Though there are myriad wonderful resources (see the end of this column for a partial list) available through SIOP and through other sources that offer advice to graduate students on everything from how to seek out graduate programs to how to make the most of attending SIOP’s annual conference to, indeed, how to enact money-saving tips specific to graduate study, I can’t locate any1 that accomplish the modest objective that I have for this issue of the I-Opener: to identify specific, temporally-constrained categories of expenses that graduate students face in our field.2 Here’s why I’m doing this:

Welcome readers! A little more than a year ago I wrote a column on preparing to teach an online class. At that time I was about to teach a fully online section of psychology research methods for the first time. That class has come and gone, and I’ve also just finished teaching a hybrid format statistics class, also for the first time. I’d like to share with you some of my experiences as a new online/hybrid instructor as a follow up to the column from last year. My goal is to provide some further food for thought for those of you considering teaching fully online or hybrid format classes.

The House and Senate Appropriations Committees concluded negotiations on an omnibus appropriations bill (H.R. 244) to fund federal government agencies for the remaining 5 months of fiscal year (FY) 2017.  President Trump signed the bill into law on Friday, May 5.  Despite the cuts proposed by the Trump Administration, the final bill provides increases to federal investments in many of the research, education, and healthcare programs important to research universities and nonprofit research institutions. 

In the last installment of Learning About Learning, we talked about the trends in corporate L&D and how I-Os can help investigate whether or not these trends live up to their hype. Now, we’re looking at the other side of the coin: the trends in I-O concerning training. As we’ve stated before, sometimes the “hottest new thing” in L&D is an approach to learning that I-Os have been researching for a decade or more. Other times, the latest and greatest fashions in L&D don’t even make a blip on the I-O radar. So, let’s explore what training has looked like recently from the I-O side of the fence.

Throughout our tenure as TIP columnists, we have written each of our columns with the aim of critically discussing a number of topics relevant to the graduate student experience and the field of industrial-organizational psychology. For our final column we wish to take a more reflective approach. We aim to synthesize and contextualize our previous columns and provide recommendations to further support the development of graduate education in I-O. To accomplish this, we have broken our column into three parts: first, a reflection to highlight the learnings and themes that have emerged across our columns. This is followed by contextualizing these themes within broader discussions happening in TIP and across other forums, as well as the identification of future directions. We conclude our column with recommendations and key takeaways to support change. By doing so, we aim to summarize our learnings and inform the future direction of our field, with a particular emphasis on the importance of holistic learning and development.