Career/Graduate School Links and Information
What can you do with a degree in psychology? This is question on many students’ minds, and the answer is “many, many things!” A degree in psychology opens numerous doors.
Some of these doors require graduate training, but a surprising number are open to students with a bachelor’s degree. Therefore, the first decision for you to make is whether graduate school makes sense for you. Graduate school is, first of all, a time commitment. Although there are Master’s degree programs that can be finished in one year, most Master’s degree programs take two years to complete. Ph.D. programs generally take a minimum of five years. Given such time commitments, do thorough research, ensuring as much as possible that this time commitment will be taking you in a direction you want to go.
Career possibilities with a bachelor’s degree
Think about the sort of career in which you envision yourself. There are some careers that are available to students with a bachelor’s degree. As a psychology major, you are learning a myriad of skills, including critical thinking skills, research methods, and writing. These are skills that you can apply to a range of jobs, including community relations officer and advertising copywriter. For more information on these, and other, jobs, click here.
Career possibilities with a graduate degree
If you find that you will need graduate training to pursue your career of interest, the first decision to make is what sort of graduate training you need. The broadest distinction is in terms of research or application training.
Within the field of application, there are several different options, including:
- Applied behavior analysis: generally used to help clients who are diagnosed with developmental disabilities, such as mental retardation and autism. For more information click here.
- Clinical psychology: generally provide help to those who suffer from mental illness. For more information click here.
- Counseling psychology: generally provide advice and help to people in need. For more information click here.
- Mental health counseling: with options for training in creative arts therapy, marriage and family therapy, mental health counseling, and psychoanalysis. For more information click here.
- Social work: working with people who are in a crisis or stress-filled situation. For more information click here.
In the field of research, there are also several options, including:
- Abnormal psychology: generally focused on developing an understanding of how and why abnormal development and behavior occurs, and how to help rectify it. For more information click here.
- Cognitive psychology: generally focused on developing an understanding of cognitive processes, including memory and language. For more information click here.
- Developmental psychology: generally focused on developing an understanding of both normative and non-normative developmental processes. For more information click here.
- Evolutionary psychology: generally focused on developing an understanding of the evolutionary processes that are relevant to the behavior, motivation, and cognition of humans and other animals. For more information click here.
- Health psychology: generally focused on the study of how ideas and findings from psychology can be applied to medical settings. For more information click here.
- Industrial organizational: generally focused on the study of how ideas and findings from psychology can be applied to the workplace. For more information click here.
- Psychology and the law: has a number of different sub-disciplines devoted to applying knowledge and methods from psychology to the context of criminals and the legal system. For more information click here.
- Learning and memory: generally focused on the study of how humans and animals process and remember incoming information. For more information click here.
- Neuroscience: generally focused on the study of the link between biology and behavior. For more information click here.
- Perception: generally focused on developing an understanding of the mechanisms behind how people learn about and perceive the world. For more information click here.
- Psychometrics: generally focused on the study of measurement, research, and statistics. For more information click here.
- Social psychology: generally focused on developing an understanding of how people both affect, and are affected by, the actual and imagined presence of others. For more information click here.
Believe it or not, this is just a brief listing of the myriad of fields in psychology! For more information about even more fields, click here.
Graduate school:
Once you have made the decision to pursue graduate training, the next thing is to find a graduate program that matches with your interests, and to get accepted into that program. Remember, you should pick the program based on what it has to offer you, rather than its geographical location. This is the time in your life when you can try out a new area of the country – or of the world!
A good starting place is to look at the schools where the people with whom you would like to work are located. If you have read an interesting journal article for a class – or for fun! – take a look at where the author of that article is. Additionally, do your homework on what different programs can offer in terms of education and training. For more information click here.
Next, the thing to do is to get accepted into the schools you want! To do this, in addition to doing well in courses and gaining relevant experience, for most programs you also need to do well on the GRE. See these pages for more information on this, and on the process of applying to graduate school:
otel.uis.edu/
www.psychgrad.org/
www.ets.org
