Successful Alumni

Job Title: Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychological Science at Ball State University (Postsecondary Teacher)

Job description and tasks: I have taught over 15,000 students in over 300 courses since Fall 2004, including Introduction to Psychology, Forensic Psychology, and Health Psychology. I have been honored by our students voting me “Best Professor” for 5-straight years. I have deeply loved my teaching career and have met the most extraordinary young students. Many of my beloved students have found success in PhD Programs or work in the profession in various positions.

How did your MA degree help prepare you for the job?: I originally started the program to prepare myself for a PhD program so I could work as a forensic psychologist. During my time in the program, I learned that I wanted to teach undergraduate students. The program allowed me to teach my own undergraduate Social Psychology course followed with teaching my own forensic psychology course. All of my success is thanks to my mentors—Drs. George Gaither & Kerri Pickel – who supported and cared about a 50-year old man who was still trying to find his way in the world.

Job Title: Senior Data Analyst

Job description and tasks: I work as a Senior Data Analyst in the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment (OIRA) at MCPHS University (Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences). One of my primary responsibilities is managing our institution's Tableau Server: building helpful visualizations and self-service data mining tools, adding users, and increasing engagement. I also assist with regular federal and state-level reporting, ad-hoc data requests, surveys, and custom research projects.

How did your MA degree help prepare you for the job?: The focus of the program on quantitative research and statistics helped prepare me for my current position. In my day-to-day I use the best practices I learned for survey design, survey administration, and data management. I am able to ensure validity of experimental designs and the use of appropriate statistical methods. And, in general, my experience helped me to approach everything with a healthy dose of skepticism, to make sure I truly understand a dataset before making any inferences or generalizations.

Job Title: Market Research Strategist

Job description and tasks: I work directly with clients as a consultant to build better brands and drive products forward by leading the design, implementation, and analysis of data using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Alongside my team, we synthesize our findings in order to create actionable insights that can be translated to key stakeholder and internal teams.

How did your MA degree help prepare you for the job?: My degree allowed me to develop a deep theoretical understanding of human attitudes, persuasion, and decision making processes that laid the foundation for my transition into studying this phenomena in an applied setting. It also exposed me to a variety of research methodologies and statistical practices that I still use today as part of my career in research strategy / data analytics.

Job Title: Visiting Research Associate

Job description and tasks: My unit offers a range of supportive services in STEM education research to faculty members. At the moment, I am mostly involved in program and project evaluations and consultations. My colleagues and I have also just started preparing a manuscript on transferable skills. Most recently, I have stepped in as the facilitator for our internal grant that we offer to faculty. Briefly, this includes collecting annual and final reports from recipients, consultation, and organizing review panels, workshops, and the annual symposium.

How did your MA degree help prepare you for the job? I think my MA degree prepared me in a myriad of ways. The theoretical concepts in cognition and social psychology have all been relevant in terms of diversity issues in STEM, group processes, memory, and learning to name a few. My work as a research assistant, my master’s thesis, and my courses in research methods and statistics have all prepared me for tasks such as completing IRB applications, choosing measures, creating surveys in Qualtrics, analyzing data, presenting at conference, and writing manuscripts for publication.