TIP-TOPics for Students: Introducing the New Team!

Andrew Tenbrink, Mallory Smith, Georgia LaMarre, Laura Pineault, and Tyleen Lopez, Wayne State University

It is with great excitement and gratitude that we address TIP-TOPics readers for the first time as the incoming columnist team. As graduate students, we strongly believe in the importance and impact our collective voice contributes to the SIOP community. In our view, this column represents a unique outlet for graduate students to engage with one another and with professionals in our field.

We are a team of five students from Wayne State University (Detroit, MI) with varied backgrounds in terms of research interests, applied experiences, and academic training. Andrew Tenbrink, Georgia LaMarre, Laura Pineault, and Tyleen Lopez are all full-time PhD students, and Mallory Smith is completing her first year of Wayne State’s part-time master’s program in I-O psychology.

During our 2-year term as columnists, we aim to promote dialogue among readers at all stages of education and involvement with the field—including master’s and doctoral students in traditional I-O programs, management students with I-O interests, undergraduates considering graduate programs in I-O, faculty mentors, and others who influence graduate-student life. With input and feedback from TIP-TOPics readers guiding our authorship, our objectives are to:

• Provide insight into the life of an I-O graduate student and build a network of resources to support our peers,
• Increase visibility of underrepresented contributors in the SIOP/I-O communities,
• Enrich the discourse within our field through inclusion of a diverse range of perspectives.

As students at an urban university with the most diverse campus in Michigan, Wayne State’s mission is part of what drives our commitment to incorporating the theme of diversity and inclusion in our approach to this column. Our program benefits from the mentorship of non-White and female faculty members, and boasts a PhD program rich with religious, ethnic, age, and gender diversity, as well as representation from working students and students with children. We hope to leverage this diversity to generate column topics and conduct interviews with minority and nontraditional students and faculty. We feel our appointment is well-timed in this respect, as we share Dr. Eden King’s presidential mission to promote inclusivity within the SIOP community. It is our hope that TIP-TOPics can be one of many platforms used to make this vision a reality, particularly by giving a voice to those student members who may have felt marginalized in the past, such as master’s students, teaching-oriented doctoral students, international graduate students, and so on.

Our vision as columnists is to provide a dynamic, representative, and reliable resource for graduate students in I-O psychology. Our primary goals include generating quality content that furthers SIOP’s agenda to bridge the science-practitioner gap, distribute information that is useful to current and prospective graduate students at all stages of their studies, and promote a culture of reciprocity with column readers by engaging with TIP-TOPics’ diverse audience through a variety of media. Although we have several ideas for interesting and relevant content for this column, we acknowledge that there are many perspectives and topics of interest outside of our collective experiences and expertise. For that reason, we think it’s important to approach TIP-TOPics as an ongoing conversation between authors and readers, breaking stride with our habit as graduate students to be on the receiving end of one-way academic discourse. Though columns are published quarterly, we hope to use social media to call on the feedback and opinions of our readers more frequently to gain new insight, perspectives, and direction on different topics. This will not only enrich the material generated for column but also foster a community of support and professional connections that will be beneficial as students enter the field and shape the world of I-O.

However, we cannot achieve these goals alone! We are depending on you, our readers, to work alongside us in building a SIOP graduate student community through TIP-TOPics. Throughout our term, we encourage you to introduce yourself to us, provide feedback on our columns, and make your voice heard in the larger SIOP community, whether that be by sending us an email, sharing our columns on social media, engaging with our team members on Twitter (@LPineault; @mallorycsmith; @AndrewPTenbrink), or striking up a conversation with us at SIOP. We are eager to hear your thoughts and opinions regarding graduate-student life.

Now that you have a sense of who we are and what you can expect from us as columnists (and what we are expecting of you as readers), here are some topics we intend to address in future columns:

• Strategies to achieve success in graduate school and to develop skills vital to work as I-O practitioners, including topics about:
  • Writing in graduate school;
  • Conducting interdisciplinary research; and
  • Exploring tools and resources useful for scholarly and applied work in I-O.
• Contemporary issues that I-O graduate students contend with in both their academic lives and in a larger societal context, such as:
  • The impact of #MeToo on the experiences of I-O graduate students; and
  • Balancing the demands of graduate school while maintaining good mental health.

We would like to thank TIP editor Dr. Steven Toaddy for the opportunity to represent I-O graduate students in this column. By leveraging the knowledge and experiences of each of our team members, as well as integrating feedback and perspectives from our audience and from experts in our field, we hope this column will be a resource that is interesting, relevant, and impactful. Stay tuned for more information on how you can get involved in the TIP-TOPics conversations.

Team Bios:

Andrew Tenbrink is a third-year PhD student in I-O Psychology. He received his BS in Psychology from Kansas State University. His research interests include selection, assessment, and performance management, with a specific focus on factors affecting the performance appraisal process. Starting this fall, Andrew will begin a one-year internship working as a research, development, and analytics associate at Denison Consulting in Ann Arbor, MI. Andrew is expected to graduate in the spring of 2021. After earning his PhD, he would like to pursue a career in academia. andrewtenbrink@wayne.edu.

Mallory Smith is pursuing a Master of Arts in I-O Psychology. She earned her BA in Psychology and German from Wayne State University in 2017, and is employed full-time at the university providing support for academic technologies. Her interests include factors influencing employee attitudes, efficacy, and perceptions of justice during organizational change. Following graduation, she is interested in an applied career in the private sector—ideally in a role where she can help employees and businesses anticipate, prepare for, and navigate periods of uncertainty. smithy@wayne.edu.
 

Georgia LaMarre is a second-year PhD student in I-O Psychology. Originally from Canada, she completed her undergraduate education at the University of Waterloo before moving over the border to live in Michigan. Georgia is currently working with an interdisciplinary grant-funded team to study the workplace correlates of police officer stress in addition to pursuing interests in team decision making, workplace identity, and paramilitary organizational culture. After graduate school, she hopes to apply her I-O knowledge to help solve problems in public-sector organizations. georgia.lamarre@wayne.edu

Laura Pineault is a third-year PhD student in I-O Psychology. Her research interests lie at the intersection of leadership and work–life organizational culture, with emphasis on the impact of work–life organizational practices on the leadership success of women. Laura graduated with Distinction from the Honours Behaviour, Cognition and Neuroscience program at the University of Windsor in June 2016. Currently, she serves as a quantitative methods consultant for the Department of Psychology’s Research Design and Analysis Unit. Laura is expected to graduate in the spring of 2021. After graduate school, she hopes to pursue a career in academia. laura.pineault@wayne.edu.

Tyleen Lopez is a first-year PhD student in I-O Psychology. She received her BA in Psychology from St. John’s University in Queens, New York. Her research interests include diversity, inclusion, and leadership—particularly regarding Latinas in the workplace. Tyleen is currently a graduate research assistant and lab manager for Dr. Lars Johnson’s Leadership, Wellbeing and Productivity Lab at Wayne State. Tyleen is expected to graduate in the spring of 2023. After earning her PhD, she would like to pursue a career in academia. tyleen.lopez@wayne.edu.