What to Expect

Industrial and organizational psychology students study the psychology of the workplace. These programs are usually offered at the graduate level.

Stephanie Paquet says the master's program is quite similar to the PhD program she took.

"In your first year, you take courses like you did for your three years of master's," she says. "Once you finish up your course load, you write candidacy exams."

Candidacy exams are one difference between the master's and doctoral programs. Students are given a reading list, which could be about 3,000 pages of material from books and articles.

"You read them and you take very meticulous notes because you will be tested on that," says Paquet. "You set a date and you receive three questions and you have four weeks to answer these questions in the form of a paper."

Paquet says students then have to answer oral questions on their paper. There could also be questions related to the reading list.

"You can fail your oral or you can fail your written or you can fail both. If you fail your oral, you just do it again. If you fail the written, then that's kind of bad because then you get a whole new set of questions and you have to redo the whole process."

PhD students write their dissertation (a long essay) after the candidacy exams. Derek Chapman can tell you all about that.

He graduated with a doctorate in I-O psychology and is now an assistant professor. "One of the main things I focused my PhD dissertation on was job choice," says Chapman.

Chapman studied 1,000 students to get their impressions of organizations before and after job interviews.

"Some really interesting things we found are that very contrary to what a lot of people believe, pay isn't everything. And...a lot of people choose organizations and jobs based on a whole range of criteria," he says.

How to Prepare

Chapman says good math and English skills will help you.

"We do a lot of statistics in industrial and organizational psychology, so being good in math is a good thing. English courses as well are extremely important because after you've done the math, you have to communicate it."

Chapman says I-O students will need some specific traits. "They have to be someone who is keenly interested in human behavior and also interested in the world of work," he says. "Someone who reads the newspaper and wants to look at articles about companies and what's going on and the latest things in the workforce."