Psychology and Counselling

Hi, I’m going to be studying Psychology with Counselling at the Open University this October. Is there any pre-reading or research that I should be doing? It would be nice to know some people who study there/are going to be studying that course or just at the OU in general.
Any help is greatly appreciated
Amy

Hi!

I graduated from this course last year. I absolutely loved it, so I really hope you do too!

There are some tasters from some of the psychology modules on Open Learn. You can sign up and look at them for free here: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/ - this is a good way to get a taste of the topics and the OU style of learning. There is also a course on there about preparing for undergraduate study, which could be useful.

Alison also has a few good free psychology courses: https://alison.com/ - a good insight into the kinds of topics you will study during your course.

The counselling side only makes up quite a small part of the degree, with psychology being the main bulk (that's how they get their BPS accreditation). For this part, though, I would read about:

Person-Centred Therapy & Carl Rogers
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
Psychodynamic Therapy
Basic counselling skills
BACP Ethical Framework

There are videos on YouTube, which are quite useful, or a quick Google search will bring up loads of results.

I hope you enjoy the course as much as I did!

Loren

Hi, thanks so much for your reply! Did you study full time? I’m thinking about studying part time for the first year until I get the hang of things and then I’ll see how I feel after that.