Hi there. I’m a junior at Umich starting the search for grad schools and. Its exhausting because I have no idea where to start and a lot of places have a form of but not all that I’m looking for. I’m looking for grad school programs that focus either in abnormal behavior (like psychopaths, antisocial personality disorder/behaviors, violence) and/or human rights violations, diplomacy, etc). It would be amazing if I could find a way to combine the two.
I love Umich so I’m hopeful that I can find a school like it. It would nice to find a prestigious program in the UK, but I should also have some US safety schools. Here’s some info that may help.
GPA: 3.6/4
Attained honors 3 of the 4 semesters I’ve completed
Studied Abroad: 1 month in Japan
Research: No research experience yet
Positions of leadership: Secretary of a student org
I’d suggest that if you aren’t yet sure what you want to study, then it may be too early for you to be looking for programs. It’s exhausting, and you likely have no idea where to start, because your net is too wide. Human rights/diplomacy/international studies and abnormal psychology are two very different fields.* Even though psychology has some overlap with human rights & diplomacy, that’s usually not on the clinical/abnormal side. (There’s more touching in the middle, though - violence and human rights/diplomacy can be related. Or you could work in human rights for people with mental health disabilities.)
Graduate school is not like undergrad; generally, people don’t seriously begin putting together a list of programs until the summer before their senior year at the earliest. By the time you finish your sophomore year of college, you may have only just begun to dive into the upper-level classes in your major - usually, you haven’t been exposed to enough in the field yet to make a determination what you want to study.
I’d advise you to spend your junior year narrowing down your area of focus. What kind of career do you want, and what graduate degree (if any) do you need to succeed in that career? What do you want to study?
If you really want to study both, you might consider doing a joint master’s program at a school that will let you do that - but it will take longer than a regular master’s.
*However, one way I will say you can combine these is international psychology. It’s not a widely known field, but a friend of mine from graduate school (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anjhula_Mya_Bais) got her PhD in international psychology and parlayed that into being the president of Amnesty International Malaysia.
“if you aren’t yet sure what you want to study, then it may be too early for you to be looking for programs.”
This is exactly what I was thinking.
You might want to work for a year or two, and then apply for master’s programs. At least when I was a master’s student, there were a LOT of students, probably a large majority, who had work experience between when they got their bachelor’s and when they started their master’s.