Graduate Psychology Degrees

For many professions today, it takes a great deal of schooling and training to even get your foot into the door. One of those professions is psychology and if you want to be a real professional, you have to get a lengthy, difficult, and expensive graduate degree in the field. That is not meant to make it sound scary or unrealistic. For people who are schooled and interested in the field, it's a very attainable goal. The fact of the matter is that getting a graduate degree in psychology is a huge commitment that requires both intense study and a serious amount of time. For those who are dedicated and ready, it also requires a number of choices. If you have done any research whatsoever on the psychology field, then you know all about the different areas of study that you have to choose from. The first big choice, of course, is between a standard PhD program and a PsyD program. These programs have their differences, and it all comes down to what you want to do once you get into the field. This is one of the things that makes psychology a difficult field to break into. For doctors or lawyers, many of the big choices can be made once you have completed a year of professional school. If you are aiming to be a psychologist, then you better be ready to make this choice up front. It really comes down to whether or not you want to be a clinic psychologist or a counseling psychologist. The differences here are staggering, and they require a different skill set and personality. For those people who drew their motivation for psychology from watching movies or seeing psychologists on television, then counseling psychology is probably the better degree choice. This is a field which is nice for people who want to be able to have a little bit more freedom and flexibility. Though there are some basics that you have to stick to, this is the portion of the field where you get to make some of your own determinations on treatment methods and analysis. In general, this is a field where you get more personal, one on one interaction with different patients, too. This requires care and it requires the psychologist to have a much more affable personality. One of the other options is getting your clinical psychology degree. A clinical psychologist will work much more with methods and they will spend much more time researching. There are advantages to this for people who really love to be working on big projects and trying to come up with large conclusions about the way that people act. The clinical psychologist will be working with tested, proven methods and he or she will be more process-based. You could also choose to go the route of developmental psychology, wherein you study how folks progress through their lifespan. This is something that people will study if they want to work with developing young adults or something of the like. No matter which route you choose, it is important to know if you are ready to invest the time and money into one of these programs. With four to six years required for a degree, you need to know that you're heading in the right direction, so a lot of self searching and self evaluation is required before you ever step into a difficult graduate program.

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