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Description
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We offer a multidisciplinary
aging training program. Most of our students tend to be
psychologists. The students are simultaneously admitted to
the Department of Psychology (for their Ph.D.) and to the
Institute on Aging Graduate Training program. The core
components of the Institute on Aging (IoA) training program
include: (1) assignment of each student to a
multi-disciplinary mentoring team, including a primary
mentor from the student's discipline and additional mentors
from both within and outside the discipline; (2) a
goal-directed performance model, in which students begin
each academic meeting with their mentoring team to sent
quantifiable goals in the domains of research, education,
and service. Mentoring team meetings throughout the year then
address student achievement on each of these goals, evaluating which goals have been met or exceeded, and
which have been thwarted by barriers which the team must
help to eliminate; (3) a weekly campus-wide colloquium
series featuring top national speakers, local researchers in
aging, and professional development sessions; (4) support
and encouragement for the presentation of research at the
Gerontological Society of America meetings; (5) expectation
of students taking additional coursework in gerontology and
methodology beyond those courses required by their Ph.D.
program (to give them more career flexibility).
Most students pursue a
Gerontology Minor as part of the program. Career
counseling/career goals are a paramount element of
mentorship from, literally, the first day of the student's
arrival. The Graduate Training Program in Aging currently
includes over 25 core faculty mentors from across campus.
Our model is still biased
toward training academic researchers. However, the mentoring
team process allows students to set (and modify)
INDIVIDUALIZED goals. That means that the mentoring team
accommodates students with non-academic aspirations equally
well as students with more traditional "tenure track" goals.
Indeed, we are actively involving students from a variety of
clinical disciplines (rehabilitation sciences, clinical
psychology, nursing). In addition, the multidisciplinary
nature of the mentoring teams means that students repeatedly
get exposure to other professional options and other
disciplinary ways of viewing research topics. Our students
are therefore poised not only for research in traditional
psychology departments, but also in clinical research
facilities, multidisciplinary gerontology environments,
policy settings. Indeed, multidisciplinarity seems to be a
key element in helping students (and their faculty mentors)
to understand that multiple career trajectories are
possible. The goal-setting structure ensures that students
must learn early to ARTICULATE their short-term and
long-term goals, so that career counseling can be
appropriately tailored from the outset.
http://aging.ufl.edu/gradfello.html
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