Grad school or not? Desperately need advice.

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I never intended to be a clinical psychologist. It's just the major I got into because I hated the material in all the other majors I tried. Oh well, too late now. Graduated.

Col. Jessep: “You want answers?”
Kaffee: “I think I'm entitled.”
Col. Jessep: “You want answers?”
Kaffee: “I want the truth!”
- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104257/quotes
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5j2F4VcBmeo

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The first thing you need to know about academia is that many of its inhabitants have very big egos. This is especially true of the faculty and the upper levels of the administration. Although they are intelligent people, they mistakenly believe they are brilliant at everything. Their arrogance vastly exceeds their true competence.

The second thing you need to understand is the way academia and the great research game works. The goal is to reel in grant money and churn out publications. This does not necessarily involve performing good scientific research. If anything, the system encourages quantity over quality.

At the start of the game in graduate school, you assist your advisor/ mentor with his/ her research. (If his/her research interests happen to be the same as yours, then great. Otherwise, too bad.) Hopefully, this will lead to publications with you listed as a co-author, along with opportunities for you to present some of this research at conferences. If your advisor/ mentor is a “big name” in the field, then some of these publications will be in “major” journals. (“Big names” get all sorts of crap published in “major” journals—the peer-review system is a dismal failure.) These things will help establish you in the field, and will help you obtain a job by the time you graduate—either a teaching and research job, or a pure research job. They will also help you procure your own grant money, and get your own research published. You see, the reviewers will assume that you must be a good researcher because of the research you did with your advisor/ mentor. In short, in academia, as in the rest of life, who you know is more important than what you know.

Keep in mind that graduate schools churn out far more graduates than there are teaching and/ or research jobs available, so competition for those jobs is fierce. In addition, by the time they graduate, some people have had enough of the great game of academia, as well as all of the arrogant pricks who inhabit it. What to do then? Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius wrote a book titled "So What Are You Going to Do with That?", which is basically a career advice book for people in that situation. Although it is an interesting book, I think that it is really only useful for NTs, and perhaps a few high functioning Aspies. I have known people with a bachelors degree in psychology who went to work in finance on Wall Street. I have known people with Ph.D.s in social psychology who have gone on to work at marketing research companies. Here is an article about a guy with a D.Phil. who worked as a management consultant,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/busin ... 88556.html
These are bright, articulate people, who are not on the spectrum.

What I am trying to get at here, is that you may complete a graduate degree only to find yourself in the same boat you are in now, except that you are several years older. In terms of employment prospects, you might be better off completing an associates degree in some sort of technical field for which there is a great demand in the labour market.

Finally, if despite everything I have written, you still want to go to graduate school, there are books which offer useful tips for getting into graduate school and starting a research career. If I recall correctly, the ones I read were
“The Complete Guide to Graduate School Admission: Psychology, Counseling, and Related Professions”, by Patricia Keith-Spiegel and Michael W. Wiederman
and
“A PhD Is Not Enough: A Guide To Survival In Science”, by Peter J. Feibelman.

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Willard: “Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another.”
- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078788/quotes
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzM4D2_uOP0

Last edited by Logan5 on 10 Oct 2009, 1:58 pm, edited 2 times in total.

This would most likely fall under the sub-field of developmental / life-span psychology.

In your original post you mentioned music. I do not know if this would be of interest to you, but there are some people who do research on the “psychology of music”. They are probably in the sub-fields of sensation and perception psychology, and cognitive psychology. (Sometimes these are lumped together under the general label of experimental psychology.)

I had a similar discussion with my wife hoping an advanced degree would help me find work.

Basically, you will be both over and under qualified at the same time.

Employers want experience and a 4 year degree simply means you have an average I.Q. and are trainable unlike the other highschool dropouts. Thats it sadly.

In this economy the employers have the ball and the playground so to speak. If you can find a job being a psychologist it maybe worth perusing but psychologists and counselors are going to be laid off as Obama's stimulus ends and governments begin axing jobs in the field.