During freshman orientation, right before I attended UNCG, I was surprised to hear that not only do many freshman (at UNCG at least) start out with a declared psychology major, but most end up dropping out of the major by their senior year.

As someone who's been passionate about psychology for a long time (probably a little before I could really articulate it) I was a little surprised by both accounts - but it didn't take me long to think of why this might be. On the surface, a psychology major is an easy one - generally, the major requires only a single math and an English class (and sometimes, a biology course is required as well), and lots of different psychology classes throughout the four years.

However, after general psychology, the difficulty of these classes start climbing. Psychology is not strictly a "soft science" - if you plan on going into research in psychology, be prepared to take a lot of math classes. I'm planning to use my degree to become a therapist, but I'm well aware of the fact that I'm still going to be required to take courses in advanced statistics. And of course, that fact that every psychology major quickly learns - you can't do much with a bachelor's degree of psephology. (Unless you're content to take notes on lab rats for your career.) And, perhaps most frustratingly, in order to make a lot of money as a psychologist, you have to spend a lot of money and time - it's mostly PhD level psychologists that have the greatest income.

So it's easy to mistake psychology for an easy and quickly lucrative major. The fact is, it's not. But that doesn't mean there aren't any good or rewarding reasons to get a psychology degree!

First of all, a degree in psychology can be used for a lot of things. Some psychologists work for the government or corporations, and can make a lot of money doing so, such as, psychologists who work with human resource departments to select and train effective employees.

Second of all, a great reason for getting a degree in psychology is because you have a great passion for the science! For me, psychology is so fascniating because our thoughts and ideas make up so much of our lives, and it's exciting that there is a science dedicated to studying the processes behind these. And whether it's research or therapy, the discoveries made about the human mind by us future psychologists will be worth all of the all-nighters.