The Collage: Dr. Robert Ryan
Article highlighting faculty member of Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. Featured in the Fall 2016 issue of The Collage.
After sixteen years of working in the hotel and restaurant industry, following a brief career as a secondary music teacher, Dr. Robert Ryan decided to pursue psychology, thus beginning a 12–and–a–half year journey in pursuit of his master’s and doctorate degrees.
At the time, Dr. Ryan was a recently divorced, single parent. Between his studies and a full–time job, he would work on his research assistantships in the evenings.
“So I said, ‘Well I’m this close, if I can just get one more experience, get a letter, I can apply and if I can get in, I can get an assistantship [and] I can get paid again.’ So, I quit my job, my company refused the unemployment, and I went down to the city of Pittsburgh and applied for welfare. I was on welfare for six months. And in that time I got another research [assistantship] and another job,” said Dr. Ryan.
Soon after, Dr. Ryan was accepted into the University of Pittsburgh and became a graduate assistant. While he initially wanted to become a child psychologist, Dr. Ryan shifted from clinical to academic psychology after discovering the competitiveness of clinical psychology and his passion for research, an interest that would eventually lead him to KU.
While teaching at Union College in Kentucky, he came across an ad for faculty interested in building the research program of KU’s Psychology Department.
“By that time I really realized I wanted to build a research program…so I came here [to KU]… promoting myself as the guy who…could do that job,” said Dr. Ryan.
And that is exactly what he did. Since arriving at the university in 2000, Dr. Ryan has built the Psychology research program through his work on the hiring committee, which has led to faculty being more involved in studies, thereby providing students additional research opportunities.
Dr. Ryan’s current project is one example of the academic opportunities available to students. Since 2012, he has been preparing and refining his approach to studying immediate acquiescence and retention among college students. His focus is on basic and key concepts introduced in PSY 200: Statistics for Social and Behavioral Sciences and their retention in PSY 270: Experimental Psychology.
This year, he has begun the immense undertaking of running 300 subjects through his study; typically, psychology studies only have 30 – 40 subjects. With 300 participants, Dr. Ryan has created a high–powered study, allowing for greater accuracy.
Given such a vast number of subjects, Dr. Ryan expects the project could extend into a second year. However, he anticipates the study methods introduced to the participants will result in a 100 percent retention rate on the post–test.
Once the results are analyzed and published, Dr. Ryan would like to see the study extended and replicated by other universities.
“I would love to see the 14 PASSHE schools get involved in a big project, where we try to reproduce this. It would be so apropos for a system of teaching universities,” said Dr. Ryan.