“10 Worst Undergraduate Majors”
With baited breath, I click the link and scroll through the ad-infested list of ostensibly “bad” college majors. I’m relieved when I find mine didn’t make the cut. Perhaps, every now and then, having outside confirmation that majoring in psychology wasn’t a mistake helps my sanity... even if it’s from a website as reputable as a Geocities webpage made by a conspiracy nut.
In a number of schools across the United States, psychology programs are among the largest on their respective campus. A discipline that is (arguably) not as analytical or logical as engineering or computer science, or (again, arguably) not as applicable and skill-based as accounting or applied health, we get grouped in with other “laughing stock” majors. What do we even do, anyway? Act as personal therapists to our friends? Diagnose people with mental illnesses as soon as we complete the intro course? Of course, students majoring in psychology will happily tell you about their interest in studying behavior and thought processes, but that’s where people relegate it to a “useless” major - assuming we just really liked that one cool dream interpretation class and decided it was what we wanted to devote our entire life to.
But I’ll let you in on a secret: even though you joke about us wanting to analyze and diagnose your otherwise normal behaviors, not all of us actually want to do that for a living. In human factors psychology (an area of with ties to engineering and computer science occupations), cognitive psychological theories, as well as theories related to perception and sensation, are used to improve performance and fix human error. Industrial and organizational psychology focuses on applying theories in personality and motivation to enhance work environments for businesses and employees. Admittedly, I couldn’t really tell you what specific disorder that character on that one sitcom has, but I can tell you about extraversion and its relation to leadership success.
There’s a reason there are so many psychology majors: psychology is a broad, all-encompassing discipline, and the necessity for understanding how people work will never become obsolete in any occupational field. Psychology is the root to what we study in art, language, politics, and even economics. It gives us a basis to figure out what makes people spenders or savers and why certain goods and marketing strategies appeal to consumers. It is knowing what we perceive and how we translate it to prose or onto a canvas, and why others interpret it the way they do.
Needless to say, any student needs to consider the implications of what they want to study in college. There are programs you are more likely to find work upon graduation with and that won’t require extended education - psychology is not one of them. But that shouldn’t scare anyone away, especially when it does come to the jobs in clinical psychology. We’re beginning to acknowledge more than ever the importance of mental health care and treating mental illness. We need psychologists to study the impact of PTSD in our military personnel and to help us learn what makes certain people so susceptible to destructive behaviors and how to solve it - after all, America’s gun problem isn’t just the guns, right?
I am honestly often afraid to admit to people I’m a psychology major, but in good conscious, there’s absolutely nothing foolish about choosing any major when you’re aware of what it entails and can utilize it to master critical job skills. Moreover, there's no reason to discourage students from pursuing a major as pertinent and relevant as psychology, even if a PsyD isn't on the horizon. Simply put, there are many avenues to success, but the avenue to life satisfaction is understanding how people work, how to communicate with them, and how to help them to be satisfied with their lives, too.
