"What we play is life."

Princeton University:
First year of Ph.D study is automatically paid for with a fellowship; students must find their own fellowships after that.
Princeton! Badass!

Indiana University:
Ph.D students are required to have a Ph.D minor.
And IU has the Kinsey Institute! Badass!

Northwestern University:
All five years of Ph.D study are paid for, tuition and stipend! Wow!
But damn, out of 300 applicants they accept 25, and about 12 of them end up going there. That would be so freaking hard to get into.

Washington State University:
My back-up plan if nothing else works out (or works out well).

The more I think about psychology these days, the more worried I am that I don't really know what I want to do with my life after all.

The most fascinating thing about psychology, to me, is interpersonal relations. I am not interested in clinical psych--no thanks to schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder--but even purely psychological problems like depression aren't NEARLY as interesting to me as the way people relate to each other. Taboos, group dynamics, social constructs... that is the kind of thing I want to learn more about. But I don't think sociology would be a better major for me, because when I think about soc I think about racial inequality and education inequality, which is all well and good but not what I want to do.

So I think my major is correct. I am very interested in psychology, but maybe I should take more sociology classes and sort of test the waters. I guess social psychology would be the right way to describe what I want to do. Looking at the Princeton website (because how badass would it be to get my Ph.D at Princeton), they have a very extensive social psychology program. This is good. It all looks ridiculously interesting.

The only thing is: what would I do with a concentration in social psychology? I am toying with the idea of marital counseling. That has to do with interpersonal relations. I could also go straight to being a university professor, and conduct a bunch of my own research.

I don't know. It's all very far away.

But I do need to start preparing for grad school application. Hopefully either this summer or next summer I can find somebody to take a trip to the east coast with me and visit a bunch of universities over there. I know that I want to apply to a few Ivy League schools, but I would like to explore my other options as well. I also want to see what the campuses look like, because five years spent at an unpleasant campus wouldn't make me very happy at all. I should also talk to my psych advisor about applying to grad school, when I should start filling out the applications and whatnot.

(Also--I got over 100% on my stats exam! How exciting is that?)