Some questions from a high school student interested in becoming a psychologist.
This comment was posted to reddit on Apr 12, 2015 at 7:16 am and was deleted within 12 hour(s) and 17 minutes.
Some questions from a high school student interested in becoming a psychologist.
For me it's been amazing, and I would absolutely recommend studying psychology. I'm a graduate clinical psychology student. First the "negative" part of being a psychology student: if you want to get good grades you have to work hard. I've had to sacrifice a lot of my spare time to get where I am today. The positive part is that I've learned so much! I don't mind spending weekends reading research papers, to me it's often more rewarding than watching a tv show or going out to a party. So yeah; you have to work hard, spend a lot of time and efford and enjoy what you're doing.
Mathematics, especially statistics, is an important part of psychology. The reason is quite simple: when you're doing an experiment, you have to be able to show that your findings are not just coincidences. But don't worry; there are a lot of compute programs out there that will help you with this. Understanding mathematics is important, yes, but you will still do find even though you find it hard. I'm pretty bad at maths and I'm doing okay.
Learning another language is alway usefull, and I think being able to speak several languages can make you eligible to work in a broader area than if you just speak one language. But I don't think speaking a range of languages is cruicial. I'd say being able to read, write and speak english is the most important, since most research is international and written in english.
I believe that it's easier to study and work in the field in you're able to accept the fact that there isn't a "single truth". You have to be able to accept that there are a lot of contradicting theories and research findings, and that you can't force someone else to believe what you believe.