Old and Inexperienced!

Hi All,

I studied Psychology as an A level, many moons ago, but was dissuaded from pursuing it as a degree/career due to some fairly derogatory comments about its usefulness.

Skip forward 10 years and I am a Chartered Surveyor. I enjoyed my university course and post uni training, but haven't really enjoyed my job since qualifying. I essentially make very wealthy people even wealthier, and for me that lacks meaning and feels hollow. Subsequently, I have really lacked motivation in recent years!

I've signed up to do a Masters in Psychology which was shockingly easy to get on to (takes me back to all those derogatory comments I received back in the day!). However, all I'm looking for at the moment is something to study which I find genuinely interesting which can bring me a little enjoyment and purpose.

I will preface my next few questions by saying - if studying is all I get from this process, I am fine with that. An area which particularly interests me is child protection and working with those who have suffered abuse in childhood. If I were to try and progress this as a career - is this a particularly competitive area? Does anyone have any advice as to how I could get experience and if so, does it need to be related to child protection, as I assume, given it's nature - that would be particularly hard to come by?

On a separate note, I am a little confused by whether I would ever be eligible to apply for a doctorate, given that I will have a masters, but my undergrad is in a totally unrelated subject? I realise you need a wealth of experience to get on to a training programme - but would this particular point stop me?

Any advise would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks!

Reply 1

Interrobang

20

Original post by MMSunny

Hi All,

I studied Psychology as an A level, many moons ago, but was dissuaded from pursuing it as a degree/career due to some fairly derogatory comments about its usefulness.

Skip forward 10 years and I am a Chartered Surveyor. I enjoyed my university course and post uni training, but haven't really enjoyed my job since qualifying. I essentially make very wealthy people even wealthier, and for me that lacks meaning and feels hollow. Subsequently, I have really lacked motivation in recent years!

I've signed up to do a Masters in Psychology which was shockingly easy to get on to (takes me back to all those derogatory comments I received back in the day!). However, all I'm looking for at the moment is something to study which I find genuinely interesting which can bring me a little enjoyment and purpose.

I will preface my next few questions by saying - if studying is all I get from this process, I am fine with that. An area which particularly interests me is child protection and working with those who have suffered abuse in childhood. If I were to try and progress this as a career - is this a particularly competitive area? Does anyone have any advice as to how I could get experience and if so, does it need to be related to child protection, as I assume, given it's nature - that would be particularly hard to come by?

On a separate note, I am a little confused by whether I would ever be eligible to apply for a doctorate, given that I will have a masters, but my undergrad is in a totally unrelated subject? I realise you need a wealth of experience to get on to a training programme - but would this particular point stop me?

Any advise would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks!

If you want to work in child protection, would you not consider studying to be a social worker? Or are you thinking counselling? Either way, you would need to do further study after the psychology masters

If your masters is a psychology conversion course, you would be eligible for the doctorate

Reply 2

Nerol

21

Original post by MMSunny

Hi All,

I studied Psychology as an A level, many moons ago, but was dissuaded from pursuing it as a degree/career due to some fairly derogatory comments about its usefulness.

Skip forward 10 years and I am a Chartered Surveyor. I enjoyed my university course and post uni training, but haven't really enjoyed my job since qualifying. I essentially make very wealthy people even wealthier, and for me that lacks meaning and feels hollow. Subsequently, I have really lacked motivation in recent years!

I've signed up to do a Masters in Psychology which was shockingly easy to get on to (takes me back to all those derogatory comments I received back in the day!). However, all I'm looking for at the moment is something to study which I find genuinely interesting which can bring me a little enjoyment and purpose.

I will preface my next few questions by saying - if studying is all I get from this process, I am fine with that. An area which particularly interests me is child protection and working with those who have suffered abuse in childhood. If I were to try and progress this as a career - is this a particularly competitive area? Does anyone have any advice as to how I could get experience and if so, does it need to be related to child protection, as I assume, given it's nature - that would be particularly hard to come by?

On a separate note, I am a little confused by whether I would ever be eligible to apply for a doctorate, given that I will have a masters, but my undergrad is in a totally unrelated subject? I realise you need a wealth of experience to get on to a training programme - but would this particular point stop me?

Any advise would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks!

Hi!

Regarding your eligibility for a doctorate course, if the MSc is a BPS accredited conversion course, you are fine. If it is something you may be interested in, I would recommend ensuring this is the case.

There are so many ways to go if you want to work therapeutically with children. You could go down a counselling/psychotherapy route and train in that (note that for this, you do not require a degree in psychology). This would involve a minimum of 3 years of study, with further specialisation in working with children.

As mentioned above, you could consider social work instead if child protection is something you are interested in. I don't know as much about this area, but I imagine it would involve significant training also.

You could go down the psychology route, get a BPS accredited MSc then do a further course in child psychology or similar.

It is a very competitive field and will mean many years of gaining experience while you train, but if you have a genuine interest in the area and are willing to do the work, I would say go for it!

I began my psychology studies aged 25. I'm now 31 and still training.. I've gone into counselling now and plan to apply for a Counselling Psychology doctorate at some point.

Hope this helps some. Feel free to message me if you want to know anything else.

Loren

Reply 3

Arden University

17

Original post by MMSunny

Hi All,

I studied Psychology as an A level, many moons ago, but was dissuaded from pursuing it as a degree/career due to some fairly derogatory comments about its usefulness.

Skip forward 10 years and I am a Chartered Surveyor. I enjoyed my university course and post uni training, but haven't really enjoyed my job since qualifying. I essentially make very wealthy people even wealthier, and for me that lacks meaning and feels hollow. Subsequently, I have really lacked motivation in recent years!

I've signed up to do a Masters in Psychology which was shockingly easy to get on to (takes me back to all those derogatory comments I received back in the day!). However, all I'm looking for at the moment is something to study which I find genuinely interesting which can bring me a little enjoyment and purpose.

I will preface my next few questions by saying - if studying is all I get from this process, I am fine with that. An area which particularly interests me is child protection and working with those who have suffered abuse in childhood. If I were to try and progress this as a career - is this a particularly competitive area? Does anyone have any advice as to how I could get experience and if so, does it need to be related to child protection, as I assume, given it's nature - that would be particularly hard to come by?

On a separate note, I am a little confused by whether I would ever be eligible to apply for a doctorate, given that I will have a masters, but my undergrad is in a totally unrelated subject? I realise you need a wealth of experience to get on to a training programme - but would this particular point stop me?

Any advise would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks!

@MMSunny

It sounds like social work might be an interesting career for you, there are a variety of fast track programs available where you can typically study for a year whilst doing some low key work, and their used to be a bursary that went with it. One I saw a few years ago was £18,000. It is worth putting 'fast track social worker' into google.

In terms of progressing beyond your Masters, I have been discussing with a University about PhD level study and I have a Sociology degree but my MSc is in Psychology. It tends to be the grade itself rather than subject matter if you have a really strong MSc grade you should be fine. Some of the more redbrick universities will be stricter on this however - https://www.findaphd.com/ might be useful for you

Marc
Arden University Student Ambassador

Reply 4

JamesManc

15

That sounds more like social work than psychology

Reply 5

marinade

16

Original post by MMSunny

I will preface my next few questions by saying - if studying is all I get from this process, I am fine with that. An area which particularly interests me is child protection and working with those who have suffered abuse in childhood. If I were to try and progress this as a career - is this a particularly competitive area? Does anyone have any advice as to how I could get experience and if so, does it need to be related to child protection, as I assume, given it's nature - that would be particularly hard to come by?

Any advise would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks!

Get on linkedin and try and find the sort of roles that exist in your local authorities, what the job titles are called and so on.

As said by three other people, although this is often regarded more the remit of social work, there are jobs that you can do after a psychology degree but they are normally along the lines of being a support worker or admin/policy around support workers/enforcement/policy. I've known psychology graduates do this.

You asked how could you get experience. As a general comment which is relevant to you is on safeguarding. If you're serious about this you'll need to mug up significantly on safeguarding and learn to use the lingo. Try and see if there is any form of accredited safeguarding training e.g. run by the council for free, or on eventbrite or other providers you can do. I've had to do quite a lot of references for psychology grads that went on to do support worker and they go big to town on safeguarding. One of the reasons is that psychology grads generally know very little about safeguarding even though it's important to them and they often say they know a lot and people usually acquire niche bits in certain jobs (often with training attached). This is an area that's not particularly challenging for you to improve on a low knowledge base and make it slightly easier for you to get voluntary experience in a wide variety of settings.

Old and Inexperienced!

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