Hi! I just found your blog and I'm loving your posts. As a Year 10 student I'm already meant to know what I want to do for my future and yet I don't even know what I'm doing in 24 hours. I was thinking bout going into Psychology and I was wondering if you could tell me about what you do and what it's like? Thanks xx
Hello! First of all, thank you for following and I’m glad you like my posts!
Now, about Psychology, when I got into Uni I really had no idea about what really implied studying psychology other than helping people. Over the past year and a half I can tell you that I fell in love with my career, it is one of the most beautiful careers in Humanities. In my case, I learned the basics the first year, the third semester is the beginning of understating human behavior and interview procedures, the fourth semester (which I am currently in) is learning about different mental disorders (tbh the most exciting part for me) I highly recommend to read a bit of the DSM-V just to get a general idea.
At my university, they give us the opportunity to choose some certificates depending on what area would you like to work, along the classes that imply those certificates we have one or two regular classes, like, psychological tests, clinical diagnostic, criminology (really excited for this one), and professional ethic.
Of course the classes will vary depending on your college/university but they will most certainly teach you the basics of Psychology, still, never settle for the content they teach you at school, always have hunger to know more, investigate, read, watch documental, even movies or series!
It sounds really interesting and exciting all this I’m writing, but once you are out there, it can get a bit scary and intimidating when treating a patient (if you’d like to work as a therapist) -for that you’ll need a masters degree or doctorate- but you’ll definitely won’t be alone through the treatment, there will (and must be) someone supervising your cases.
I had the experience of working at a public elementary school, I can tell you that it was really touching working with kids but also heartbreaking knowing that some of them didn’t even know how to read or write, working with kids imply a lot of things, you have to get the room teacher to work with you along with their parents and even some of them won’t take much interest and all we can do is just work with them while they are at school and even then we sometimes are limited by time. It also requires a lot of patience. I love kids but having the experience of working with them made me realize that I wouldn’t be efficient enough in the educational area focused on kids.
Having said all this, if you are thinking on studying Psychology, I’d tell you that it is definitely a really exciting yet stressful career, but I, at least, am loving it so far.
Sorry if this got a bit long, but I wanted to explain myself well c: