The Professional Practice Committee volunteers continue to do an incredible job on your behalf. There are some exciting new resources they have created. Also, there will be some expanded and new offerings at the SIOP Conference in Chicago. Here are some key highlights:

Greetings readers!

At the beginning of each semester for most of my “professing” career I have had what is likely to be a familiar conversation for many of you. These conversations generally hit one of more of the following notes:

I’m pretty sure in academia that you always remember your first “big” publication. For me, it was my master’s thesis that got published in 2011. I’ll assume my reaction to the process is typical of a lot of other folks—from me not realizing that a high risk R&R was a good thing; to me panicking (shocking, I know) about the reviews and my advisor (Jim Diefendorff) laughing at me (I believe his response was “Oh, these aren’t even that bad!” and my response was wanting to faint since O-M-G these were the hardest comments in the history of comments); and, of course, to me taking a literal victory lap around the Akron I-O department when the email appeared in my inbox saying “accepted.” That first paper came with a wave of relief knowing that I had a chance on the job market. But, I also distinctly remember feeling—what else—panic at the thought of (a) having to publish again and (b) having to publish in the future without Jim. How, after 5 short years, was I supposed to create a pipeline to sustain a tenure-track line if I couldn’t focus largely on the research pipeline I was building in my graduate program?

It is often the case that social psychology is overlooked as a potential source for enhanced learning and application for our practices as I-O psychology. While social psychology is the origin of I-O, we have advanced our own version of applied social psychology beyond the roots in cognitive dissonance or attraction. In this column, we take a stroll back into the social psychology by examining the concepts of rejection and comparative feedback mechanisms. Whether looking at how individuals handle rejection or students experience test anxiety based upon the method of feedback processing, the studies reviewed here provide insights into the relationships between feedback and generalized attitudinal perceptions. In this review, we provide insights into the application of the relevant findings for workplace application.

The real power of technology for I-O becomes most apparent when you combine skillsets. This issue, we’ll be drawing connections between the ideas in my “Crash Course on the Internet” and my “Crash Course on R” to understand web applications, also known as “apps.” By the end of this Crash Course, you’ll be able to build a simple data visualization app and deploy it to the Internet for other people to see and play with.

 So to start, what exactly is a web application? Remember from my Internet crash course that all interactions between your web browser and the Internet can described as a series of data exchanges. Your web browser sends a request to a server, that server sends you something in return that is hopefully what you asked for, and your web browser interprets what it receives and displays it to you. But now we’re talking about apps! Wait a second, you ask yourself – if that’s true, how can I use something like Google Docs, which seems to record what I’m writing as I write it?