I got accepted to UC Berkeley and they are making me take more maths. Why? I am more interested in clinical, biological, and social psychology. I don’t want to do research. My career goal is to be a clinical therapist. I don’t understand why I need maths. I already have done statistics and research methods.
Part of a well rounded psychology education is analyzing research studies and data, regardless of what your end career goal happens to be.
Even back in the stone ages When I was in school calculus and upper level calc based stats were required.
As a clinical psychologist you might be asked to read reports from schools. These reports will include standardized tests, and you need to understand the scores.
Just getting through your degree will require that you know enough math to do sophisticated statistical analyses. Pscychology is first and foremost a science. A subsection of it also deals with helping people clinically. The lay public perceives it in the opposite direction, as first a way to help people then a science (and many people don’t realize that it’s a science), probably because most people first encounter psychologists as therapists. They don’t perceive the science behind it.
Maths? Are you British? If so you would be better off going to a British univesrity where you only study one subject.
@TomSrOfBoston That’s xenophobic.
You will be expected in grad school to take courses in statistics, tests and measurements, you will need to know how to do research (masters and dissertation work), you will need to be able to critically review articles, to understand if data is reliable and valid, to perform psychological tests and understand how to interpret these tests, to understand if a difference is or is not significant, how change is measured, etc. You will need to understand how the electrophysiology of the brain and neurotransmitters work, and there may be a need for ore math to understand what an action potential is… etc. And this is just a start.
Every single clinical psychologist, who has ever worked with me, has had to present the results of recent testing of the patient. As part of the rehab team, this occurred almost daily. You can’t be a clinical therapist if you don’t understand the testing that you did on the patient. You have to do math calculations when summarizing the evaluation results. I had protractors in my desk and those went largely missing because the psychologists kept “borrowing” them to assess angles in a patient’s drawings.
My colleagues used math every single day to understand the statistics and probabilities of testing results. You have to be able to interpret, understand, and compute results of the various tests presented to patients. Some of the tests presented to clients involved math algorithms. You need math skills to understand how the patient is working out and deriving solutions to mathematical problems printed in the evaluations.
If you don’t want additional math courses don’t take this major. You have to be able to explain the results of all of the evaluations that were completed by the patient, to the insurance company, in your reports. You have to be able to explain it to the patient and his or her family In layman’s terms.
So you had better get used to being able to mathematically interpret results, and “translate” them for the insurance companies. Insurance companies will eventually will pay your fees, unless you plan to be working for free? A large majority of people seeking clinical services are not self-pay.