Hello everyone,
I’m new to these kinds of forums so please bear with me.
Here’s my current situation,
I’m currently 22 years of age and will be graduating in May with a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from the University of Maryland University College. I’m debating whether or not to go on to Graduate School or to start job searching. I know it’s relatively difficult to find a job related to my major with only a Bachelor’s degree but at the same time, I’m a bit nervous about pursuing a Master’s degree (Preferably in I/O Psych or Human Factors).
I don’t know if i have what it takes for a Master’s degree and would like to know what it’s like so i have an idea of what to expect. I have been asking for advice for a while now and have a handful of people telling me to get some job experience and others telling me to go straight for graduate school. What do you guys think?
How much harder are graduate programs at the master’s level compared to undergraduate programs?
Any information will be appreciated.
I think you should get a job.
Number one, it’s too late to go to graduate school this fall anyway, so you’d have to find a job now anyway. Graduate school admissions work somewhat like undergrad - you have to apply in the late fall or early spring of the year to enter the following fall. So if you wanted to start Fall 2015 (aka this September), you would’ve had to apply between December 2014 and February 2015. People are finding out where they’re going and making decisions now. So the earliest you would be able to attend would be Fall 2016 (or maybe Spring 2016, if you found a program that admits in spring), which means you need to find a job anyway.
Number two, if you don’t already know what you want to do, it’s better to work for a few years first and figure that out - human factors and I/O psych are different fields (related, but very different). You could work for 2-3 years to figure out which of the two you really want to go into and which one is more lucrative for you, and then choose a program later. Number three, if you are not 100% committed to graduate school you’ll be unhappy and you won’t do well. Grad school takes dedication and perseverance.
People will say that you can’t find a job with a psych major but that’s not true. Most psych majors are gainfully employed; you just need to figure out what you want to do and where. You could look in marketing and advertising or entry-level corporate positions; some places might have entry-level human resources positions. You could look at doing social science research for a think tank, government agency, NGO, or nonprofit organization. You could work in market research; a lot of psychology majors go there. You’re too late for the big consulting recruiting but there might be some boutique consulting and strategy firms that would hire you at this point.
Also, this may be unhelpful, but you are starting the job search v. graduate school question pretty late. I already explained about grad school, but these days finding a job can take months, too. You might get lucky and find a job this month to start next month, but you need to apply far and widely to make sure that you get one and don’t face a long period of unemployment post-college. Don’t limit yourself only to jobs in the field - be creative and open. It’s easier to find another job once you already have a job, so you could always make a lateral transfer from one field to another if you find you don’t like it, but right now you need to eat.
Thank you for the quick and detailed response Juillet. I really think getting some job experience first is important before Graduate school as well. Just a quick follow-up though, I’m interested in the field of Human Factors but have difficulty finding jobs that will help me get some experience in the field. Any suggestions to where to search for entry level positions so i can see if it’s something i really want to pursue in future graduate studies?
Thanks in advance.
I’ve been exploring this field a bit recently. I have found most of the related jobs at tech firms - either firms that focus explicitly on tech (like Google or Microsoft) or firms that use tech extensively to do what they do (like Etsy or Bloomingdale’s). One thing that comes up a lot is user experience research - which usually employs social science and CS majors together on teams to figure out what consumers of tech products like and how to improve offerings/products for consumers. Lots of tech firms hire user experience researchers, and pay them pretty well. In fact, a search for “human factors” on Indeed.com turned up mostly UX jobs.
Another closely related field is marketing/market research. UX is basically the tech version of market research, but you could go into market research positions that are more technically focused and have more programming/CS built into them. Many market research firms have tech divisions or departments like operations or advanced analytics that focus on the design of the experiments/studies that bring in the data. Examples of such companies are NPD Group, Nielsen, comScore, IRI, Ipsos, Kantar, Westat and Arbitron.
@juillet Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask but you seem super knowledgable! Basically, I have spent all of high school assuming that most people go straight from undergrad to grad school. I was just looking up different requirements of grad school and most want work or even volunteer experience, so that’s the best path to go after BA/BS, right? Although I assume law and med school is straight after undergrad?
I am still choosing where to do my undergrad so I was wondering if there’s any sort of statistic or way to measure what people do after going to that college and which grad school they end up?
You really should start a new thread with this question as it is substantially different from the title. However, let me answer you briefly and I am sure that @juillet will answer as well.
There is no one way that is right or wrong. It very much depends on you, your goals and your particular experience. It also may depend on your field of study as in some fields, it is valuable to have work experience before going to graduate school.
Many people go directly to graduate school because they know that they want to do research and are ready to undertake 5 or so (minimum) more years for a Ph.D. This is not always the best idea, however in fields like engineering where work experience is important and valued by graduate programs. If you are going for a research degree, the most important kind of experience is research experience. You can get that in your undergraduate institution if you make the effort to do so.
Sometimes, an individual might be tired of studying and in need of some time in the work place to decide whether graduate school is the right direction. It might be that after some time working, it becomes clear that a professional (coursework only) Masters degree is the right path to meet one’s goals. In this case work experience is most important.
So the bottom line is that this is a complex question that has a lot variables which you have not provided us. It is difficult to give you advice without them but from your post it is clear that you are still in high school so planning for graduate school can wait. Figure out your major, your university and then start to see if research is a passion. Then you will be able to ask specific questions that can more easily be answered.
I’m confused or is that a typo? How is it you are just choosing an undergrad institution now if you are graduating in May from the Maryland online program?
The second poster is different from the OP, @BrownParent 
@peppermintgum, I agree with the encouragement to start your own thread - you’ll get more answers that way - but basically, @xraymancs said what I would say. There IS no right or wrong way to to do undergrad + grad school. You can take time to work or volunteer or travel, or you can go straight through. That’s true of grad and med and law school, and it’s true no matter how much time you take off. I have lots of friends who did something else in between undergrad and med and law school, and lots of students who decided to do the same - in fact, I think I know more people who took a little time than people who went straight through. I went straight from a BA to a PhD program and I wouldn’t do it again. There are a few programs that basically require work experience (like MBA and MPH programs) and some that strongly prefer it (like MPP and MPA programs). And these days at top law schools, most people are taking a year or two to do something else before hand (check out Harvard’s and Yale’s class profiles).
And no, there’s no sort of statistic - there might be a general measure of what percent of graduates go onto graduate school after, but that’s relatively meaningless to an individual because it’s going to be based upon the major makeup of the college and the pre-college ambitions of the student body. School A’s students might all be relatively pre-prifessional finance heads who want to go to Wall Street so only 10% of them go to graduate school - it’s not because they couldn’t, but because they didn’t want to. Conversely, School B’s students might all be hippie save-the-world types (said affectionately, lol) who want to go talk about books and study phenomenology and such things, so 70% of them go to graduate school. It’s not because they couldn’t get jobs; they just didn’t want to.
So when selecting an undergraduate degree, focus on colleges that can prepare you to do anything that you might want to do. The good thing is that most top colleges (and by “top” I am speaking broadly - the top 100 or so colleges that CC’ers talk about plus a good number more, like strong regional colleges) will prepare you for either graduate school or work. Some of them might prepare you better for certain things than others - the Ivies, of course, have connections on Wall Street that are pretty deep; places like Reed, for example, pride themselves on priming their students for PhD programs. But that doesn’t mean that a Reed alum couldn’t be working at McKinsey and a Columbia alum won’t go to a PhD program - they certainly could! (Nor am I trying to imply that Reed is better prep for a PhD than Columbia - I don’t think that’s necessarily the case.)
You might want to ask a more specific question on the College Search & Selection board explaining your tentative interests and listing the colleges that you’re thinking about, and asking for some input. You’ll get plenty from lots of knowledgeable parents and others.
@BrownParent - I was responding to the second poster, not the OP. That post (#4) should have been put in a separate thread but I wanted to answer it anyway.
Thanks. Dang, tripped up by another threadjack.
@xraymancs wow that comment was incredible. Thank you for that answer about choosing the right time to go to graduate school. That seriously enlightened me and makes me feel better about the undergrad school that I decided to attend!