<p>If you are this undecided, then you shouldn’t go to graduate school at all - not right now. You should do some more research and informational interviewing and find out more about these fields. While they are related, they are very different from each other and you will be doing different things in your day to day life. You may even try to get a job within one of the fields - like intern at a juvenile justice center, become a research coordinator for a psychology lab that does forensic research, or get a paralegal certificate and start working in lawyers’ offices.</p>
<p>As for your questions:</p>
<p>Forget the “doctor” title. It’s not all that important. What’s important is that you can do what you are passionate about and that you are appropriately compensated for that.</p>
<p>If you want to do counseling, there are a few options. You can get an MA in mental health counseling and get licensed as an LPC, but you actually may find difficulty getting reimbursed for your services and find yourself low-paid, and may find difficulty getting into the justice system (I’m not sure, this is all second-hand). You can also get an MSW and get licensed as a clinical social worker (LCSW) and do work within the justice system; there’s a high demand for social workers in that system. Either of those options will do enough to do counseling with victims, but the MSW will have more versatility. I have a friend with an MSW who worked with the CASA program as an intern during her MSW.</p>
<p>Personally, I wouldn’t recommend the PsyD (they are four years plus an internship and they are rarely funded, so they are very expensive). But it is a possibility if you want to do clinical work. However, there are scientist-practitioner programs in clinical psychology that lead to a PhD and are funded. In many of these programs, while you do have to learn research skills, most students plan a practical career. And realize that research is related to clinical practice and vice versa. Everything we know about what works in clinical practice is because we’ve done research on it, so going to a scientist-practitioner program will help you learn to be a responsible consumer of research. Plus they’re usually funded.</p>
<p>So that fourth option is doing a PhD in counseling or clinical psychology (at an APA-accredited program). That will take you ~6 years (5 years of the program + 1 year of internship). This will give you the greatest autonomy as far as setting up a private practice and getting into the systems; there’s a pretty high demand for psychologists with the feds and especially in veterans’ affairs.</p>
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<p>Most doctorates in psychology and law (PhD/JD programs) are research oriented and won’t get you to your goal. Besides, people with JDs and PhDs typically don’t do both counseling and legal work - they generally select one, and the latter degree informs the former. Honestly unless you want to teach at a law school I don’t see the point of JD/PhD programs. These programs are also NOT four years - they tend to be one year shorter than they would doing them separately, which means they can take anywhere from 7 to 10 years.</p>
<p>Another option would be a JD/MSW. That would take you four years, and you would have the option of being either a lawyer or a social worker. But probably not a professor. Professors do lots of research, and if you wanted to be a law professor you’d have to go to a very very top tier law school and do lots of legal research in law school.</p>
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<p>Law is completely different. Lawyers don’t counsel in the mental health sense, but you would do the legal work to help bring justice to those who are wrongfully convicted. You could also represent kids who have been sexually abused. However, I think it’s prosecutors who do that work, and you may find yourself in a bind. What if you have to prosecute someone you don’t think is guilty? What if you find yourself prosecuting someone who you think or know is a victim of a sexual assault, and who’s crime is related to that assault (such as injuring or killing their attacker or abuser)? Answering these questions was what made me decide not to go into law school myself - I originally wanted to be a prosecuting attorney. But some people are okay with that, or feel that the benefits outweigh the cons.</p>
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<p>Last note - you actually don’t have to make all of your decisions at once. If you get an MA or MSW you can go back for a PhD or a JD later. Or if you get a JD or PhD, you can get an MSW later. It will really only add an extra year - most combined programs only shave off a year anyway.</p>
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<p>So here’s the part where we get into my opinions on your options.</p>
<p>It sounds like you are really unsure, so like I said, your first steps are to do nothing about grad school right now, but do some informational interviewing with people in this field and some more reading about the lifestyles.</p>
<p>From there - I think an MSW is the most versatile and flexible degree option you have. If you get an MSW, you can work within the justice system as a traditional macro-level social worker, or you can get licensed and do clinical work - or you can do both. MSWs often have their own practices. You can go to a public university’s MSW program and still get a decent job (social work isn’t a prestige-driven field like law) so you don’t need to spend a whole lot of money on the MSW. If you are content with counseling with your MSW and a license, then boom, your educational journey is over!</p>
<p>But from there you have a lot of options, too. You can choose to go back and get a PhD in social work or a DSW, which gives you the option to continue counseling and doing macro level work but also research and work as a professor in a school of social work (and other schools, too, like schools of public health). If you want the autonomy and still have a burning desire to be called “doctor”, you could choose to go back and get a PhD in clinical psychology as long as you have the requisite coursework. Or you can do a PhD in social or forensic psychology - like at University of Virginia - and study the psychological underpinnings of false confessions and human memory as expressed in eyewitness testimony. Surprisingly, there aren’t a whole lot of people doing research on this.</p>
<p>The American Psychology-Law Society has a list of recommended programs that combine psychology and law: [AP-LS</a> Graduate Programs](<a href=“http://www.ap-ls.org/education/GraduatePrograms.php]AP-LS”>http://www.ap-ls.org/education/GraduatePrograms.php) Before you pick any of those MA programs, though, I would look very carefully and make sure that they lead to licensure for counseling work (not all of them do - in fact, probably most of them don’t) AND see what placement data is like for students wrt jobs. Stay away from the for-profit programs like Argosy and Alliant. The good clinical programs are at Arizona State, Fordham, John Jay, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Alabama, UArizona, UIC, and maybe Nebraska. Georgetown, Cornell, NCSU, UC-Irvine, UIC, and Minnesota have great non-clinical, research-based programs.</p>
<p>Or let’s say you like counseling all right but what you really want to do is be a lawyer and defend the people that you counsel in court. Then you could return and get a JD and use your social work experience as a lawyer within the system. JDs are typically far more expensive than MSWs and the JD field is very prestige driven, which is why I don’t recommend exploring law school before social work.</p>