Think strategically: some advice for being a great mentor with a great research program.

Worthington, Everett L., Jr.

I am very impressed with the quantity and the quality of the practical suggestions that these scholars have provided in their essays. I have tabulated many of those in the Appendix, though I urge you to read the essays for even more suggestions and for the specific context of the suggestions, which cannot be tabulated effectively.

For 34 years, I have been a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), a Carnegie Research 1A university. I was, of course, a graduate student for the four years prior to assuming my faculty position. In those 38 years, I have observed some great researchers and terrific mentors of new researchers, and I have formulated some opinions about what might make for success. Although I work in a large secular state university, I will try to make comments from which people in every type of institution of higher education might benefit.

Having Great Student Researchers Begins with You and Your Strategic Vision

If you are going to involve students in your research program, it stands to reason that you must have a research program. Many faculty do not have a program. We are trained in most graduate schools to think about research projects--a master's thesis and a separate dissertation. That conditions many psychologists to think about doing separate projects. Although they succeed at producing some very nice projects, many never develop a research program. This is like the general who thinks battle by battle. That general will almost always be defeated by a general who thinks in terms of a campaign.

Planning a campaign to succeed in research begins with your dream. What do you want to accomplish? I recently talked with a beginning researcher who sought some advice from me. I suggested that he decide what he wanted to accomplish. He wanted to elevate the state of marriage in his state. Great dream! If you are at an undergraduate institution, your research dreams will be of necessity more limited than someone at a Research 1A university. You will not have the resources of time, graduate student trainees, and incentive structures to accomplish in your available time what someone like Roy Baumeister or Frank Fincham (both seem to publish a major paper every Tuesday) can accomplish.

So, what is reasonable for your setting? Rodney Bassett (see his article in this issue) has produced sustained contributions in several concentrated areas in Christian psychology, and yet he had spent his career at an undergraduate teaching institution. He has focused on social and personality psychology research. He has conducted many studies with students on seeking forgiveness, sexual attraction, measuring religious values, and other areas of Christian behavior in social context. He has concentrated his energies on a few topics rather than on a scattered wide net of topics. He has made an impact. If I were at such an institution, I would model my research career on Rod's. I would study forgiveness, couples, and religious and spiritual values--because those are my interests--but my aims would be to engage students in projects they could succeed on, and I would seek to publish a lot of papers in Journal of Psychology and Christianity, Journal of Psychology and Theology, and psychology of religion journals (i.e., Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, The International Journal of the Psychology of Religion, and The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion).

If I were at a Christian master's degree program in counseling, pastoral counseling, or marital and family counseling, I would look to intervention research on a limited scale. I would think about combining the research of three or four students into single intervention studies. For example, suppose you compared three couple enrichment treatments (done in psychoeducational groups) with an assessment only control group and you used multiple baselines. Each of three students could compare their treatment to the same assessment only control group for their master's degree research project. You could coordinate the entire project as a good publication of an outcome study. The next set of three students might compare the same treatments with assessment only but using individual or couple psychoeducation (instead of groups). The next set of three could compare workbooks. The next, online delivery. The next reading books on the topics. Thus, over a few years, you could do several studies of the three groups being delivered in different modalities--hence, a campaign, not a battle.

Although there are faculty at specifically Christian programs who have succeeded with large federally funded research programs (i.e., Warren Jones, Alexis Abernethy both at Fuller), usually faculty at Christian programs tend to have better success at seeking funding from foundations that are Christian-friendly or with philanthropists. So, if I were designing a campaign at such a Christian training program, I would think of my goal. If it was to be like Warren Jones, I would hope to see a philanthropist-endowed center and multiple NIH grants in my future. I would ask how to get there. It would require building a stellar record both in the secular publication arena and the Christian journal arena. Furthermore, it would involve publishing at the highest levels of competence and impact.

Other faculty in Psy.D. or Ph.D. explicitly Christian doctoral training programs might not desire to strive for success in the same arena that the Research 1A scientists occupy. They might decide that their goal is to create the best targeted intervention in dealing with a particular area. Suppose, for example, you had a heart for studying forgiveness in adolescents. The first step in your campaign is usually basic research. What are the things that adolescent men and women can't forgive their father, mother, sibling, teacher, or BFF for--what are the issues? What is the prevalence, locally, state-wide, and nationally (and perhaps eventually beyond the national boundaries) of each of the issues and of the problem as a whole? How seriously does the problem of inability to forgive actually impair adolescents, and in what ways?

Once you know what the issues are, how often they show up, and how impairing they are, then you are in a much more convincing position to design an intervention targeted to forgiving others. Of course, you could create a semi-generic intervention aimed at forgiving others based on what you know. You might take the REACH Forgiveness model (Worthington, 2006, see www.people.vcu.edu/~eworth for free downloadable Word documents of leader and participant workbooks) and tailor it to adolescents on the basis of your clinical experience (see Worthington, Jennings, & DiBlasio, 2010, for a review of such treatments). You could do a randomized clinical trial that would become your baseline study. If you did an intervention and found it efficacious relative to assessment only, then you could later, after the studies of issues and prevalence, make a strong revision of your generic workshop for adolescents and compare whether the specifically targeted workshop is better than an assessment only control and how it compares to your previous more general targeted intervention.

After that, you could study delivering it to different populations (abused adolescents, adolescents in correction facilities, pregnant teens, etc.) and different modalities (i.e., psycho-educational groups, workbooks, online interactive programs, reading books, watching videos, etc.). Over time, you would build up your strategic campaign. The faculty member at a doctoral clinical psychology training program would spend much time aimed at studying interventions. Starting a clinic might provide real clinical experience for non-research oriented students and also real clients for the clinical trials that test the efficacy of the interventions. See the article by Jennifer Ripley and Mark Yarhouse for more specific examples.

For the Research 1A faculty members, many of the strategies I have already mentioned above are usable. However, in today's climate, strategic planning must incorporate getting major government and foundation grants. Often, faculty members who have not sought grants think of grants as chasing money for the sake of money or because the administration is demanding of it. They might think of grant-seeking as being just a bit on the moral side of prostitution. However, in reality, grants are ways that you can do large projects you could not afford to do on your own. Grants are mostly about getting difficult-to-attract samples that are meaningful to the general population. Grants are not typically awarded to study undergraduates. Like Michelangelo needed a "grant" to sculpt the David or paint the Sistine Chapel, today's major scientists need grants to sculpt their research programs. Strategic planning is almost always necessary. To get a $1M grant, one needs to have a $250,000 grant. To get that, one might need a $75,000 foundation grant, and to get that an internal award of $15,000 from one's university. To land the local grant, one needs a research campaign aimed at a grand strategic goal.

In today's Research 1A university, the premium is on doing research that has an impact. That means publishing in high-impact journals, getting high-impact government grants, and making an important impact on the general population. That impact on the general population usually means one must be media savvy and think in terms of public relations. Just as book authors must today have their own websites, blogs, radio programs, media presence, and platform of potential book buyers, academicians need to build a base of people who will be affected by meaningful research.

Wow. A lot is necessary for success in research today. Thus, we come to a couple of conclusions immediately. (1) You cannot do this alone. You need collaborators. That means (a) graduate students, (b) postdocs, (c) therapists to provide actual clients, and (d) other top-notch academicians. Successful researchers collaborate. If they do not, they will not succeed. (2) You need collaborators also because you are in all likelihood not Roy Baumeister, Frank Fincham, Robert Sternberg, or Martin Seligman. I certainly am not capable of getting 1000 major publications. So, I must assay my skills and do what I can do and collaborate to cover the things I cannot do.

A Dozen Guidelines for Success--What You and Your Students Must Have to Succeed

Drive. Neither you nor your students will succeed without drive. You need a mission, literally a vocation (i.e., a calling from the voice of God).

Dream (BIG). Dare to dream big. My personal mission statement is to do all I can reasonably do to bring forgiveness into every willing heart, home, and homeland.

Desire. Research is a passionate activity. I truly believe that if a person does not have passion for the research he or she is doing, little will be done.

Decision to take reasonable risks. Success in research, like in any endeavor in life, will not happen without taking risks. We have to be aggressive to reach our vision.

Dedication to the Future. This involves dedication to (1) your own future, (2) to making the world a better place, and (3) to the future of your students and collaborators.

Deliberate preparation. Success occurs because you prepare yourself to succeed.

Develop your skills and abilities. Many people who go to graduate school in psychology are bright, talented, and energetic. The temptation is for such gifted people to rely on native skills and abilities. This might yield success, but will not change the world.

Darned hard work. To succeed, you have to work very hard and make sacrifices.

Distinguished character of virtue. Virtue is about pursuing a goal. We catch the vision, exert effort at building the habits of the heart that consist of virtues. That requires persistence in the face of failure, humility in the face of success, patience in the face of your ambitions, and a realization that not everything is up to us. There are crucial non-controllable factors, and the chief among those is God's will for us.

Destiny. God has selected some people to do a great work. They are people of destiny. For others, God has in mind more local contributions. Seek whether you have a destiny from God, and if you do, go after it.

Detect luck. God works in our lives providentially, but also things sometimes just happen. God is not stymied by luck. Detecting that I have bad or good luck helps me to realize that I cannot take full credit for my life. I need to seek God.

Deity. God is trustworthy and good.

Summary of the Guidelines

I believe that many of these guidelines can be summarized in a couple of equations. See Kahneman (2011) for the genesis of this idea.

Success = Talent + Preparation + Work + Uncontrollables

Great Success = More Talent + More Preparation + More Work + More Uncontrollables

Why do some seem to fail despite following many of these guidelines, and some people have success despite following none? I don't know. But "Chance favors the prepared mind," said Louis Pasteur. That prepared mind is one appropriately focused on God's leading as well as our own learning.

Four Essential Qualities You Must Develop to Lead and that You Should Seek to Develop in Your Students

Once you have a strategic direction, seek to develop your own leadership skills and the leadership skills of your students. I draw on Fears (2007) for four qualities that jibe with my observations about leaders. Leaders must have the following.

Sound Foundational Principles

Leadership is based at root on a sound foundation. For the Christian scientific scholar that involves sound understanding of both psychology and theology.

Moral GPS System that Re-orients to the Foundational Principles in Times of Emotion and Conflict

Life, like a strategic campaign, is full of times of confusion--the smoke and chaos of the battlefield, so to speak. In those times, we are particularly inclined to stray from our mission or our direction. We are particularly tempted to abandon our foundational principles or simply forget them as we respond to the exigencies of the moment. But good leadership does not get sidetracked. It has a moral GPS system that keeps the leader (and the organization the leader is leading) oriented toward the goal.

Compelling Vision

A vision of the future is needed for good leadership. Leadership leads people somewhere, and if the leader does not have a compelling vision to evoke and to place before the eyes of those who are being led, then everyone will end up somewhere else.

Ability to Build Consensus

One can have a great vision, but if one cannot get others on board with the vision, then the vision will not be realized. People always have divergent visions. Students have different, self-interested, visions than the visions of their self-interested mentors. The best mentors shape their vision to include the students' visions and they personally inspire students to achieve the joint vision.

Fears (2007) argues that good leadership involves all four characteristics. A leader missing any one of the four may be a good leader, but will not be a great leader. Leading a research team then is a matter of discerning oneself and the leading of God and clarifying that leading. It is about developing the skills and knowledge necessary to move along the research field. Finally, it is about leadership on the ground. This might be likened to tactics more than strategy. Nevertheless, carrying out the following advice is necessary to make a large impact with your research.

Advice about Getting the Right Graduate Students

Select for Success

Use the applicant's letter to assess for mutual research interest and potential career path. It is a must that the applicant says that he or she is interested in my research area, and probably the person should name me by name and show that he or she understands my research. In addition, if the person says he or she wants to be a practitioner, I will usually be uninterested in the person. I want to train academicians. If the person says he or she wants to do practice but will, of course, do necessary research, or wants to teach but have a part-time practice, I usually consider that as evidence that the person is primarily interested in practice but has been coached to say the "research" word. So, I give "points" for being sensitive to their coaching, but I am more interested in someone who clearly wants to go academically.

Use GRE Scores to assess for brightness. Most of the people who apply to your graduate program have the ability to succeed, and many have the ability to excel. So, first screen for general brightness through looking at the GRE scores. GRE-Q tends to be more discriminating in a research-heavy program than does GRE-V. Basically, most people who apply to a graduate program in counseling or clinical psychology have GRE scores in the 67th percentile or higher. Sometimes, statistics can be troublesome, so GRE-Q in the 67th percentile or higher is important. Obviously, the ideal candidate has very high scores in both GRE-V and GRE-Q (in the old way of scoring GRE-Tot > 1400 or better yet, >1500). I get very nervous below 1300, especially with low GRE-Q pulling the total down. Scores between 1300-1400 indicate that the person can succeed, but might not excel among those who get into the VCU program. I use the GRE-W (writing) to fine-tune or adjust. So, a person with scores 1300-1400 with a GREW score at 3.5 or below, probably would not be invited to interview.

Use GPA to assess for sustainable motivation. GPA tells whether the person is driven to succeed and can sustain work throughout a hard schedule and with lots of distractions. Due to grade inflation, I now would reject people with GPA < 3.6 (unless some extraordinary case like change of major in the junior year and 4.0 since then). Scores 3.6 < GPA < 3.8 are iffy. Sometimes this indicates a person is bright, but he or she works best only if interested. That can spell trouble on research because it isn't all interesting yet the work still has to be done. Scores from 3.8 < GPA < 4.0 are excellent, especially if the institution is rigorous.

Letters of recommendation can rarely help, but they can sink an applicant. Just like grade inflation, recommendation inflation means that we look for superlatives. The recommender needs to say not just that the person walks on water but floats several feet above it. I look for phrases like "top 1 or 2" or "one of the best ever."

Summary of selection from applicants' folders. Selection of invitees for an interview (based on objective records) is a crucial step. If you invite great people, then you will get great people. That is important given Meehl's (1954) and Kahneman's (2011) guidance on making actuarial predictions rather than judgment-based predictions.

Interviews

Interviews are usually not informative (Meehl, 1959). I look for things that can eliminate the good candidates from being my top choice and make ranking easier.

Do they get along with my research team?

Poor recommendations from my research team members can eliminate an applicant from consideration. If collaboration is really a key to success in establishing and maintaining influential research programs, then evidence that the applicant cannot get along with my research team does not bode well for the person's future. My research team plays a vital role in eliminating some of the candidates who are invited for an interview.

Does the person seem to be driven to be a researcher? That can be hard to discern, and even if one correctly discerns what a pre-doctoral student intends, the function of education is to open the person to new possibilities. So, the person might move toward practice. It is harder to change, however, than to go with the flow. So, in general, I want to select the person who is the most committed to research.

Does the person look like a good potential collaborator? I want to make my best judgment of whether the person will be agreeable to work with for four or five years. Abrasiveness can eliminate the person.

Poor social sensitivity. Poor social skills can indicate potential trouble in practicum. That can eliminate the person.

Advice about Advising Once Students Are Admitted to the Program

What the Student Produces Is Important

Research is the "coin of the realm" in academics. This applies to success in graduate school regardless of whether the person is headed toward a research career. So, within the four years in the doctoral program (and even in the fifth year away on internship), the student should do the following: (a) prioritize research, (b) initiate research, (c) take extra statistics courses, (d) carry research through to publication, (e) do a lot of research, and (f) (perhaps) aim for employment in academia.

Students need to prioritize and initiate research quickly because research takes a long, long time to do. Even if a student's research begins in the first year of a five-year program, it takes a year to develop the IRB proposal and collect data, and a half year (at least) to write an article. Counting on six months for a minimum of one rejection before the article gets accepted, this means that typically the student cannot see the first acceptance until 2.5 years into the program. Then publication often lags by a year. Unless the student is very active in his or her first year of a graduate program, the CV will be thin at graduation.

Professors Are Important in Creating the Right Environment for Student Success

The role of the professor in organizing the environment. The role of the professor in ensuring success in graduate students is not inconsequential. Professors create a learning environment that is structured, social, and fun. The professor must be organized and provide structured guidance in the master's degree. Gradually, the amount of direct guidance is phased out over training. The professor tries to establish an environment of mutual self-help and self-sacrifice among all graduate students, post-docs and faculty members within the research team (the professor included). The leader is usually the senior but equal member and not a privileged czar. The professor creates acceptance of non-resentful collaboration in which everyone on the team benefits from most projects.

The role of the professor in setting the team mood. The team should provide rich social interaction, friendship, and should be fun. Teams that have positive moods produce more articles and chapters. This is true of baseball and other sport teams, work groups, and other groups. Social contagion is a product of networks (Christakis & Fowler, 2009). So, the advisor can help establish and maintain a good mood. As a leader, the advisor is centrally located in the social network, so his or her interactions tend to have the strongest weight. Social networks unravel from the outside in (Christakis & Fowler, 2009). So, a disaffected graduate student can cut himself or herself off from the rest of the group, but that disaffection can spread quickly into the center of the social network. So, the advisor must attend to disaffected students and try to get them reengaged into the research team.

Professors Teach Essentials

Early, the professor provides a lot of structure. Get across the idea that graduate school signifies the entry into professionalism, rather than a continuation as a student. We are lifelong learners, and graduate students are beginning their stint as lifelong adult learners. Grades are less important than professional activities.

Help the student get quick results. If the professor can provide a thesis project that can be completed before the end of the second year, that is best. Provide a collaborative environment where the team members cooperate and stimulate each other. Keep engaged with former team members. The research team does not disintegrate like a college basketball team upon graduation.

Give opportunities to publish early. Some graduate students begin research prior to coming on campus. Chapters can provide reinforcement quicker than do articles because it is not usually necessary to collect data for a chapter. So, provide students the opportunity to co-author chapters as soon as possible.

Help students win awards for scholarship and research. In academic environment, the big payoff is for publications and grants. Regardless of whether one is headed to a Research 1A, a liberal arts teaching-scholar college, or practice, the psychologist reads the environment and matches his or her behavior to succeed. This is emotional and social intelligence. Research is important to winning awards.

Once the student is in internship, he or she must make a transition from quantity to quality of research and impact. Producing a lot is a habit. It is often a hard-to-break habit, but the person must move to publishing a lot but a lot of high impact articles.

Helping the Student Put Together His or Her Plan of Research

Know your students. Passion drives research. If you attempt to make students carry out your program, you will succeed only occasionally. Keep them engaged in their passions, but do so with overlapping interests of your own. If your student is headed toward practice, your expectations must necessarily be less than for a student is headed toward a Research 1A institution.

Use students' strengths to protect their weaknesses. If a student is great in statistics, use him or her early and often in that regard. If the student is a tireless worker, or good at planning research, again use the strengths. It is necessary to evaluate students impartially and determine what they are good (and not as good) at, and how those strengths and weaknesses dovetail with your own. Let people use their strengths while you keep encouraging them to build up their weaknesses. For instance, for years, Joshua Hook and Donnie Davis (see their article in this issue) were both on our research team at VCU. Joshua was a magician at revising with an eye to cutting out material that did not contribute to the main flow of the article. He excelled at reducing the size of manuscripts. Donnie, on the other hand, was a great divergent thinker. He was able to bring in new theoretical aspects and integrate them into the manuscript. However, that usually resulted in lengthening the articles. So, having both Joshua and Donnie on our team allowed creativity of building theoretical connections and also parsimony and economy of words. Over the years, they exercised their strengths, but by their graduation they had learned from each other and were both able to do both activities well.

Leading Your Team

Velocity creates a sense of vitality. Life or vitality is about movement and change. Speed creates excitement, not only on a roller coaster but also in a research team. Is a lot going on? If so, members of the team see the activity and want to get involved. They feel disconnected from the research group if everyone is producing papers, doing studies, writing chapters and reviews but they are not doing so. In the same way, it is vital to get students engaged in research from the beginning. They need to be involved in far more research than just their thesis. By getting projects underway in their first year, they not only will have more productivity over their graduate school career and establish a stronger base for post-graduation positions, but they simply will goad themselves to higher levels of activity.

Build unity. We think and talk like a team. At VCU, we are the Positive Psychology Research Group. We have publicly open seminars weekly and invite graduate students and faculty from the entire department to hear our talks and to present on their own topics. We also publish as a team. Few of our publications are two-authored publications (and virtually none is a single-authored publication). Most articles and chapters are authored by all team members and perhaps graduates still engaged in the topic. We have a T-shirt. On the front it says, "We Are Positive" and underneath that, "The VCU Positive Psychology Research Group." On the back, the shirt says, "Research for Goodness' Sake" and beneath that we list the topics that we study: Forgiveness, Justice, Humility, Gratitude, Mercy, Inspiration, Patience, Self-Control, Religion/Spirituality, and Positive Marriage. The T-shirt is team oriented, not professor oriented. We give a shirt to all graduate students on the team and also all undergraduates assisting with the research. It is advertising as the students wear the shirts around campus.

Encourage independent tactics and initiative. Students are encouraged to suggest topics for research and initiate IRB protocols and studies. I meet with each student individually weekly, but students also meet together in work groups to do and plan projects. Of course, the projects engage the whole team, and usually (but not always) involve me in the planning. Students often find subunits who work well together and are particularly productive. In the 1990s, Mike McCullough and Steve Sandage were particularly productive in studying forgiveness. In recent years, Joshua Hook and Donnie Davis (see this issue) and Daryl Van Tongeren (now on the faculty at Hope College) have been a particularly productive subunit.

Encourage leadership. You can see that we try to foster leadership within our team, not just the graduate students managing their own projects and the undergraduates who work on those projects, but also in planning and initiating all kinds of projects. In the Counseling Psychology (APA-accredited) program, our training model is scientist-practitioner-leader. We put this into practice in our research team.

Students are encouraged to inclusively involve each other in every aspect of the work on projects so that we truly have collaboration. Today's science is collaborative, and scientists learn that best in research teams that are positive, collaborative, and able to invite prestigious researchers to collaborate on other projects that we initiate.

Conclusion

Three important themes cut across my philosophy for creating successful and productive research teams and developing independent scholars. First, practice love. Love is valuing the other person and not devaluing the other person. We practice love as advisors by valuing each student and seeking to lay down our lives to develop those young scholars in our care. Second, practice humility. As William Temple, previous Archbishop of Canterbury, once said, "Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself than of other people, nor does it mean having a low opinion of your gifts. It means freedom from having to think about yourself at all." We think of others we are helping with the research, others whose careers we are helping with collaboration, others in the research team, and most of all we think of God and doing our part to bring about God's kingdom. Finally, we think strategically. We seek discernment of our vocation, our calling from God. Then we plan a strategy that will be our guide--always subject to recalibration due to God's leading and the pressure of circumstances--in doing all we can to bring about God's kingdom.

Appendix: Specific Advice from Thirteen Scholars

Loren Toussaint (Undergraduates)

1. Make expectations clear.

2. Go for the long haul; get commitment throughout their college career.

3. Engagement yields retention.

4. Build a collaborative and supportive research team.

5. Don't expect all to publish, only 10% do.

6. Have lab meetings regularly.

7. Focus on your (the leader's) research interest and let students then use their interests and the leader's.

8. Show your excitement about research.

9. Consult with your colleagues.

Rodney L. Bassett (Undergraduates)

1. Field work or research option.

2. Bite-sized hunks

3. Get on board with the advisor's research and help further it.

4. Lay out research ideas but get buy-in from the undergraduate students.

5. Present one's own ideas (starting with a pre-formed idea shortens the process and makes it doable; keep it relatively simple, so it is doable; make the research experience successful and rewarding; design research ideas so that regardless of how they come out, the result is a win-win).

6. Work separately with each research group; requires individual and personal attention of the advisor.

7. In discussion, start with a few ideas, open the floor for buy-in, be willing to listen and change.

8. Make students experts.

9. Don't be afraid to set limits so the project succeeds.

10. Be available for consultation

11. Try to make individuals responsible for writing sections, which accrete, rather than trust to a group effort (because that often is done by a single conscientious student while others freeload).

12. Teach students that words are to be edited and re-edited, and it is only in school, not the real world, where a paper--especially in draft form--gets graded. Mostly, they get modified repeatedly.

13. Expose students to actually collecting data, whether in questionnaires or in experiments.

14. With undergraduates, the professor might have to analyze the data.

Mark S. Gerig (Master's Counseling Students)

1. Provide lots of volunteer scaffolding.

2. Requirements are minimized.

3. Engage the students procedurally and teach research skills.

4. Then provide volunteer opportunities and low-key environmental approval that might encourage more students to voluntarily do research

Jennifer S. Ripley and Mark A. Yarhouse (Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology)

1. Learn from reflecting on who mentored you. Did the person inspire? Did the person stand up for unpopular beliefs and values? Were they intrinsically or extrinsically motivated to do their research?

2. Consider your setting and fit your research plans to the setting and the students and faculty in the setting.

3. Consider these four goals for your research program: (a) Do you try to do really meaningful research? (b) Do you use your research to create meaningful relationships with your students? (c) Do you coordinate the research of team members so you can magnify students' projects by combining smaller projects into fewer but more important larger projects, when appropriate? (d) Are you an advocate in your local group, the discipline of Psychology, the church, and the world for the Christian message?

Jamie D. Aten (Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology)

Specific Strategies

1. Seek out and introduce students to interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches.

2. Connect students with communities.

3. Help students learn how to build sustainable capacity for community-based research.

4. Get students involved in learning about and seeking external funding.

General Strategies

1. Know what I am passionate about.

2. Understand and communicate my vision for research.

3. Collaborate, collaborate, and collaborate.

4. Be aware of what I value as a researcher.

5. Take steps in research to communicate what I value to students.

6. Conversely, it is important to know what others value about research.

7. Be open about my research strengths and weaknesses with students.

John K. Williams, Peter C. Hill, Sohye Kim, and Clark D. Campbell (Ph.D and Psy.D. Clinical Psychology Programs)

Three suggestions, provided in the form of challenges facing programs, are discussed for faculty who are teaching and doing research within a clinically oriented program.

1. Place a high priority on research mentoring when hiring new faculty.

2. Conduct research that is relevant to clinical students.

3. Motivate students to develop good research skills.

4. Students often assume that science and practice are hypothesized to be in a symbiotic relationship. But they are looking mostly at clinical science and practice rather than the basic research. They see basic research as mostly training in rigorous thinking, scientific databased thinking, and skill-building. However, I would argue that basic science must be translational (David & Montgomery, 2010) into clinical practice and then also into clinical science. Clinical science must consider whether the intervention works and for whom under what conditions, but also why (in basic science terms) it works.

Nathaniel G. Wade (Research 1A Doctoral Program in Counseling Psychology)

1. Select students with interests in research who match your own interests.

2. Engage them soon after they start the program.

3. Recruit the student to work with you as much as just having a program that they want to get into.

4. Express enthusiasm to work with the students.

5. Convey that you will push them, but also respect their personal space.

6. Express passion and enthusiasm for research, but also express interest in clinical practice and in getting them to have good experiences in the clinical area as well as the research area.

7. Create a web presence that explains past research interests and future plans as well.

8. For students interested in clinical practice, don't shoot to have them highly involved in research but to connect with clinically focused research (which aligns with their interests).

9. Try not to convey to students that you only value them if they publish huge numbers of articles.

10. Practice as research mentor to "stay with your passion"; even if the research is more difficult, you'll do more if you are doing what you love. Why is this important? Interest and passion are contagious.

11. Place students' needs first. Never coerce. Never manipulate.

12. Assess the students' needs and try to make research mutually beneficial for both the student and the faculty member.

13. Let students make informed choices that do not lead to penalties. Also, that means balancing personal and work lives.

14. Although ethics demands that professors keep boundaries between them and their students, completely ignoring anything but the professional part of the student's life gives an out-of-balance message.

15. Encouraging self-care in students (and modeling it yourself) does not mean prying into the personal. But it does mean inquiring.

16. Hold in check your tendencies to overwork your students and expect too much of them.

17. Help students build stamina for the marathon (and not just the doctoral education, which is more like a 5K than a marathon).

18. Teach resilience to rejection.

Joshua N. Hook and Don E. Davis (Research 1A Doctoral Programs in Counseling Psychology)

1. Orient students to scientific culture.

2. Put energy in early.

3. Build a collaborative and supportive research team.

4. Involve students in writing and presenting early; it is reinforcing.

5. Advocate for your students.

References

Christakis, N. A., & Fowler, J. H. (2009). Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives. New York: Little, Brown.

Fears, J. R. (2007). The wisdom of history. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company. [36 lectures]

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Meehl, P. E. (1954). Clinical versus statistical prediction: A theoretical analysis and review of the evidence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Reprinted 1996)

Worthington, E. L., Jr. (2006). Forgiveness and reconciliation: Theory and application. New York: Brunner-Routledge.

Worthington, E. L., Jr., Jennings, D. J., II, & DiBlasio, F. A. (2010). Interventions to promote forgiveness in couple and family context: Conceptualization, review, and analysis. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 38, 231-245.

Everett L. Worthington, Jr.

Virginia Commonwealth University

Correspondence regarding this article should be sent to Everett L. Worthington, Jr., Ph.D., Department of Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University, Box 842018, Richmond, VA 23284-2018; eworth@vcu.edu.

Everett L. Worthington, Jr., is professor of Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University. His research interests are forgiveness, marriage dynamics and enrichment, and religious and spiritual beliefs and values.