UCLA Professor: Dr. Shelly Gable

From the moment I began to tell people that I was interested in studying relationships, person after person relayed the same message to me, "Take Shelly Gable�s class!" So, I did, and two months later I decided that what she studies and how she got to her place at UCLA were things that others needed to hear. That is how I came to be sitting across the table from this spunky, ambitious professor in her fourth story office in the tower of Franz Hall.

Shelly Gable grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and did her four years of undergrad at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. After graduation, she did not go directly into graduate school, but worked for four years doing clinical work, both with adults in a mental health ward and also with disturbed teens. Shelly was sure that she was interested in Psychology after studying and working in the field for so long, but really was not ready to choose a discipline within psychology that she could commit herself to for such a long time. Instead of forcing herself into a specific field, Shelly Gable chose William & Mary University for her masters, working for two years towards her thesis in a broad, general psychology field. With a masters in general psych comprised of one year of social and one year of clinical, Shelly chose the social route and went on to Rochester University in upstate New York for her Ph.D. in motivation and relationship studies in social psychology. Once there, she finished her dissertation in just four years, and accepted an offer from UCLA right after graduation.

When asking Professor Gable "Why UCLA?" she gave a wide grin and said,� Because it is the best place in the country for what I do." What she does is study close relationships and motivations within them, one of the newer fields in psychology, and she does this with a surprisingly positive twist. Most work done on relationships focus on how to avoid things, how not to be jealous, how to communicate better, how to work when there is not enough of X, how to overcome Y. Professor Gable is more interested in what she calls "capitalization", what we do and how we respond to each other when things go right. She looks at how couples talk about the positive things and why people do them that way. Approach and avoidance are her two catch words. She uses them to assess where our motivations lie. Are we the type of person who tries to avoid the bad (ex. I really hope I don�t fail this midterm) or the type who more often strives for the good (ex. I hope I do well on this midterm)? Professor Gable has found that how we look at situations and how we look at relationships has a very large impact on their outcomes.

Professor Shelly Gable is currently teaching at UCLA, as well as doing research here, and apparently feels that doing one without the other is not nearly as fulfilling. She teaches multiple graduate level courses on close relationships and statistics, but also teaches the �undergraduate close relationships course,� psych 137C, offered this winter as well as a �non-experimental methods social psychology lab,� psych 136B. She also works with multiple graduate students as a faculty sponsor in the Social Psychology department and was happy to offer her advice to students looking to apply to graduate school in psychology.

While offering her first slice of wisdom, she herself laughed and said, "It�s corny but it�s true: If you don�t love it, you will never get through it." She strongly emphasizes doing what you love and what you are passionate about in graduate school. Five or more years is a very long time to dedicate to a program you are only sort of sure about. On that note, her second piece of advice is that you should not feel pressured to know exactly what you want to study, but have a feeling of what truly captivates you. Look into general grad programs that offer a blanket research degree, which allows you to branch in any direction. When looking at individual grad schools, find programs that have at least two different professors working in a related topic to your own interests. It is nice to have options of who to go to when you have questions about your own work. And last, being admitted to graduate schools is never all about one thing. Sure, nice test scores and a high GPA look good, but it is often that all of the other things a person does that shows dedication and interest in the field. What makes a good graduate student is passion and being able to take interesting ideas and turn them into interesting research questions. Her last piece of advice to all of the psych students undergoing the never ending application process? "Have fun and good luck."

Rebekah Skoor
UPJ, Editorial Board

Copyright 2002 by the Undergraduate Psychology Journal
(Vol. 1, No.1.)

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