<p>OP, I checked out SJSU’s psychology curriculum. Their BA psychology curriculum looks no more focused on psychobiology than any other standard psychology curriculum. You take general psych, research methods, statistics, child & abnormal, an advanced measurement/statistics course, and you select one course from each of three focus areas: cognitive-ish, social/personality, and some applied field (clinical being one of the choices). That’s pretty standard - UC-Davis and UC-Irvine have very similar curricula.</p>
<p>I’m a social psychologist and in undergrad I took classes in educational psychology, counseling psychology, and psychology of learning. The point of the undergrad degree is to get a broad base on the field - and in the case of psychobiology classes, you’ll need it anyway. It’ll be useful to know how some of your clients’ medications and brain chemistry work, even if you can’t directly prescribe. You should also know that undergraduate clinical psych classes are relatively uncommon at undergrad departments, actually, and it’s nice that SJSU has one. So are advanced stats classes and psych tests and measurements classes.</p>
<p>Importantly, the faculty as SJSU seem to be research-active, which means that you can work with them to get research experience for your clinical psych degree. SFSU’s clinical psychology professors come from the top clinical programs in the country - Berkeley, UCLA, Yale, Michigan, etc. Both are great choices for undergrad preparation, and people in my PhD program came from all kinds of undergrad schools.</p>
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<p>A couple of other thoughts, although these are less related to your immediate predicament:</p>
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<li><p>You may not want to hyper focus on one graduate program…UCLA’s #1 status means that it is extremely competitive to gain admission there. It’s like med school applications. Most clinical applicants apply to between 10 and 15 programs they would be quite happy at.</p></li>
<li><p>Top clinical psychology PhD programs are usually fully funded for 5 years. So you would not have to borrow substantially to attend one. (This is not a reason to borrow big in undergrad, though.)</p></li>
<li><p>If you want a career at the forefront of research, I would not recommend pursuing a PsyD program. PM me if you want more details. One big reason, though, is that PsyD programs are not funded.</p></li>
<li><p>When you are ready to apply to clinical psychology PhD programs, please don’t write about your personal struggles with mental health disorders/your personal “story” or that the reason you want to go into clinical psychology is that you were inspired by your own therapists. Students frequently think that these kinds of stories will help them, but they will not. Please read [url=<a href=“http://psychology.unl.edu/psichi/Graduate_School_Application_Kisses_of_Death.pdf]this[/url”>http://psychology.unl.edu/psichi/Graduate_School_Application_Kisses_of_Death.pdf]this[/url</a>] article.</p></li>
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