Your Undergraduate Degree in Psychology: From College to Career

Paul I. Hettich received his PhD in general Experimental Psychology from Loyola University Chicago. Subsequently he was program evaluator for the federally funded Cooperative Education Research Laboratory, Inc. At the Intext Corporation he worked as an applied research scientist managing driver behavior research and training contracts. His experiences in military, non-profit, and corporate settings gave him a “real-world” perspective for a 35-year career at Bara College (later Barat College of DePaul University) where he taught various psychology courses, chaired the department, and served in administration as academic dean, grants writer, and institutional researcher. He completed a post-doctoral summer session in program evaluation at Northwestern University and subsequently directed the evaluation of a three-year federally funded Women in Leadership Learning program at Barat College. He was a member of the Danforth Foundation for Teaching excellence and the first recipient at Barat College of the Sears Roebuck Foundation Award for Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership. He has several professional presentations—nationally and internationally—as well as publications on diverse topics such as study skills, professional development of faculty, teaching methods, program evaluation, cognitive development of college students, and workplace readiness. He is a Fellow in Divisions 1 (General Psychology), 2 (Society for the Teaching of Psychology), and 52 (International Psychology) of the American Psychological Association and a Life Member of the Midwest Psychological Association.

R. Eric Landrum is a professor and chair in the Department of Psychological Science at Boise State University. He received his PhD in cognitive psychology from Southern Illinois University–Carbondale. He is a research generalist, broadly addressing the improvement of teaching and learning, including the long-term retention of introductory psychology content, skills assessment, improvement of help-seeking behavior, innovations in advising, understanding of student career paths, the psychology workforce, successful graduate school applications, and more. Eric has made more than 425 presentations, written 23 books, and published 85 peer-reviewed journal articles. He has collaborated with more than 300 research assistants and taught more than 18,000 students in 28 years at Boise State. During summer 2008, he led an American Psychological Association (APA) working group at the National Conference for Undergraduate Education in Psychology studying the desired results of an undergraduate psychology education. At the 2014 APA Educational Leadership Conference, Eric was presented with a presidential citation for outstanding contributions to the teaching of psychology. With the 2015 launch of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology journal, he served as inaugural coeditor. He is a member of APA, a fellow of Division 2 (Society for the Teaching of Psychology), and a fellow of Division 1 (General Psychology), and he served as STP president (2014). He served as the 2015–2016 president of the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association. He is a charter member of the Association for Psychological Science (named fellow in 2018). During 2016–2017, Eric was president of the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association, and he was president of Psi Chi, the international honor society in psychology, in 2017–2018. In August 2019, he received the American Psychological Foundation’s Charles L. Brewer Distinguished Teaching of Psychology Award, the highest award given to teachers of psychology in America. In April 2024, Eric was named a Distinguished Professor at Boise State, the highest award for tenured faculty at the university. In January 2025, he was named a Psi Chi Distinguished Member, the highest honor bestowed by the international honor society in psychology.