SGPsychStud: Is Psychology useful at all?

You may hear some of your friends say that what they learnt in university and earlier years of school to be not useful in work at all. However, is it the same for psychology? Will everything (if not, some) of what you learn in your psychology degrees to be not useful when you go out to work?

Now, the main questions:
Can we use what we study? Can we even use them in our daily lives?
Psychology courses tend to be all-rounder courses; that is why it seems like you have to learn about a lot of things, from statistics to life and death to pretty much everything...But do you need so much things?? Answer: Yes. Psychological programs are actually based on a model (see this post), that is supposed to teach you to become a psychologist, like all other courses where engineering and IT programs teach you to be engineers and IT people. However, this model is a very huge model, because there are myriad reasons for why your clients may come to you, hence you are "supposed" to have all the answers. (Wow. That sounds like someone we all know whose name starts with G, so let's not go there.) This is the reason why you will have to learn about almost everything. But the questions is will we use them?

You will definitely use that knowledge in your jobs, but by then it will become a question of "Are you able to remember what you learn and apply it?" The wide range of subjects that you study is also partially the reason for the huge range of jobs you might get.

You may not notice that yet; but as you do the program and go through your years of training in psychology, you might see some changes in you. Some people who I have spoken to have told me that people who study psychology tends to think and speak differently. "Huh?? I don't feel much difference." That's our normal response. However, there might be some subtle changes in you.

As we all know, the way you think may actually affect the way you behave. I think one of the main changes would be that you might get used to being rational in your thinking, taking up different perspectives and hypotheses when discussing a topic or issue. This is part of the critical thinking training that you go through during your psychological programs. And with this training, you may tend to look at the world and things a bit differently from before you start the program. So is this useful?

(I used to joke with my classmates that male psychology students are better boyfriends, because they learn about the other sex and the differences about males and females. And because they are able to think critically, they "might" be able to take up the female perspectives and the way that females think, hence making them more sensitive to the subtle changes in the girl's moods and feelings. What do you think, everyone?)

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