HIGH IMPACT COFFEE HOUR Ekim & Katrina

Tune in to our conversation with Andrea, a third-year PhD student in Clinical Psychology based in Chicago, about her path to grad school with a background in social work and what her day-to-day life looks like. Andrea also breaks down how she structured her career according to her long-term goals, and why she chose to pursue a PhD in Clinical Psychology. Finally, the three of us discussed the similarities and differences in each of our path to academia and current experiences.


Research areas: Clinical
Career stage: PhD student
Affiliation: Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine
Follow Andrea on Twitter @AndreaHaidar_ !

A few months later, we are back! Kat and I have been busy with grad school, but we finally sat down and recorded an episode in light of recent events, specifically the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In this episode, we talk about how we have been dealing with the current news cycle, how we try to navigate the terrains of 2022, and how we experience these events as 20-something grad students struggling to find meaning and focus in our everyday work at the same time of war, continuing pandemic, and diminishing human rights. We find ourselves questioning a lot, and there is a glimpse of desperation, anger and frustration, but we know we aren't shouting into the void: through commiseration and candidness, we come to undertand that we are not alone, and that you may be feeling a lot of the things that we are, too. Hope y'all take care out there and, if applicable, acknowledge the disruption that politics has brought to either yourself or someone you love, for what is political is personal. 

Informative & interesting articles:


26 States Are Certain or Likely to Ban Abortion Without Roe: Here’s Which Ones and Why by the Guttmacher Institute
“The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion” When the Anti-Choice Choose By Joyce Arthur

A few resources below:


Abortion Resources by Women's Health Clinic 
A Guide to Abortion Resources in a Post-Roe America by Wired
National Network of Abortion Funds

Tune in to our conversation with Cas, the host of Clinically Psyched Pod (a podcast about the hidden curriculum of grad admissions to Clinical Psychology programs), where she talks about her interests and knowledge in Sexual Psychology! We also discuss her ongoing journey to grad school and share our own experiences and difficulties in our respective applications cycles. Shows mentioned: Succession (available on HBO), Sex Education (available on Netflix), Pop Culture Detective (YouTube channel); this came up in our post-recording chitchat and requires reader's discretion (TW: may elicit the familiar urge to burn down the patriarchy even before climate change ends us all; I was too caffeinated for this).


Research area: Clinical, Sexual Health
Career stage: aspiring student
Follow Cas on Twitter @PodPsyched!

Keywords: PhD experiences, productivity tips

Tune in as we share how our first year of PhD program is going and went, what we have been up to, where our focuses are! We also talk about how we organize and manage our research life, finding a work-life balance, and how we establish a support systems. This episode also includes our productivity tips and other techniques that we have tried out, what worked for us and what didn't. If you are curious about our PhD lives, or anywhere between thinking of applying to PhD programs and well underway into yours, here is a snippet of our individual experiences that hopefully provides some insight into what a first year can look like! Mentioned in this episode: Ekim's spreadsheet planner for organizing their grad life; free and available.


Research areas: Clinical, Social, Neuroscience
Career stage: PhD students
Affiliations: Vanderbilt University, University of Cambridge
Follow us on Twitter @HIcoffeehour!

Keywords: Chronic pain, fibromyalgia, traumatic life experiences, career path

Tune in for our conversation with Ariane, a PhD student at the University of Manchester whose project aims to develop diagnostic tool for chronic pain treatment in clinical settings using Bayesian models. We talk about her career trajectory and her experience in her PhD so far, as well as what it means to take a hollistic approach to understanding the human mind. Ariane completed her Master's degree in Neuroscience at the University of St. Andrews, where she studies stress and decision-making, and transitioned into pain research. Pain can be a wonderfully existential topic that is simultaneously subjective and objective. If you are interested in the role of early traumatic experiences in shaping experiences of pain later in life, and if you occasionally ponder about the adaptive brain, this episode is a gem!

As it happened, a digression was made to visit the relationship between microbiota and social behavior. A main paper of interest is linked here, and here is a further paper of interest that explored the role of stress response in this relationship.


Research areas: Neuroscience, Clinical Science
Career stage: PhD student
Affiliation: University of Manchester
Follow Ariane on Twitter @ArianeDelgadoS2, and her research account @ResearchPain! 

Keywords: Autism, consciousness, connectivity, development, cognition

Tune in to an episode with Dr. Lucina Uddin, head of the Brain Connectivity and Cognition Lab situated at the University of Miami, where we learn about her career trajectory and thoughts on autism and cognitive flexibility.  Taken from her lab website, they are broadly focused on investigating the relationship between brain connectivity and cognition in typical and atypical development. Within a cognitive neuroscience framework, their research combines functional connectivity analyses of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data and structural connectivity analyses of diffusion-weighted imaging data to examine the organization of large-scale brain networks supporting high-level cognitive processes. This is an episode that none of you would want to miss out on!


Research areas: Social, Cognitive, Network Neuroscience
Career stage: Professor
Affiliation: Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Behavior, UCLA
Follow Lucina on Twitter @LucinaUddin! Can confirm she's edgy. :)