TESU Psychology courses & grad school prospects.

[advancedmemetics]

Hello everyone,

First of all I'd just like to thank everyone who contributes to the enormous wealth of information available to non-traditional students on this board. It has been a huge help in planning my education.

When I began planning my Psychology degree earlier this year, I had been set on testing out of as much as I could and taking upper-level courses through secularcourses.com/study.com. My plans for after graduation were originally to teach English overseas, but recently I've been instead considering pursing graduate work. In doing research on admissions for clinical psych programs (at least funded ones), I've realized that graduating from TESU without graded major course work is going to be a considerable hindrance. So my thoughts now are to perhaps pay for the comprehensive tuition plan and spend a year taking the majority of my upper-level courses with TESU.

My question for those of you with relevant experience is, would it be reasonable to think that over the course of a year I could develop solid enough relationships with psych instructors to ask for letters of recommendation?

For those of you who may have taken some of the online psychology courses offered at TESU, what was the difficulty like? How were interactions with professors?

How competitive might I be to grad admission offices with a TESU degree? I realize I'll probably have to explore REU options as well as postbac research options to strengthen my chances. I will probably, at some point, make a second post in the grad sub-forum dealing specifically with admissions concerns.

I look forward to hearing any thoughts or opinions; all of the posts on here have been incredibly helpful thus far.

Thanks!

[cookderosa]

Hello everyone,

First of all I'd just like to thank everyone who contributes to the enormous wealth of information available to non-traditional students on this board. It has been a huge help in planning my education.

When I began planning my Psychology degree earlier this year, I had been set on testing out of as much as I could and taking upper-level courses through secularcourses.com/study.com. My plans for after graduation were originally to teach English overseas, but recently I've been instead considering pursing graduate work. In doing research on admissions for clinical psych programs (at least funded ones), I've realized that graduating from TESU without graded major course work is going to be a considerable hindrance. So my thoughts now are to perhaps pay for the comprehensive tuition plan and spend a year taking the majority of my upper-level courses with TESU.

My question for those of you with relevant experience is, would it be reasonable to think that over the course of a year I could develop solid enough relationships with psych instructors to ask for letters of recommendation?

For those of you who may have taken some of the online psychology courses offered at TESU, what was the difficulty like? How were interactions with professors?

How competitive might I be to grad admission offices with a TESU degree? I realize I'll probably have to explore REU options as well as postbac research options to strengthen my chances. I will probably, at some point, make a second post in the grad sub-forum dealing specifically with admissions concerns.

I look forward to hearing any thoughts or opinions; all of the posts on here have been incredibly helpful thus far.

Thanks!

This is exactly what happened to me. I started at TESU with a very different plans than when I began studying, and ultimately decided to take all the courses in my major for that very reason, to have graded credits (my major was/is social science, so mostly psych and social psychology). It is my opinion that if you plan to study something in grad school, having at the very minimum taken the courses in your major will be important. I do not, however, think you'll get enough of a relationship out of the interaction at TESU for letters of rec. TESU doesn't employ professors, only mentors who deliver canned curriculum- it's kinda flat. Not that you won't learn anything from the content, but what they contribute to the process is very limited. After I graduated I took a graduate Abnormal Psych course through Harvard Extension and had a lot of interaction with the professor and TAs. Though that was my only graduate psych class there, I'm confident that I could have built relationships with them.
I don't really have an answer except to say that beginning with the end in mind is more important if the end includes additional schooling. I think you can get into grad school with an undergrad from TESU but I don't know about a funded doctorate, and that's what you asked, so if that really is your new goal, you might want to see if you can find a more traditional 4-year college that will accept the credit you have already earned and go from there.

[dfrecore]

Cookderosa is right, when I took my capstone, there was very little interaction with the mentor. The bare minimum. I would not have felt right asking him for any kind of recommendation, because he knew VERY little about me.

Instead, I would consider taking at least a few courses from a local school, or an online school with more professor interaction.

[advancedmemetics]

Thanks to both of you for the input! Does anyone have any experience with SNHU? It looks like there's a much greater degree of professor interaction and they'll take up to 90cr. Alternatively, I was considering applying to a local state university but I'd end up having to do an extra year making up generals/prereqs.

[davewill]

Thanks to both of you for the input! Does anyone have any experience with SNHU? It looks like there's a much greater degree of professor interaction and they'll take up to 90cr. Alternatively, I was considering applying to a local state university but I'd end up having to do an extra year making up generals/prereqs.

You could just take the AOS courses at the local state uni, then get the diploma from TESU. 

I applied and was accepted to the GT Online MSCS program. I took a handful of courses at TESU, and asked my AI prof to write a reference letter. He was willing, (I did well in the course and wrote some good blog posts), but he wanted me to write the letter for him to polish. I elected not to go that route as I didn't think it was entirely honest for me to write the letter and I had good references from my work experience to tap, but it IS possible to get reference letters from TESU mentors. He was a PhD in computer science, so no problem with credentials.

[sanantone]

Letters of recommendation are the dumbest part of college admissions. Flipping a coin is more accurate than using recommendations for hiring and admissions decisions as evidenced by human resources research. I guess that doesn't help you since most graduate programs insist on using this invalid method of judging applicants.

You can do like me and find progressive programs that don't require letters of recommendation. University of Florida has several programs that won't even look at LORs. For my first master's program, I received LORs from community college instructors. I think I only took one online course with two of them. Just send them your resume, GPA, test scores, and career goals.

When I applied to the competitive PhD program I'm in now, I received an LOR from a professor I got to know pretty well. By accident, he emailed it to me. It was a total fluff piece, but I got in. Most LORs will be fluff pieces. No college graduate is dumb enough to get a bad LOR. If an instructor doesn't want to recommend you, then he or she will say so or come up with an excuse.