Unique Undergraduate Experiences and their Impact on Postgraduate Plans for St. Mary's University Psychology Majors

Authors

• Angelina Robledo, St. Mary's University
• Zoe Lozano, St. Mary's University
• Jose Ignacio Guerrero Donoso, St. Mary's University

Files

Contributor

Hill, Heather (Facullty Mentor)

Digital Publisher

Digital Commons at St. Mary's

Publication Date

Spring 2026

Keywords

Higher education, Undergraduates, Graduate School planning, Psychology Majors, Success, Soft Skills, Learning Experiences

Description

• The amount of research opportunities a student has available is linked to higher post graduate student success rate (Stoloff et al., 2015).

• The quality of different research experiences also matter (Love et al., 2007). Positive undergraduate experiences lead to higher levels of self-efficacy in undergraduate students.

• Students' soft skills are improved throughout various classroom activities, preparing them for post graduate opportunities (Marsh et al., 2016).

• Wayment and Dickinson (2008) found that students who participated in undergraduate research were more likely to get accepted to graduate school.
• Hypotheses
  • Attending sophomore retreat can reassure areas of interest for psychology undergraduates, which may be related to higher graduate school acceptance rate.
  • More soft skills in the classroom will help undergraduate students get into graduate school.
  • Students who participated more in research during their undergraduate degree may be related to graduate school acceptance. 

Format

PDF

Size

1 poster

City

San Antonio, Texas

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.