Psychology degrees - what is it like ??

Thinking of swapping courses from maths to psychology but quite frankly I have no idea what you do on a psychology course

I assume you write tonnes of essays but what sorta essays are they like are you meant to argue about theories or debate things or simply regurgitate stuff from books and journals ?

My subject has no essays so I never write anything lol so I'm pretty clueless as to what these degrees are like ?

Also what is the difference between Alevel and degree level psychology ?

Thinking of swapping courses from maths to psychology but quite frankly I have no idea what you do on a psychology course

I assume you write tonnes of essays but what sorta essays are they like are you meant to argue about theories or debate things or simply regurgitate stuff from books and journals ?

My subject has no essays so I never write anything lol so I'm pretty clueless as to what these degrees are like ?

Also what is the difference between Alevel and degree level psychology ?

https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1200984

For my degree, we mostly wrote essays during term.

What you are given at university level is simply an essay question, a suggesting reading list, and most times you will get a few lectures on the essay topic (although sometimes essays will be due before lectures).

The main skill is (i) reading a lot, quickly, (b) doing your own search for relevant materials (usually journal articles, sometimes you will look at textbooks, but you cannot really just rely on textbooks for university essays), (c) finding an interesting/novel/critical approach to answer an essay.

In contrast to maths, most of the content will be quite simple to understand, so instead of spending your time trying to get your head around some concept, your normally spending your time trying to find evidence in journals/booka to build an argument in an essay. Then at exam time you try and remember your main arguments and studies are regurgitate this out.

Most psychology courses will have some practical elements where you will gather and analyse data from experiments and write up lab reports.

Thank you for the advice

Also can I ask what is your timetable like in terms of number of contact hours and the sort of contact you have

E.g lectures, seminars, tutorials and what is the difference between them cause my course doesn't have seminars for instance so I don't exactly know what happens in them ?

Thanks

Stick with maths you probs won't get a job with psychology

You should probably be more concerned about whether you like psychology enough in order to study it.... i did a dual honours degree so my timetable wouldn't be very informative! I did something like an essay a week (with a meeting after each essay), plus 1/2 lab reports a term, and i didn't go to any lectures in third year. You can easily find these things out if you email the university though.

It seems interesting enough and tbh anything compared to maths is interesting cause maths is just so abstract and pointless tbqh whereas psychology is actually real world stuff that you can relate to ; I can't relate to complex numbers ffs

Well see idk cause you look at all these grad schemes and they just say any subject with a 2:1 ... and tbh I'm considering stuff like teaching or like business like not finance things that people typically go into from maths I'm really not interested

Thinking of swapping courses from maths to psychology but quite frankly I have no idea what you do on a psychology course

I assume you write tonnes of essays but what sorta essays are they like are you meant to argue about theories or debate things or simply regurgitate stuff from books and journals ?

My subject has no essays so I never write anything lol so I'm pretty clueless as to what these degrees are like ?

Also what is the difference between Alevel and degree level psychology ?

Well you could do applied maths - things like physics, statistics, engineering, etc which would be a bit more similar to what your used to. Are you already in uni?

Yeah, quite a lot of essays but also lab reports and basic statistics (which should be fine for a mathematician).

You are supposed to argue about theories and evidence in essays, although weaker students tend to regurgitate from books.

There should be a lot of independent research from journals.

A level psychology is much more about memorization of particular examples and studies. There's little emphasis on understanding or critically analyzing whether information is any good or not (and a lot in psychology is not).

I would highly recommend not switching to a psychology degree though. Maths is much more employable. In fact, many of the best psychologists I know came from maths/physics/engineering backgrounds.

Your last line makes me think I should be doing a psychology degree then ; how would you become a psychology from doing a maths degree lol

Usually after completing their first degree, a Masters in psychology, or neuroscience, or information/computer science, and from there a PhD in the scientific end of psychology.

Oh really so you could do a masters in psychology with a maths degree ? Seems a bit unlikely like seeing as most maths students despise writing essays

As chazwomaq says, can do a research masters/phd in psychology without a psychology undergraduate degree, although you may find it quite tough if you have never done university level essay writing and reserarch before. To become a practicing psychologist, you need to have a BPS accredited psychology degree or postgraduate conversion course, then you need to more postgraduate study and training (see http://careers.bps.org.uk/ ).

I know Newcastle University (and maybe others) have a specific program for people with engineering or maths backgrounds to do funded Masters+Phds in neuroscience. Might be worth a look.

Thanks for the advice very useful aha

What did you decide?