Should I get a Ph.D. or Psy.D. in psychology?

Kevin Yabes askes "What are your thoughts on PhD versus PsyD and clinical versus counseling psychology. The first thing you need to ask yourself is do you even need a doctorate in psychology field? If the most important thing you want to do is psychotherapy then there are other paths available to you at the masters level that might take a lot less time and cost a lot less money and run up a lot less student debt. The reason I decided to pursue a doctorate in psychology is I really really loved psychology and I wasn't sure if I wanted to just focus on psychotherapy or if I wanted to do other things like training and education and program development and a lot of things that might be just a little bit easier with a doctorate. The next question is what you want to do as a psychologist? If you're someone who's interested primarily going into research and if you're also someone who is not going into a health service field or patient therapy treatment field you're going to get a Ph.D...That's it. Done deal. If you're interested in clinical / counseling and treatment then that it gets a little complicated. Ph.D. is the older degree and it's the model's supposed to be clinical scientists where you do get exposure to treatments but also the research behind them. The PsyD is a newer degree and it's supposed to be modeled more around like an M.D. where it's just focused on understanding the practice of psychology. Here's the thing. It doesn't matter too much unless you're at the extremes. If you really just want to do research in clinical psychology like if you really just want to understand OCD or eating disorders or study treatments but not necessarily want to be practicing how to treat those things or applying those treatments then definitely focus on a Ph.D. and if you really really really just want to focus on practice at the doctorate level as a psychologist then maybe you do want to pursue Psy.D. I've seen people in the research world who have Ph.Ds. and Psy.D.s. I've seen people in the practice world who have Psy.D.s and Ph.D. What tends to matter much more is the quality of your training and the experiences you're getting. The number one thing you want to look at is whether or not the program you're applying to is accredited. What accreditation does is it gives you set standards that you can expect in your graduate training. Next I want you to focus on the cost and debt. A lot of people end up taking loans just to be able to afford everything that goes along with graduate school. I'm going to display the data right now about how common it is to have debt in graduate school and psychology and I wish I'd thought about that more before I went into grad school because I came out with about $120,000 in debt. And that's from a program where I got assistantship and I got help getting through graduate school. The next thing you want to focus on is a match between the interests of the program what they focus on their strengths and what you want to study what you want to learn what you want to become an expert at. I worked on my program's admissions committee in graduate school and that's the number one thing we looked at is most people had a good GPA. Most people had great letters of recommendation. They had interesting experiences but did they have that match? Finally what are people doing when they graduate from this program? What type of jobs do they have. Do their work in hospitals, private practice, program development, teaching, academia what kind of stuff are people doing and does this match what you want to do? If you're unsure about all of this about where you want to focus what you want to be doing then please please please ask a psychologist. Ask your faculty. Find someone through Psy Chi or even find a psychologist in your local community who is doing the kind of stuff you want to do and ask them if you can just meet with them for a few minutes or if you can have a short phone call and ask them what it's like. What an average day in their job is like. Ask them what their favorite parts of the job are what are the stressful parts. Ask them for their recommendations on graduate programs. That is the best way to figure all of this stuff out. Special thanks to Kevin for submitting this question. If you want to see your question answered in a future video leave a comment below or submit it on social media with the hashtag #ThePsychShowQA and I might just answer it on a future episode. If you like this video give it a thumbs up. Be sure to subscribe to get more easy to understand psychology videos. And thank you again for

Channel: Doctor Ali Mattu

Views: 191,804

Keywords: psychology, ali mattu, the psych show, clinical psychology (field of study), clinical psychology, grad school, graduate school, psychology major, clinical psychology phd, clinical psychology graduate school, clinical psychology psyd, clinical psychology student, grad school application, grad school advice, graduate school admissions, graduate school psychology, psychology phd psyd, doctor of psychology (degree), psychology phd vs psyd

Id: rBuDogUBFgo

Length: 5min 0sec (300 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 31 2018