Undergraduate students

graduate students

*****I will be reviewing applications for the 2022-2023 application cycle for the Ph.D. Program in Counseling Psychology at Colorado State University*****

Dr. Karoly’s Approach to Mentoring

Mentors in the field of psychology perform the important role of helping to shape the future of the field by nurturing the next generation of researchers and practitioners. My goals and values as a mentor primarily stem from my goals and values as a scientist. That is, I strive to conduct research that is ethical, innovative and impactful. Moreover, I endeavor to merge compassion, creativity, critical thinking and interdisciplinary collaborations to design and carry out research projects that have the potential to reduce human suffering, particularly in the realm of substance use and addictive behaviors. Therefore, as a mentor, I am best suited to work with graduate students who are similarly passionate about research, who have at least a budding interest in studying substance use, and who are in pursuit of a research career (broadly defined!). Possible directions include academia (research, teaching, and service), research in industrial settings, in hospitals, and/or in free standing research centers, as well as conducting clinical/counseling work in a manner that leverages one’s knowledge of empirically validated principles of motivation and change.

Mentorship Roles and Responsibilities

For students whose broad professional goals are aligned with clinical/counseling science, I believe that my responsibility as a mentor is to help them obtain the kinds of training experiences they’ll need in order to sharpen and reinforce their interests and simultaneously develop the skills and knowledge necessary for a successful career. I believe that a mentor should act as both an advisor and a facilitator. As an advisor, it is my job to offer my knowledge, experience, tangible resources, and constructive support as students move through their coursework and develop research projects. As a facilitator, it is my responsibility to provide students with timely, objective, helpful and iterative feedback on their work. Another big part of my job as a mentor is to be an advocate for students. Such advocacy might mean helping students to identify professional opportunities (i.e., workshops or courses to take), funding opportunities (grants to apply for), speaking opportunities at conferences or other venues, or facilitating professional networking with peers and/or relevant experts. Along these lines, I recognize that students often have unique interests or training goals that necessitate seeking out additional mentorship. For example, a student may want to explore a content domain outside my areas of expertise when they are developing their thesis or dissertation project. In these situations, I work with students to develop professional relationships with enthusiastic new collaborators who can help enhance the innovation and rigor of our work.

By balancing these roles and responsibilities, I hope to assist students in becoming successful independent investigators and/or practitioners. 

Mentorship Style

My mentorship style is such that I do not take a one-size-fits-all approach. Rather, I recognize that students may come to graduate school with a diverse set of experiences as well as differing strengths, interests, and prior skillsets. Thus, I strive to meet each individual student’s training needs by getting to know the student’s personal aspirations, their current strengths, and the areas in which they most wish to grow. I also recognize that my role as a mentor often changes for my students throughout their time in graduate school. In general, I tend to spend more time with graduate students in the early years of their training focusing on foundational skills such as study design, statistical methods and scientific writing. In students’ later years, I spend more time focused on career-building skills such as grantsmanship, establishing productive collaborations and assisting them in developing a clear and programmatic line of research.

A few more thoughts…

Some of the best advice I ever received as a trainee was to “find the fun” in the challenging work we’re doing. Extending that advice a bit, I have come to add that if you can’t always find the fun, it helps if you can at least “find the meaning”. I believe that we’ve all come to the field of psychology because we are deeply motivated by a desire to help others and to attempt to solve the seemingly unsolvable problems impacting our society, whether through direct clinical contact, scientific study, or both. Hence, my goal as a mentor is to provide for my students a didactic context within which they can emerge from their time in graduate school as full-fledged scientist-practitioners ready to make meaningful contributions to the field of psychology/neuroscience.