The Secret to Getting Involved with BPS

You may not have noticed but BPS membership has increased from 3100 (in 2001) to 5200 today. While growth has slowed a bit recently, the division will soon reach twice the size it was five years ago – and it was big then.

Participating on the BPS Program

I hope you have not noticed all this growth. We have worked to create a sense of community so the division’s size does not limit your ability to be involved. For example, we now have multiple BPS social events each year including: Meet BPS on Saturday night, the Irwin Outstanding Educator reception on Monday, and the BPS Social hour on Tuesday. Although we certainly recognize the importance of parties ;-), let me go through a few of the other ways you can get involved.

The Program

You certainly know about the program! 1000 of you sent Joe Mahoney (our esteemed Program Chair) 720 submissions and 1000 of you reviewed submissions for him. With 20% of our members submitting papers and 20% serving as reviewers, BPS is one of the most research-active divisions in the Academy. Of these submissions, 657 were papers and 63 were symposia. It’s especially great to see that more of you are collaborating to assemble symposia – we have fallen short on symposium proposals in years past. Participation extends broadly throughout our members: 50% of BPS reviewers and 52% of BPS authors were international. As you saw, Joe fashioned these submissions into an exceptional program. Since BPS generally has about 10 sessions going on at a given time, he continued the tradition of creating tracks in the program to avoid scheduling similar sessions at the same time. You may have noticed that you ran into people with common interests as tracks were assigned to specific rooms.

Workshops and consortia

Joanne Oxley, our Assistant Program Chair (and Program Chair Elect for 2008), reported a 30% increase in PDW proposals this year for over 75 sessions that added up to 200 hours of programming. We estimate that about 800 people organized or served on BPS PDW panels – 15% of our members. PDWs offer us a unique opportunity to work with other divisions and Joanne has continued to forge excellent ties with all of the other divisions.

The PDW opportunities will certainly continue next year. Tammy Madsen, the Assistant Program Chair for 2008, has encouraged the BPS membership to be creative in PDW proposals (e.g., things we can’t accomplish in symposia). Click here to see the call for proposals.

Joanne also oversaw all of the BPS consortia. We now offer four consortia to address people’s needs at every stage (doctoral consortium, dissertation consortium, new faculty consortium, and mid-career consortium). In total, about 160 people participated in these consortia last summer.

The Secret for Getting More Deeply Involved in BPS

As you can see, there are lots of opportunities to get involved by participating on the program. However, you might be surprised how many other opportunities are available. For example, the Executive Committee appoints about 30 people to serve on several key standing committees including the Research committee (involved in judging for awards), Teaching committee (Irwin award and teaching excellence), and Global representatives (help us build and serve BPS membership outside of the U.S.).

The Executive Committee, in turn, includes 12 representatives and five officers who you elect. We also have several appointed positions including Treasurer, Newsletter Editor, Technical Director, and Listserv managers. Please click here to check out who is involved.

So, you’re wondering, how can I get more involved?

Let me share the secret for how you can get involved (lets just keep it between us though ;-). With our size has come a need for systematic processes for involving people. We are well aware that if we ask, “who do we know that would be good to get involved?” we are bound to miss some exceptional people who we just haven’t met yet.

The first opportunity for you is to review for the annual conference. You probably knew that each year, we give reviewer awards to about 50 outstanding individuals (click here to see the list). What you may not know is that when we need to fill a position, we make a point to surface names from those who are consistently among the best reviewers. To us, that is a good first indication of how much time and effort you would put into activities for the division as well as your interest in becoming more involved.

For example, under Anita McGahan’s guidance, we recently expanded the role of our Global representatives (click here to see who they are) and needed people to help us build our membership where we have the least coverage. A major part of the process was to go to our list of active reviewers and identify some hard working individuals from the various regions.

Of course, that is not the only path to involvement, nor is reviewing a guarantee that you will be asked to become more involved. However, reviewing is very important to the division, it is an easy step for you to initiate, and the division is actively looking to involve those who really put in the time and effort. If that isn’t enough, you would also be helping BPS colleagues who need feedback on their research.

This process has brought some exceptional people into the BPS leadership over the years whose work continues to influence the division long after they step down (see www.bpsdiv.org/html/past_chairs.html). With Anita serving her final year on the Executive Committee, I want to call your attention to all of the work she has done for the division. Her mission has been to make BPS more inclusive and more international – her impact is apparent in much of what I have discussed above.

As I write, the closing (Liberty?) bell has only recently tolled on the Philadelphia conference but we are already focused on Anaheim. Please note the calls for PDW proposals and papers/symposia (click here and here). The deadlines always come faster than we expect. Also, be sure to reserve the dates for next summer’s meetings on your calendars: the PDWs begin on Friday, August 8th, and the regular program begins on Monday, August 11th. There will be lots of serious research – none of that Mickey Mouse stuff you’ve seen at other conferences.