UCSB discontinued their psych BA degree this year and it’s what I’ve always wanted to study in college. I know a lot of other students admitted as psych and brain majors got screwed over this year because of the change and are either changing majors completely or switching to sociology, neither of which I want to do. I asked an academic advisor why UCSB discontinued the psych BA major, and he said the university advertises they are doing psych majors a favor by getting rid of the BA, since a BS will lead to a so-called more “marketable” degree and more research opportunities in the science fields. He then went on to explain that it is his personal opinion, however, that UCSB is simply trying to accumulate a larger student body of STEM majors.
I don’t want to go through with the BS degree because I would be, quite frankly, miserable trying to complete chemistry classes and calculus classes and science labs particularly geared toward medical research for the next four years of my life since I’ve never been very science or math oriented. My GPA would suffer and would affect my chances of getting into a graduate program in the future, since I am hoping to get a PhD in clinical psychology someday and be able to either conduct research in that particular branch of psych or maybe get licensed to practice, which is very different compared to the kind of psych research UCSB is focusing on through the BS major. I also wanted to pair psychology with comparative literature or english since I want both psychology and writing available to me when I graduate, and getting a dual degree (BA and BS) is very difficult since there is little to no overlap among courses, especially if I am also wanting to study abroad. I would take my counselors’ advice about simply majoring in something else and giving up on psych entirely since it’s not required for grad school psych, but since early high school I have known I want to study psychology in college, and not being able to do so at this university has been very disappointing and I feel as though I’m being forced to pay for a degree in a major I’m not entirely invested in and that I’m just postponing learning about what I really want to learn about for another four years of my life.
The two solutions I’ve come up with so far is to either stick it out for the next two years at UCSB completing GE’s and then try to transfer to a university that has what I’m looking for, or transfer to my local community college and transfer to a different four-year institution.
Another note is that I am in my first year and in fall quarter at UCSB. Any advice would be much appreciated!