In college, I used to write Dr. Ryan Scanlon everywhere.

In the header of my notes.

At the top of assignments before I would submit them.

(My favorite was typing Dr. Ryan Scanlon when I was sending a printing job to our library’s printer)

I wanted that association to manifest.

But of course, I went a different path.

The three letters next to my name now are ones I couldn’t predict.

But there is a story, and a lesson, from my chase for the original three letters I fantasized about:

The Backstory

The blueprint was made simple to me:

If you wanted a shot at a doctoral program, you needed research experience.

That’s what every psych undergrad was taught and I swallowed it whole.

Like many others, my entry into the field began through clinical exposure. But I quickly noticed that the people I looked up had academic research as a central aspect of their career.

I’m an adjunct professor
I have my own research lab
And I run a small private practice.

That was the dream. A triple-threat career.

From that moment on, I threw myself into academic journals with the energy of a finance bro.

My junior year, a simple class assignment snowballed into something much bigger: a semester-long project that transformed into my first real taste of academic fire.

The topic is one I get prouder about with each year that passes: MDMA knowledge and risk perception, and how these factors influenced attitudes toward MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in young adults.

It was 2014. I was in college. It felt so badass.

That study turned into a poster at APS, resurfaced at MAPS three years later, and was published in our university’s peer-reviewed undergrad journal. I was levitating above everyone else. In my mind, I was already halfway into a PhD program. My inner psych nerd was flexing hard.

But, like with most things, the ascension vibes weren’t the whole story.

Behind the scenes, my advisor on this project, Dr. Zach Kornhauser, kept my research partner and I grounded with a grueling standard around clarity, design, and empirical rigor. We even created two original scales for this project - an uncommon and risky move for undergrads.

While I was humming with excitement, Zach was editing syntax and dissecting structure. It was exhilarating and exhausting.

As monumental as this all felt, a sober look at this project from the lens of a doctoral program admissions team would call this a promising but cute student-led effort.

That was my first brush with the tension between how I saw my work and how the system regarded it.

I scanned my CV like an analyst, pinpointing the gaps.

I needed to add more.

One insight was obvious:

I hadn’t yet worked under a Principal Investigator with real academic heft.

In one of my conversations with Zach, I mentioned my fascination with schizophrenia. Zach pointed me to Dr. Sarah Kamens, who specialized in phenomenological research with individuals living with schizophrenia. Her work focused on long, subject-led interviews that offered rich, introspective explorations to be decoded through intensive transcript analysis.

Guess who got to do that coding.

Those hours spent in dialogue with human complexity were nothing short of sacred.

This wasn’t data, it was humanity, raw and unfiltered.

And somehow, generously, Dr. Kamens made me a co-author on her book that still sits on my shelf to this day, a quiet homage to what that work meant to me.

With some time left before graduation, I kept pushing as hard as I could.

I landed a moral psychology study with a professor once connected to Lawrence Kohlberg. I didn’t even stop to realize how unusual it was, all of this happening in undergrad. I was outpacing myself, overlooking my own burnout.

In 2015, started a Masters in Counseling program at CUNY. The goal still was to leverage this into a PhD program, regardless of how rare this particular path was. Like a sommelier pairing wine with cheese, I sniffed around for open research opportunities at the CUNY psychology labs, continuing my quest for the most dense CV this side of the Hudson.

I found a professor who was willing to have me help their projects. But this was when where the ice started to crack under my feet.

I helped in a deception study involving a virtual ball-toss game (Cyberball), meant to simulate racialized social rejection. I had to convince participants they were interacting with real people (they weren’t). Ethically complex, psychologically sharp.

Two weeks in to my courses, I decided I was bored by the Master’s program. I dropped out and took a job instead. The job was a graveyard shift at a community housing program. My sleep, energy, and sense of time flipped upside down.

A time where I should have taken a step back, I gripped tighter.

Despite my exit from the Master’s program, I spent more time in the professor’s prodromal psychosis lab - an ethical grey area if I was ever supposed to be there at all. I just didn’t want to give that opportunity up.

In addition to the Cyberball project, I tried to hatch my own half-baked project, studying marijuana use, trauma, identity by using data from the prodromal psychosis lab.

Then the wheels started to fall off.

Amidst my ambitious mania, I ignored the pressures and realities of taking up space in a university lab.

This honeymoon phase and idolatry of the doctoral track was starting to wane.

While my borderline reckless approach to CV boosting is something I reflect on heavily, I also began to see the ugly academic machine beyond my control: a publish-or-perish ecosystem dependent on irrationally ambitious students volunteers like myself.

And when students couldn’t keep that up.

When their projects were fully formed or couldn’t attend a conference due to financial constraints.

They were asked to leave the lab.

Which is what happened to me.

The academic track I set out to conquer eventually showed me its teeth. What began as glossy admiration evolved into a sobering education.

It was a messy, whimper of an end. Burnt out and misguided, it took years to understand what I should feel about the grip I held for the doctoral dream and, conversely, the grip it had on me.

Consciously or not, I haven’t been back in an academic research setting since.

Nearly 10 years removed from these experiences, I’m able to look empathically at my dogmatic chase. The way I approach work, the way I write, the way I sink my teeth into opportunities, these research experiences provided a hidden gift: a sharper lens, a thicker skin, a professional clarity I carry with me to this day.

The Lesson

The primary format used in psychology research is APA - short for the American Psychological Association.

Most people think of formatting systems like APA, MLA, or Chicago Style as ways to cite references or arrange a page layout. But APA is more than just margins and citations.

APA is a style of thinking. A philosophy of writing.

It goes beyond structure to shape how we present ideas - prioritizing clarity, precision, and neutrality.

Its explicit goal is to “to reduce bias in language”.

That’s not just about fairness; it’s about stripping communication down to its cleanest form.

Words that are often used to describe APA voice:

Authoritative

Concise

Elegant

Translation: APA doesn’t care about your feelings.

It’s cold and clinical. It doesn’t ask you to tell a story - it expects you to build a case. It often reads like a monotone master of neutral persuasion, built from a stack of references copied and pasted from prior studies.

My early drafts in undergrad were constantly marked up for being “too literary” or “telling too much of a story.”

APA isn’t interested in how things felt. It’s interested in what the data said.

There is no reading between the lines. No embellishments. No metaphors.

And certainly no promises, wishful thinking, or hope.

In fact, trying to make a compelling argument without any language bias is a kind of paradox, and yet, that’s exactly what APA demands.

And as clinical as it sounds, I came to love it.

Because it cut through the bullshit.

The mental health world can be metaphysical, lofty, and self-important. APA formatting strips all that away. No window dressing.

It demands that authors get to the point… and stay there.

APA is a model of discipline above all.

To this day, when I write a marketing email or develop messaging for work, I hear my old advisors in my head:

Why is this word needed?

Can you say this in fewer words?

You’re beating around the point.

Make the point.

Make the f**ing point.

**that last one might be my own voice**

APA trained me not just to write more cleanly, it taught me how to think more cleanly. It sharpened my BS detector. It made me skeptical of vague claims, allergic to fluff, and attentive to the missing detail in someone else’s argument.

In a world full of motives - utilitarian, self-serving, or otherwise - this kind of internal compass keeps me sane.

When I communicate, I ask myself:

What am I actually trying to say?

If I suspended all concern for how it might feel...

If I could speak with an authoritative, concise, and elegant voice...

What would that voice say?

Once you learn to

Write

Create

Live

In APA

It’s hard to turn that voice off.