area museums, showing the students the connections between what they were learning in the classroom and what kinds of discoveries they could make if they continued to pursue science. Teaching in this capacity greatly strengthened my communication skills (and certainly bolstered my graduate school application).

In my personal statement for graduate school, I crafted a chronology of my interest and experience in psychology: catching the reader's interest with a snippet of my first brief exposure to behavioral research during one assignment in high school, chronicling my research experience during my undergraduate and post-undergraduate years (emphasizing my independent research and its publication, along with my ability to obtain funding), and concluding with my reasons for wanting to attend each school to which I applied. This last point is crucial to Ph.D. programs: you are expected to specify the particular professor with whom you want to work and explain why your research interests are a good fit. Finally, I also made sure to discuss my ultimate goals of becoming a research professor and continuing to teach and mentor (describing my college experiences in these realms as well). Ultimately, I was accepted into every psychology Ph.D. program to which I applied.