Psychology Department -> Undergraduate Office ->
The University of Texas Psychology Department
Graduation Ceremony
Commencement Address
May 2004
SO, Exactly What Does One Do With A Psychology Degree?
H. Clayton Foushee
May 22, 2004
It is indeed a great honor to be here today. It certainly was a complete, but pleasant surprise when I received word of my recognition for the alumni honor from the Psychology Department and Professor Domjan. Now, I’ve never delivered a commencement address before, but I’ve heard more than a few, and probably slept through a couple of those. The title and theme of my address is, “So What Are You Going To Do With a Psychology Degree?.”
As a trained psychologist, of course, the prevailing notion is that I should have some facility at dispensing a modicum of sage wisdom and understanding, but PLEASE don’t believe that for a moment. I’ve certainly had a very interesting career, but when people ask what I studied in school and they learn of my advanced degree in experimental social psychology, more often than not, the response to my answer is one of surprise. However, there is more than a superficial link between my academic training as a psychologist, and what I have pursued in my chosen careers. Perhaps by sharing my experience you’ll look at your freshly earned degree a different light.
And to the proud parents of our new college graduates, the question that many of you have no doubt asked your sons and daughters certainly won’t be answered. But, it may provide you with a way of thinking about the possibilities.
What are you going to do with a Psychology Degree? ANYTHING YOU WANT! The beauty of a psychology course of study is that it offers a way of looking at the world, exposure to a diverse body of concepts and theories about human behavior, and solid practice in the use of those ideas that will serve you well whether you choose a career as a bartender, car salesman, attorney, or rocket scientist.
I need to tell you a little about myself and my career to illustrate the point. Although what I’m about to say is going to sound exceedingly simple, I’d like to encourage you to pursue something you REALLY like and have always been interested in. What really fascinated you as a child? Listen to that…… do something that gives you personal satisfaction, and success, whatever your definition may be will likely follow. The important thing, whatever it is, is that you have a PASSION for it. Pretty simple huh?
I grew up in the pre-internet and rather sheltered world of Graham, North Carolina, population 7000 or so. My Dad decided it would be best to raise my 3 younger brothers and me, “out in the country,” so we really lived about 5 miles from town on a one-lane dirt road. That sense of isolation didn’t bother me terribly much. I didn’t know any better. We could only receive 2 reliable TV stations from far-away places like Greensboro and High Point, so our view of the outside world was rather limited. In addition, it was a fairly carefree time except for a little scare called the “Cuban Missile Crisis” where as a 3rd grader, I was taught how to “assume the position’ as soon as we saw the flash of a thermo-nuclear explosion, and I worried about that a lot. I must admit that I was also a little troubled by the fact that my Dad didn’t have any interest in building a fallout shelter. The assassination of President Kennedy was very disturbing because it was the first time I ever saw my Dad cry.
But the thing I remember most as a child is an interminable fascination with airplanes and space flight. I built every model I could find or afford. When Walter Cronkite was on the air anchoring coverage of NASA’s early space flights, I was there and I didn’t miss a minute of it.
As a kid in that world, I was always good in school, always praised for how smart I was, and my parents started encouraging me to be a Medical Doctor. Astronaut seemed too impossible to strive for, and in my world the 3 physicians in town were the smartest people in town. I always dreamed of learning to fly an airplane, but we didn’t have the money to spare for that. Military flight training was not an option for me because of an athletic injury,
So after high school, I headed off to Duke University with college loans and a partial scholarship confident in the belief that I was going to one of the best pre-med preparatory programs in the nation. At the same time, I saw a world of people and opportunity that I never dreamed was out there. Wow….kids from NY, Boston Chicago, San Francisco, LA, and yes even TEXAS, and my goodness they were different. It seemed that ALL OF THEM were a lot more sophisticated than a sheltered little kid from Graham, NC, and it was more than a little intimidating to be in class with what I perceived to be such massive intellects.
At the same time, I began to have the first of several large existential crises I’ve faced in my life (and I suspect I’m far from finished with those!!!!!). Guess what, I absolutely HATED the pre-med curriculum, and it seemed like nothing but drudgery and memorization. So after a year, I’d pretty much had it, and decided to take something that sounded like fun, psychology and English,?.oh my Dad was NOT happy!!! ?What the blank are you going to do with a Psychology or English degree? ? I guess I didn’t have a good answer at that time, but I was very stubborn and rebellious as many of us were in the 70’s, and I was not about to be deterred from doing what I wanted to do.
Psychology and English literature courses were my “academic nirvana” at Duke. Psychology appealed to the scientist in me, and English to my creative side. I found myself particularly intrigued by social psychology because to me, the field seemed to be so universally applicable to virtually every process imaginable in the world of humanity. For the first time, I was really pumped about college. I was also forced to learn how to write and still today encourage any college student who will listen to me, to load up on English courses.
I don’t remember exactly how, but a doctoral student, Rick Archer, who eventually joined the faculty here at Texas, asked me if might be interested in a job as a “confederate” in one of his experiments. A confederate--I knew we had a statue of Confederate soldier facing north on Courthouse Square in my little hometown, but I also knew I was supposed to be an “actor” pretending to be just another college sophomore research subject in an experiment on self-disclosure, but I was hooked, and I got paid! The experiment didn’t turn out all that great, but Rick was impressed by something and introduced me to a couple of the greatest social psychologists of the time Jack Brehm and Edward E. Jones, who seemed to take an interest in my enthusiasm. At that point, and forevermore, I knew I was heading to a graduate social psychology program somewhere, and I was absolutely determined to be a college professor in a social psychology department.
So armed with great grades and fabulous recommendations from a couple of the premier figures in the field, I set myself to applying to the best graduate programs in the country. I was fortunate to be admitted to several, but ecstatic about being accepted in the program at the University of Texas. It was a top-five program with luminaries in social and personality psychology like Elliot Aronson, Arnold Buss, David Glass, Robert Helmreich, Janet T. Spence, Robert Wicklund and it was in awesome Austin. Even my Dad was pretty happy about it because UT promised 4 years of support.
What a program that was and the camaraderie among faulty and graduate students was like nothing I’d ever seen. I found myself quickly gravitating toward the work of Bob Helmreich and Janet T. Spence, who were pursuing the intersection of social, personality and developmental psychology in a field of study concerned with the psychological dimensions, correlates and antecedents of masculinity and femininity, as well as achievement motivation, including mastery, competitiveness, and the predictors of success and failure in various fields of endeavor. They were compiling an impressive body of evidence that traits stereotypically associated with masculinity and femininity were not mutually exclusive, or more likely to be present in one of the other gender, but actually they were independent, so that it was equally likely that one could be high in both sets of traits as well as low or any other combination. Also exceedingly interesting to me was their related research on achievement motivation, which was showing that the highest patterns of success were not associated with highly competitive individuals, but the most successful individuals were more likely to be those who were high in traits associated with “mastery”-- operationally defined as living up to one’s own internal standard of excellence. In fact, it was interesting that highly competitive individuals were usually more satisfied with being slightly better than a perceived opponent. Being a little better than someone else doesn‘t necessarily make you the best, it just makes you a little better. And, being a little better than bad is not necessarily good. Mastery-oriented individuals could only be satisfied by living up their internal standard of the best. Wow, was that deep or what?
Bob Helmreich and Janet Spence co-chaired my dissertation committee, and unlike most other doctoral dissertation projects, mine actually worked to successfully confirm the hypotheses. No, I’m not about to put you to sleep with the results, but it was pretty slick to me at the time. Plus, people in my family started calling me Dr., which struck me as both funny and cool.
As I was about to receive my PhD from Texas, it was time for existential crisis #2. Although I loved the program and field, and had never been happier, at the same time, I was bothered by growing criticism that the laboratory-based research we were doing was really just the science of college sophomore, since so many studies in experimental social psychology drew their participants from the ranks of college undergrads. I began to question whether I really wanted to spend my professional career entirely in an ivory tower, publishing works only read by a relatively small number of very learned people. On the one hand it seemed like a great life with tremendous freedom, but I found myself drawn to the “real world” and the desire to make a “splash” in places other than just the academic pond.
Bob Helmreich had become my mentor and one of my best friends, and not only sympathized with my little crisis, he shared many of those misgivings. As a former U.S. Navy Officer, Bob had always been interested in groups performing in real world environments and had received grants from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for research on crews in stressful, isolated, and confined environments. NASA was interested because it was pursuing longer and more ambitious space flights after the Apollo moon landing program ended.
At the same time, the country was vexed by a string of highly sensational airline crashes, where perfectly airworthy airplanes had been blindly flown into the side of a mountain, or simply allowed to run out of fuel due to human error. NASA was expanding a research division charged with the Human Factors of Aviation and Space, and Bob received a call from a NASA official he’d worked with in the past, as they were looking for psychologists to staff the expanded effort.
That’s all I need to hear. I applied, was accepted, and 2 months after receiving my very impressive diploma from the University of Texas, I was off to the NASA-Ames Research Center in Northern California. Advanced flight simulators were just then becoming a reality. The sophisticated aircraft simulator became my laboratory, and highly experienced pilots became my research subjects. Turns out there were other advantages to these arrangements, because a) pilots were much easier to deal with than college sophomores, and b) in order to really understand what I was actually doing in the simulator, NASA decided they should pay for me to go to flight school. Oh man?you really have to twist my arm to make me do that, and you’re going to pay for it? And you’re going to pay me too, while I’m learning to fly? Duh, I guess that would be OK.
So, as my Dad asked me years before, what are you going to do with a psychology degree? Well, I thought I had a ?way cool? answer, and that I had absolutely broken the code on professional satisfaction. Turns out I was right, but I was also very lucky and surrounded by some of the best minds in aerospace human factors.
I also began a long-standing collaboration with Bob Helmreich, which began a stream of talented students coming out of the University of Texas specializing in group and organizational factors in aerospace environments. What we found time and time again in our research studies is that more often than not, it was crew organizational factors, more specifically breakdowns in communication and crew coordination that led to a rather large percentage of serious performance problems in aerospace. What Tom Wolfe called the “right stuff” in the famous book and movie, that collection of bravado, can-do, macho, not-very-talkative, solo-performer, was actually the “wrong stuff” in many aerospace environments. The real right stuff was a leadership style that encouraged communication, information flow, and precise management of all available resources. We called it Crew Resource Management and CRM became a buzzword all over the industry, as it still is today. But ladies and gentlemen, it was classic social, personality and organizational psychology applied to flight crew training.
Our work received attention from all over the world, but most interesting to us was that with very few exceptions, flight training programs ignored these dimensions almost entirely. Aviation organizations, both civilian and military, from all over the world began scrambling to address these factors, and regulatory authorities, worldwide, began to consider making such training programs mandatory for all pilots. Bob and I found ourselves in great demand as informal consultants for many of the world’s great airlines and military organizations.
At about the same time, after the cultural shock of the Space Shuttle Challenger accident, we were invited to help re-design the program including the astronaut selection and training process and revamp the definition of the “right stuff.”
At the beginning of the first Bush administration, the newly-appointed Federal Aviation Administrator, Admiral Busey, convinced me to move to Washington, DC, to be his Chief Scientific and Technical Advisor. Suddenly, I found myself immersed in the world of politics, fierce fights for scarce budgetary resources, and I learned great lessons in dealing with entrenched bureaucracy. Again ladies and gentlemen, these are real world examples of classic social and organizational psychology. My goal in that assignment was to attempt to coordinate the considerable combined research resources, of NASA, FAA, and the Department of Defense to mount a concerted attack on aerospace human factors problems that were the primary causes of most civilian and military aviation accidents. With some Congressional support, we began to make in-roads, but the first war in Iraq and deepening global recession, set us back despite our best efforts.
So I guess it was a perfect time to have existential crisis number #3. Northwest Airlines made me an offer I couldn’t refuse so I left Government service, and in less than a year I was promoted to Vice President of Flight Operations of the 4th largest airline in the world. In that job, I had responsibility for a department comprised of 7000 pilots and support personal, and for operating a fleet of over 400 aircraft from the smallest DC-9s to the largest 747s all over the world. My gosh that was a fun job, and during my decade at Northwest, my proudest accomplishment was that we never lost an airplane or a person and had one of the best safety records in the business. The tragedy of 9-11 made it not so much fun anymore.
I’m now in the middle of my latest existential crisis. I joined the consulting practice of the Unisys Corporation as a partner, and have the privilege to serve a broad array of clients in the aerospace community. But, I’m still trying to figure out what I really want to do when I grow up.
OK, enough, you get the point. All I’m trying to say is always follow your instincts and do what “turns YOU on.” Listen to that “inner child” and to the things that excited you as you were growing up. Listen to your own internal standard of excellence, and don’t worry so much about beating somebody else. And, keep refining your instincts about human behavior and what allows people to work well together in groups.
I’ve long believed that the best education is a good general one, and a psychology curriculum like the one here at Texas offers a sturdy foundation to build upon. You probably selected psychology because you’ve always been fascinated by human nature and the ties that bind humans together or the forces that drive them apart. Well ladies and gentlemen, no matter what you do, where you work, or what disciplines are required in your career, it takes people and relationships to make things happen.
Never stop learning, and never stop specializing. I haven’t and don’t intend to stop anytime soon. Congratulations to you all! Now get out there and DO SOMETHING FUN!
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