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Considering Psychology
sain
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I wasn't a very motivated student in high school and had little direction, I got poor grades and just barely skimmed by. I made the mistake of going to art school because I felt it was the only thing I was any good at. I was miserable, came to terms with that, and am in the process of dropping out.
I've been looking at more practical majors and was considering Psychology, it's a subject that has always fascinated me. I enjoy one on one conversations, I'm an open minded person, and I'm emotionally stable. I can't see myself being an engineer, chemist, or architect but I do want to help people.
So I'm looking at two year schools, I plan on getting an associates and transferring to OSU or Kent to complete my bachelor, then work on graduate school. I realize psychology has a reputation for being that major people just get B.A in so I want to make the most of my schooling.
Right now, my goal is a masters in Psychology, anything beyond that would be wonderful but I'm trying to be realistic.
Anyone with experience, pointers?
Is my plan solid enough?
Edit: My horrible play on the word sane applies here
I've been looking at more practical majors and was considering Psychology, it's a subject that has always fascinated me. I enjoy one on one conversations, I'm an open minded person, and I'm emotionally stable. I can't see myself being an engineer, chemist, or architect but I do want to help people.
So I'm looking at two year schools, I plan on getting an associates and transferring to OSU or Kent to complete my bachelor, then work on graduate school. I realize psychology has a reputation for being that major people just get B.A in so I want to make the most of my schooling.
Right now, my goal is a masters in Psychology, anything beyond that would be wonderful but I'm trying to be realistic.
Anyone with experience, pointers?
Is my plan solid enough?
Edit: My horrible play on the word sane applies here
sain on
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I have a minor in it (major in CompSci) and loved the classes... however, I also never had to do hard-core research and paper-writing, nor experiment design or the like.
Murphy's Paradox: The more you plan, the more that can go wrong. The less you plan, the less likely your plan will succeed.
(1) Psychiatry is not psychology. It's far more medical focused, far more focused on the physical aspects of mental health problems, and therefore far more focused on drug applications over counseling. Regardless of your feelings on psychiatric drugs, you will not enjoy psychiatry.
(2) Applied psychology is in a weird area right now. It still exists, but it tends to be much more focused then the general lie-down-on-the-couch-and-tell-me-your-feelings era of the 60s-70s You're more than likely going to have to get a job with the moniker of "counselor," or work in a specific field like forensic or organizational psychology.
The glory days of psychological therapy were really the 60s-70s. Check out some of the people who were working on new techniques in that period and you'll find some really interesting stuff. Just don't do it before you start taking classes, because you will be hella disappointed once you start.
It's a great field, interesting, fun, and applicable to your real life but be preapred to know that at the end it might not be as fun or smooth sailing depending on your tastes and self-motivation.
I work at the Post-Doctoral Psychoanalysis clinic at my school and believe me, Psychologists are some of the coolest people I've ever met. I've had long conversations with my boss about acid. But it is a serious dedication, most of the Externs and Candidates that go through the program are well into their 20's or early 30's. You'll never stop learning with Psychology, and you'll certainly have interesting experiences. Most of them describe it as not particularly difficult, just immensely time-consuming. The paperwork sucks ass, keep that in mind. Otherwise, I say go for it. You're definitely going to need at least a masters and probably a doctorate if you want to be taken seriously.
In fact, what you may discover is that some fields in psychology think that other fields are pretty much bunk (this is a harsh way of saying that some places tend to be lax with what we call "the scientific method" when it comes to what they do). For example, I was taught that psychoanalysis (aka Freud), which has thus far still managed to evade destruction, doesn't belong anywhere near a modern psychology curriculum or research except as a historical footnote.
For cost reasons I went to a local community college then transferred to UCLA with a chosen degree in Philosophy. While I was in school I discovered a passion for Cognitive Science (now more commonly called Cognitive Neuroscience, which is associated with things like Cognitive Psychology and Artificial Intelligence). Unfortunately, because I was a transfer they basically told me I couldn't switch majors or double major. However, I was allowed to minor, and I took as many classes and participated in as many research opportunities as possible. In the end the hard work paid off, because it gave me something nothing else did - the confidence to know that if I apply myself, work hard, and study diligently, I can accomplish some pretty cool things even if "officially" I only received a minor (as a Cognitive Science minor and a transfer student I have more research credentials than most Psych grad school applicants, enough so that one of my professors basically asked me to stay and become his graduate student).
Now I work in something only remotely related to either Philosophy or CogSci (Human Capital Metrics, i.e. Industrial/Organizational Psychology), and even then my day-to-day work only remotely entails working with actual science methodology, research, etc. Mostly I do things like manage projects and manipulate Excel spreadsheets. The truth is, this is what you will most likely be doing, too. Not necessarily management or menial computing tasks, but something not necessarily related to exactly what you studied for in college.
The whole point while you're there is to expand your horizons and learn how to get knowledge and skills when you need them. Try not to freak out too much about what you're going to do for the rest of your life. Study as much as you can, maybe push the envelope a little and take a few classes here and there that are outside your comfort zone, and who knows, maybe you'll find something you have a passion for. Maybe you'll just find some interesting stuff along the way. Maybe you'll just learn that the college life (i.e., grad school, academia) isn't for you. There is still plenty of life out there.
Work hard. Take the time to have fun. Pick a degree in something that interests you, but don't let it limit you. You can go to law school, art school, or get an MBA with a non-specific bachelor's degree. Most graduate programs don't even care if you have a degree in their specific area, so long as you have taken the basics, have a good GRE score, and have a demonstrated aptitude/experience in the subject matter beyond the usual undergraduate classes. Or, gasp, you can go get a job like the rest of us. ;-)
The advantage of course, is that if you can't find a career in actual psychology you've got a nice solid understanding of numbers which can be applied to a lot of other jobs.
I know these are things to ask admissions, but I though I'd ask anyway.
So in summary, Psychology is extremely fun and fucking interesting as hell (it's the only class where I have had fun and ENJOYED writing term papers!), so if it interests you, shit, go for it. I know in Canada here we have only around 18 000 or so registered psychologists, and this is considering a lot (psychiatrists, counsellors, ect) of people who don't have a Masters level degree or higher.
PS. I don't know, maybe others can chime in, but like someone said already in this thread, psychologists are awesome people, and I've never had a professor less than phenominal, both as an educator and as a person.
She also says there is a lot statistics classes required and that you must love researching and writing, because you'll be doing tons of it. She says that it's not what most people think it'll be... at least in school, you won't be at anytime talking to people one on one... you'll time will be split between doing high level statistics classes , writing pages and pages of papers or reading though tons of old research papers.
She says most of the papers you will be reading/researching are very dry and can be very taxing at time to read due to the way they are written (go look up some journal papers and read though them). While she was doing her masters, the "shortest" paper she wrote was some 37 pages... and that was just one class. PHD she says gets progressively harder.
She says that you better like those two subjects and be really good at them (statistics and research/writing) or it'll suck for the next 8 to 10 years. She says after school, some jobs will let you talk one on one (ie. therapy) - but even then, she says for every hour you talk to a person; there is probably at least an 20 or 30 minutes (if not more) that you have to spend on paper work and other maintenance tasks.
She says generally it's can be a very isolated and independent work type of environment and that'll almost half, if not more - will be spend working on your own. During school, she says besides class, it's almost all isolated and independent study, working on papers and statistics.
My sister loves researching/writing - but hates statistics. She says the statistics is pretty hard once you start getting into the higher level classes (which are required).
edit: She jokingly says that the best statisticians have PHDs in Psychology.
edit2: she also says Therapy type of job is pretty taxing on the soul. She says that not only you have your own stress, you have the stress of all your patients. At one time Therapist had the highest suicide rate. She said this was for a reason. She said (when she was doing it), that she seen the worst of people, not the best of them and that it shewed her view on life and people negatively at times and was hard to keep a "centered" view
Go for it.
I love reading research papers and journal articles! Maybe it's retarded, but I absolutely love it. I had to do a review of an article this semester in abnormal psychology and I went through and read about 4 or 5, even though I only needed one! It was awesome. I don't even like reading.... Maybe I should change my major haha.
I just find something so romantic about the notion of a science that can be used to discern truth, or to fabricate falsehoods.
Though later on in Stats textbooks it gets really weird. Stuff gets vaguer and vaguer, until they begin talking about how you can't really prove anything, you can only suggest it.
It's like talking to someone that's high.
But it's awesome.
You can never prove anything! People saying that they have "proven" something in one of their experiments annoy me.
There is some good stuff in this thread, shortly I'll be applying for PhD programs in psychology so I'll try to add some stuff when I get time. One important thing to realize is that counseling is a very small part of the field.
Pfft. Maybe you can't in your silly soft sciences. :P
That's when it helps to have a cynical world-view.
After 30 years of counseling my dad hated his upstanding-citizen bosses more than the "crazy" or "bad" adolescents he talked to.
I guess it depends on who you're patients are
At the place she was working, she had a couple of clients that were ex-pedophiles and another one that committed murder (it was a experimental prison program that send them ex-convicts when released). She didn't like them at all... she said all of them gave her the creeps and didn't enjoy that at all. She liked most of her patients though. One guy stalked her and feel in "love" with her. But, that's how it goes I guess.
We're doing important stuff here! Yesterday while I was looking for some articles, I ran across an article that found that cows prefer to lie down on their right sides.
IMPORTANT STUFF 24/7/365
(I like to make fun of my field, but there's totally a bunch of really interesting shit.)
In your undergrad there are a lot of possible areas to psychology. It's pretty broad. Take a bunch of classes, learn a lot of different areas and then try to narrow it down to something you are more interested in. Some psychology is more "sciencey" than others. For example I find that Personality Psychology just makes it up as they go along while Neuroscience and Cognitive Development try their very best to employ measurable experiments (is my bias showing).
That said, try to find out if the undergrad you are thinking of going to is research or theory focused. My university was very research based and so we focused on experimental psychology. We were expected to take a lot of statistics classes and do work in lab settings. Other schools are more counselling and individual analysis oriented. Try to figure out which one the universities near you are.
Also make sure, if you want grad school psychology, that you get to write a thesis. If you're going to split it between 2, 2-year programs then find out if you can still write a thesis. This will be absolutely expected of you for grad school.
Grad schools here are generally split into Clinical and Experimental. Sounds like you want to get into Clinical. I don't want to discourage you, but Clinical is much harder to get into. We're talking 5-10 spots for about 500 serious applicants. You will be expected to have clinical experience and exceptional grades.
Also I don't know how it is there, but most psych grad programs here are a combined Masters-PhD for 5-6 years. You can't just do a Masters. I think there's only a few schools here where you can do one and not the other. You should look into that if you just want to get a 2 year Masters.
If the psychology grad school route seems too daunting there are others available. Some schools have counselling, social work, or educational psych programs that would let you be put into schools or work with families.
With all that said, psychology is a lot of fun. I absolutely love it! A lot of people go into it thinking it'll be about sitting on the couch talking about your feelings or diagnosing your family with a variety of crazy disorders, but it's not. It's about understanding the human mind. How we learn and why we think the things we do. I find it really rewarding.
If you struggled to preform well in high school what makes you think you will be able to make it through grad school and get the doctorate you will probably need? You also just dropped out of school for the one thing you thought you were good at, so you've got some strikes against you and you just might not be an academic at heart.
Every high school student in the western hemisphere thinks they are a good listener. Do not let this idea lead you to believe that you are meant to be a psychologist.
If you do go the psych route you should be prepared for the very real possibility that you probably won't care for grad school as it really is for people who love school, and thus will not have an easy time finding a good job.
There's a lot of variables that could happen during your high school years that could negatively impact performance in many ways.
I did poorly in high school, because I wasn't interested in it. After highschool, I got into computers/college and studied and worked on computers every waking moment. If your passionate about something, you are going to put a lot more energy into it. Most people aren't too passionate about highschool.
I think this is true too. I've meet a lot of people that claim to be "people person's" or "Good with people", but in most cases they just enjoy talking about themselves or don't like to be alone.
You also have to be able to communicate effectively to a wide range of people". Just because you can talk to your brother in law about cars, doesn't mean you can talk to some that grew up in a different culture, class, and educational system. Sometimes you'll have to talk to people that don't want to be there, don't like you and the majority of the time they'll have emotional, mental and/or boundary problems.
That's what my sister says. She says people get into it because they think they'll be sitting around all day, talking to people one on one. A lot of them drop it because they weren't aware of all the math and research/writing involved with it. Also she says it has a pretty crappy "job placement" rate after you get done with school even with a masters.
Despite the fact that I don't enjoy art school I've kept up with my work and have gotten much better grades than I ever did in high school.
I'm not rushing into this though, nothing is set in stone.
Maybe I should keep in spirit with all failed artists and teach
If you were doing well then why did you stop? The same could happen to you half way through your psych bachelors. In order to get the degree you want you're going to have to put up with some bullshit that you hate.
Because it's really expensive bullshit, around 2-3 times more than state school.
I don't mind debt, but the income isn't stable enough to warrant it.
Yeah but when you wind up dropping out without finishing it becomes wasted money. That would be okay if you then went to a state school and got a useful degree that allowed you to pay off that debt, but if you plan on doing the whole psych grad school thing you've got another 6 years ahead of you at least. That's a ton of debt. And if you drop out in the course of getting that degree you are even more screwed, and still have nothing to show for it.
Basically trying out another major to see if it is for you is really not a good option right now. If you go back to school you need to be dedicated to tough it out and get that piece of paper no matter how much you wind up hating it because you WILL need the money.
I know people who have gone to a handful of different schools with nothing to show for it, and it's a hard cycle to break.
I understand that it would be silly to immediately transfer, I'm still looking at other options.