If you are a psychology major, you have heard these things before and I'm sure you are tired of hearing them said over and over to you.

1. What am I thinking right now?

First off, psychology majors are not psychics. Psychology is the study of human behavior and the science of how the mind works. We are not able to read minds. We cannot tell you what you are thinking, because only you know what you are thinking.

2. You can figure out what’s wrong with me and why I am crazy right?

So everyone has their own personal problems that they have to deal with, but that does not mean that you have a mental illness. Mental illnesses are very serious and there is a list of requirements that need to be met in order to be diagnosed with one. Most likely you are not “crazy,” which is not a term that is used in the field of psychology, but just moments in your life where you have had an increase of emotion.

3. The social sciences are not real sciences.

This statement is not true. The social sciences are as valid as any other science. Science is when you look at facts and find a system within those facts to study the world. By this definition the social sciences are sciences just like biology, chemistry, physics, etc. The social sciences use facts, and systems when they do testing for their experiments, making their findings valid. Psychology uses experiments, and the only difference between it and other fields of science are what they are studying.

4. Oh, so you are going to school to become a therapist?

Not necessarily, there are many different fields in psychology. There are counseling and clinical psychology which are only two possibilities in psychology. Other fields exist such as industrial- organizational psychology, social psychology, personality psychology, sports psychology, educational psychology, and the list goes on. Even if people start out with the intention of being a counselor, a lot of them change their mind and switch their concentration. There are so many opportunities for psychologist to use their skills in different fields rather than psychology, such as business marketing. So there is more than one job for psychology majors out there.

5. Psychology is easy.

Either you took a general psychology course once or you have never taken a psychology course, ever. Psychology is not an easy field to be a part of. It requires a lot of hard work. Whether it is going over the new diagnostic criteria, reading up on the latest findings, or running statistics for your experiment. A lot of time and effort is put in as a psychology major. There are many different types of classes that we have to take to understand our field, in order to be well rounded. We can build off some of the old information that we learned from other classes, but most of the time we are always being introduced to new ideas and theories. And it is all worth it to us.