One possibility that may exist in some families is that the parents stretch their budgets to pay for the kid’s college, but expect some financial support from the kid later (perhaps because the kid’s college cost them their retirement money). Such parents may have a greater interest in the kid’s career financial prospects than otherwise. Obviously, such financial entanglements have a greater potential for family conflict in the future, compared to the situation where the parents and kid do not depend on each other financially after the kid graduates from college.
They were very mistaken to have done so. At leas 75% of students change their major at least once. https://dus.psu.edu/mentor/2013/06/disconnect-choosing-major/
And it’s not just college. People change their minds throughout life. Change careers. Move to a different part of the country. Get divorced. Decide to have three kids instead of two. Etc.
I might get roasted for this since I posted a similar thread about my daughter who wanted to pursue photography (she has since become uber focused on biology and health related professions so…)
A BS or BA in psych does not play you into major employment opportunities when you graduate. You really have no tangible skills to hop into the job market. Even with a graduate degree, it can be a struggle in counseling due to poor health insurance reimbursement for mental health issues and the fact that a lot of counseling is private pay. I have several friends who have grad psych degrees and they definitely face career challenges. Some are doing well, but some will say it has not been a road paved with opportunity.
So that leads you with trying to turn your psych passion into a tangible employment opportunity. You need to spend some time in the psych department and with university career counseling. You mentioned school counseling? GREAT. I think you would need a BS in education (you could minor in psych) and then a grad degree in school counseling. Have you considered being a psych RN? Much broader career opportunities with the ability to one day be a psych NP (GREAT $$$…colleague Psych NP friends of mine are doing well with average starting salaries of $120-140K).
You are very smart to recognize you hate CS and to realize you want to do something else. Life is wayyy too short to do something you hate! Now turn that awareness into tangible opportunities. Do some research. Find a path that tends to lead to solid employment and you will be on your way!
Do a study on the job prospects and present it to your parents as a proof that you will be able to support yourself and be financially independent.
How many psych courses have you taken? One in high school and one in college? I would suggest you fit a couple more psych classes into your schedule and become more certain of your passion. Lay low on the arguments with your parents until you have some great grades in psych classes to back up your passion. Interact with your college’s psych profs and with your career center to search for possible internships that would help you gain real life experience in this field.
Is it possible for you to make CS a minor? Ask about cs courses that would be of some value in the psych world. You can soften the blow to your parents by telling them you will take classes in both cs and psych. If your cs grades are very low, it may make it impossible to continue with a CS minor and still maintain the GPA you will need to get into grad school. At that point, show your parents your grades. Let them see the wide gap between your pysch and your cs grades.
It would help you to speak with contacts working in pysch in different settings. Ask about the daily grind of what they do, what they like/dislike. Find out what the jobs entail and think about whether you can picture yourself in those settings.
my grades in cs are quite low and math is a struggle for me, i can probably pull of 2 semesters but that is about it, geology or marketing would be my backup, i just really hate computer science, im afraid to tell my parents i hate CS
2 semesters of calculus to clarify
I was going to say that an undergrad degree in psych can be highly employable if you add stats and CS/IT courses along with your major and get some relevant internships. However, it sounds like you aren’t a quantitative person. I agree that the first semester of freshman year is too early to decide on a new major. Take a few classes in other fields and then decide.
I am actually currently a sophmore in College.I took one semester of Computer science, precaculus and psychology . I am currently in Calculus I and Geology. I will not be able to retake Computer Science until second semester sophomore year meaning that the earliest i can change major will be First Semester Junior Year. By that time I will have taken CS 120 twice, Calculus 1 and 2, precalclus and all the GE’s for Computer Science, I believe that will be too many credits wasted even though some GEs might be the same
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Do you know how much extra school will be required to end up where you want to be? Your parents may be afraid of grad school. I have a friend who makes a very solid income as a pediatric psychologist…but she has $250,000 in student loans. She can make the payments reasonably comfortably and isn’t sorry, but if MY kid wanted to go that route I’d hyperventilate at the very least.
This right here is the crux of the problem. You are anxious and worried about how our parents will react.
Since you are interested in psychology, here’s an exercise used in CBT: What do you think will happen when you tell your parents? What’s the worst that could happen? Will they disown you? No. Will they beat you? No. Will they cut you of financially? Probably not. Will they be disappointed in you? Maybe, but you can work through that. What’s the best that can happen? They can understand and be supportive. They may be disappointed for a day, but them come around and be supportive. They may not understand, but will accept it. (I gave you possible answers to the questions, but you should think of your own answers, which will give you insight into your anxiety about it and help you address it.)
My recommendation: Go to your college counseling center and talk it out with one of the trained therapists there. It will be very helpful.
There’s different approaches to CS. It sounds like you’re taking CS via the engineering college route, which can be pretty rigorous in terms of requiring math. Some schools offer CS via a liberal arts route (eg UCLA, Carnegie Mellon) where you get a more multidisciplinary approach (and less math!). You might want to explore those avenues.
At Carnegie Mellon I did CS via the philosophy department in a degree called Logic & Computation. I was able to craft a major that focused on AI and was a combination of CS, psychology, and philosophy. A lot of schools also offer minors in CS, which you could combine with psychology and avoid a lot of the math.
There’s a lot of options out there to explore. Look around a bit before ruling out CS. Maybe CS at your current school might not work, but you might find a CS track at another school that looks attractive.
I am not sure where math is used in CS. I have been in IT for over 30 years, writing software and never used math in either college or work. I have been in engineering (EE) prior to switching to CS, and yes, engineering require lots of math, you need a good background. CS is easy, that is if you approach it as a game, where you better win all the time, machine cannot come up a winner. I never went to any top UG, local college was absolutely fine for all my 9 jobs with great pay and benefits.
You need to really think about and have an answer to the question,“what will you do with your psych degree if you decide not to go on to grad school?” It can and does happen. I majored in psychology and loved all 4 years of college. I had every intention of going to grad school, but then I decided I was done…tired of being in school, and I never went on to grad school. Just something to think about.
I majored in psych and then went to law school. That is not uncommon – in my experience. It’s a fine major and does not mean you would be limited to grad school. It can lead very naturally to careers in advertising, human relations, etc., etc., etc. You need a heart-to-heart talk with your parents.
We have a young family friend who majored in psych and philosophy and now has a fine job at a major computing firm. They specifically did NOT want her to have CS background, but she does quality control and testing of databases and tech documentation. The logic courses served her quite well.
Psych and a CS minor could yield some very interesting jobs in the cybersecurity, intel, etc. What made you interested in a CS major? Perhaps if you can identify those pieces, you can find other majors that share those same characteristics.
Ugh, this is a pet peeve of mine. I was a psychology major in college. I even got a PhD in it. I work at a household name technology company as a user experience researcher and I make a very nice salary. You can certainly get a job with a degree in psychology, especially if you want graduate school. But even if you don’t go to graduate school, most psychology majors are employed and most of them make middle-class salaries.
I also hate when parents (and students) think a certain major is a golden ticket to jobs and money. Computer science isn’t what gets you paid; knowing how to actually perform computer science on the job is what makes you money. You have to be at least semi-interested in it to do well enough in class. A CS major who is terrible at coding or analysis or whatnot is not going to get the best jobs that pay the good money.
I agree that you need to level with your parents. Do some Internet research and present them with some actual hard facts, such as the fact that [the unemployment rate for recently graduated computer science majors (8.7%) is not that much lower than that of psychology majors (9.2%](Box) - and they are exactly the same for graduate degree holders in both fields.) Industrial-organizational psychology [is one of the fastest growing fields in the country](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm) and they average over $80K a year. (I just got an unsolicited contact today from a different “household name” tech company for a sr. research scientist position that’s essentially an I/O psych position. A few months back I had a couple interviews at a third “household name” tech company for what was essentially an I/O position. My PhD is not in I/O psychology - and you don’t even need a PhD to do it; you can do it with a master’s.) Market research is another field that very much targets psychology majors and they average over $60K a year with projected growth much faster than average.
Do whatever brand of this research makes sense for you and what you really want to do - but psychology, especially behavioral economics, consumer psychology, I/O psychology, human-computer interaction/user experience research, can be a very useful and employable field.
NOW. I will say that CS can be really helpful in a psychology career IF you like it. The above-mentioned human-computer interaction field (HCI) really values people who know how to conduct social science research with human beings but also know how to pull large amounts of already data and analyze it to find patterns, especially since tech firms are just randomly collecting big data and have no idea what to do with it. Even without going into HCI, knowing SQL, Hadoop, some basic coding and statistical analysis is really useful for a psych major. BUT you can take classes on the side without majoring in it.
So, instead of telling your parents that it’s your passion and you don’t care about the money (because they know that will only be true for so long - and trust me, once you get to your mid-20s you will care a whole lot more about employability and earning power)
- acknowledge their concerns
- address them with research
- make an argument that explicitly takes those concerns into account and debunks them, and
- potentially propose a compromise (you minor in or take a few classes in CS to learn to code).
My son went through the EXACT same issue as you. He was a CS major - that’s all he ever wanted to do was work with computers, but right before he had to declare his major, he called us up and said, “I don’t want to major in CS. I love psychology.” We were shocked! And I have to be honest, I was really worried because CS majors make A LOT of money and psychology majors, well, don’t. But he was adamant that he did not want a job in CS, and his passion was psychology so although I was worried and shocked, we went along with it. He didn’t have a specific plan, but he had a general idea of what he was interested in.
Once he declared his major as Psych (and his minor as CS since he had already put so much work into it), new opportunities started to open up for him. He was asked to be a research assistant by 2 different professors at his college, as well as 1 from another college close by. He was also accepted into a prestigious internship at NYU over the summer. Know why? Because he was unique in that he was a Psych major with a CS background. There aren’t many of them out there, and they’re seen as a little bit like gods. Psychologists need computer programs to run research, and they need someone to organize all the data so someone with a background in psych and CS are like a 2-fer!
So my advice to you would be to let your parents know that you want to be a psych major, but have a plan. Do some research as others have suggested and be educated about what you’re talking about when you present the information to your parents so they don’t panic. Psych majors are not highly sought after, I’m afraid, so you’ll need to figure out how to make yourself more marketable. My son decided to do a double major in Psych and CS, but he’s very good at CS and math. Ultimately, he wants to go into research so he’ll need a PhD. In order to get into grad school, internships and lab work are very important so make sure you’re actively looking for opportunities.
Don’t be afraid to tell your parents. Just be sure you have a plan and a direction that will be marketable and sensible. Talk to professors and other professionals that are actively in the areas that you want to study to see what direction you should take.
My son will definitely not be coming out of college making $95,000 a year like his friend who’s a CS major (yes, they really make that much). But at least he’s doing something that he really enjoys and is extremely interested in pursuing. He’s lucky in the fact that he’s interested in more of the neuroscience aspects of psychology since that’s more specialized and may be more lucrative (fingers crossed). Because he understands CS, he sees the brain as a living computer, and it fascinates him.
Follow your passion and see where it takes you. Just be smart about it. Good luck!
Go to your college job placement office and discuss Psych majors with them. Ask where the psych majors from your university have been getting jobs or what grad programs they are in from the last few years. See if there are any combination psych major/ “X” minors that seem to help students get a job. See what internships psych majors are getting, too. As an aside, one of D1’s college classmates who was a psych major had an internship with the Nielsen rating company, then got a perm job there after graduation. There are some ways to use that major outside a psych practice.