Executive Officer's Report 2017
Rebecca Shiner
Colgate University
I still vividly remember the first Association for Research in Personality (ARP) meeting that I attended; it was in February of 2002 in Savannah. I had been invited to speak at a Preconference for ARP in a symposium honoring my graduate advisor, Auke Tellegen. It was the first meeting that I attended after the birth of my daughter in early 2001 (I had attended the American Psychiatric Association meeting with my daughter in tow when she was four months old—just the two of us together in New Orleans—but that is a different story). I remember feeling shaky being away from my daughter for the first time, but I was willing to do it to participate in a symposium honoring Auke. Up to that point, I didn't have a strong attachment to any particular organization or meeting in Psychology. I had attended a few meetings as a graduate student and new professor, but I didn't have a strong sense of commitment to or connection with those meetings. And I had few connections to the broader field of personality psychology, having trained in a joint clinical and child development program. I hadn't decided until nearly the very end of graduate school in 1999 that I wanted to try going into academia instead of clinical practice, so I hadn't built up a network of professional colleagues.
By the end of the ARP Preconference I knew that I had found my meeting and my people. The talks were all so good, but what most impressed me was how welcoming everyone was. More senior people mingled freely with more junior people. I got to talk to the President of ARP, David Watson, who as it turned out, had also been a student of Tellegen; it is safe to say that I had not talked to the Presidents of the organizations at previous meetings I had attended. So many of the people whom I met for the first time at that meeting have become my friends over the intervening 15 years. I hope that all of you who attended ARP this past June in Sacramento experienced that same sense of connection with other members and with the organization itself. In Sacramento, I saw people meeting new people, engaging in great conversations, and dancing with abandon. ARP has maintained the same sense of welcome and warmth that I experienced at my first meeting.
Although ARP has been growing steadily over the last decade and a half since I attended my first ARP meeting, I believe that we are in an especially exciting period of growth. Here are some of the signs:
- We have broken the 400-person barrier: ARP currently has 410 members.
- We are on a much firmer financial footing than at any time in our past. Our current bank balance is over $110,000, a substantial increase over where we were even two years ago. This is in part due to generous sponsorship of our meeting by several committed ARP members and outside organizations.
- The ARP meeting in Sacramento was attended by 285 people, and we had a terrific program covering a great variety of topics. We hosted a very successful Preconference on Research Methods in Personality Psychology with 131 people in attendance. And we cannot forget our Gala Dinner, which was attended by 180 people, and where people drank around 400 glasses of wine and 300 bottles of beer (ok, those latter data points don't really indicate growth, but they are still notable). Of the 285 people who attended ARP, 265 were members, which means that 65% of our 2017 members attended our meeting; that indicates remarkably strong engagement of our members.
- We created a new ARP Early Career Award this year to recognize outstanding new contributors to the field of personality and gave the award to our inaugural winner, Wiebke Bleidorn. Oliver John and Rick Robins generously agreed to create an endowment to fund this award.
- We are in the process of establishing an endowment for our longstanding Tanaka Dissertation Award. A generous donor has pledged a donation for this endowment and will match donations from our members toward this award. We will have more details on this campaign for the Tanaka Award soon.
- We are investigating the possibility of creating a new ARP-sponsored journal, as Dan McAdams discusses in his column as ARP President.
If someone had told me at the 2002 meeting that I would eventually become the Executive Officer of ARP thirteen years later in 2015, I would have been very surprised, but pleased. My term as Executive Officer is coming to an end at the end of 2017. I have been grateful to have had a chance to serve this association that has become very important to me over the last fifteen years. Brent Donnellan will be taking over as Executive Officer for 2018-2020, and I couldn't be happier with our selection of Brent for this role. I want to offer a sincere thank you to Dan McAdams and Dan Ozer, the two ARP Presidents during my term; Jennifer Tackett, who has been Secretary-Treasurer; and all of the Board members, meeting organizers, and committee members with whom I have worked for the last three years. And thank you to all of you who support this organization and its mission; I am confident that you will continue to help ARP grow and flourish.