In short, OP talks about interviewing candidates and being heartbroken at how many have psychology degrees followed by unemployment or low-wage employment in an unrelated field. With this experience, they offer a word of warning to those who wish to pursue this degree. Sure, psychology is interesting, but it's not a reliable career to pursue if you hope to become financially independent.
OP isn't wrong. According to Harvard, psychology is a top 3 most popular degree and it's not a surprise. Many people are interested in psychological topics and they pursue the degree at a young age without considering much concerning the job market or retirement or anything of the sort.
According to a Niche ranking, psychology was the third most popular major among college students in the classes of 2022 and 2023. The share of college students majoring in psychology now hovers around 6 percent, up from 4 to 5 percent in the 1980s.
https://summer.harvard.edu/blog/why-choose-psychology-as-your-college-major/
The number of people with psychology degrees far outnumbers the available jobs. Unfortunately, Redditors don't want to hear it. They love their precious degree and they'll defend it to the death, darn it.
They survived by tricking others into getting a useless degree
If you aren't going to become a psychologist, why spend hundreds of thousands on a psychology degree?
If anyone young is reading this, please don't listen to this fart. We live in a capitalist world. Rid your mind of this nonsense of "chasing your dreams". You're at university to set yourself up to make money, not to pursue your passions. There is nothing remotely passion-provoking in a university.
Bullshit!
One of the few based takes.
This is massive cope. You can literally do the MIT psychology course for free online.
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/9-00sc-introduction-to-psychology-fall-2011/
The truth is that if you're curious about psychology, there is no need to pursue a degree in it. Everything you could hope to learn is online, neatly organised, waiting for you to access it for free. It's a stupid reason to go to university. If you're trying to get money, the psychology degree is still useless. So, in short, avoid the psychology degree.
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My fav tihng aobut psychologyecls is how mad tehy get wehn you tehm psychoolgy is olny useufl aaginst peolpe who hvae ltierally neevr haerd of it.
The momnet you sutdy and leran all tehir trikcs and buzzwodrs it flals aaprt, to the piont eevn sipmle daignoses geos out the wnidow.
It why tehy do'nt let "depressed" peolpe readnig aobut deprsesion. Truns out tehy say the rihgt bzuzwords to aovid getting lableed as depressed! And god fobrid somoene not bow dwon to the all mgiht mediacl indsutrial cmoplex
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!nooticers I wrote this to bait people into going
and yet people just upmarsey and agree
Very teling toth e sort of peple we have here (based ones)
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i had a pretty bad runin with the psychiatric industry last decade and swore them off entirely. yeah that's not quite the same as psychology, but they're adjacent enough.
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maybe cool it with the transphobic comments
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Thats the problem with all diagnosis's being based on subjective personal descriptions
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Also based on politics. They have shown that they will bow to pressure both on criteria for diagnosis and even what constitutes a mental illness.
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remember, gender is a social construct, and that's why you can be born with the wrong one.
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Like the assertion that such a thing as mental
illness 
even exists, which there 
is no proof 
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(it's demons)
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psychology is two steps removed from astrology. Its all about buzzwords and vague assertions about yourlife and based on next to no consistent science.
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IDK I was pretty blown away with how perceptive good therapists can be. I had one that helped me make major breakthroughs and I'm not a stranger to armchair psychology. "Talking" to people 1:1 just seems to be universally good medicine and unironically uncovers stuff in your psyche that you can't uncover by yourself. I think that's why everything from psychology to religion has at least some aspect of it.
There are a ton of shitty therapists though, having a bad one sucks butt.
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Yeah I've tried multiple therapists and always came away unimpressed. Part of it is my problem because I'm not super forthcoming and they don't ask probing questions (a couple attempts to keep myself safe followed by plenty of substance abuse and not one of them has had crazy idea of asking why) but the rest of what they tell me is just meme-tier advice I could get from any grindset instagram. Never made it past 2-3 sessions, with how much it costs out of my own pocket per appointment they can't take the first 5 times they see me as a warmup for reciting platitudes.
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If you have a serious problem and you luck out by getting a good therapist then there's a decent chance to see a significant benefit. Otherwise it's a crapshoot and you may spend a lot of time and money just to end up worse off than you started.
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Absolutely, I'm actually crazy (I've posted at length about it here) so it was actually useful for me but if you're not actually mentally ill then it's not going to do much.
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Right, which is why people shouldn't get paid a whole lot to just sit and talk about problems they dont care about if anyone can do it.
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I didn't say anyone could do it, I said that we know it's a good practice as seen by how long we've been doing it.
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I'll kill you if you threaten my amphetamine prescription
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That's psychiatry, not psychology
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These are the highly educated and intelligent revolutionaries who were tricked bu predatory loan programs!!!
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Psychology students are basically math illiterate, no wonder they can't figure out the rate of return on their degree
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Conveniently they're all vaginal jews
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the vag jew i knew failed from dancing into psych. $135/hour to talk to a 'pre certified' professional.
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Most people get psych degrees to figure out what's wrong with them, not to go into the field so I don't know why they're coping so hard
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Most ppl do it because it's not difficult and it's just a way to get a bachelor's degree, which alot of entry level roles require. Alot of ppl don't know what they want to do with their life when they're 18-23 and just get a degree that somewhat interests them
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I think a lot of them go, 'Psychology is the study of the brain. I have one of those, I'll do well on this.'
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Psychology
is not the study 
of the brain, that's called neurology.
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I never said they were smart.
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Ok but at least do something interesting. One of my da's friends has a botany degree (or something similarly obscure ig) from oxford because he thought that having "Oxford" on his CV even in an unrelated subject was better than "BSc from Glasgow" and it worked, he's done well for himself
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Yup, before it was philosophy degrees but that became too obvious that it basically meant you were a failure in everything else so now "psyches" have this excuse of "Oh I want to help people with their mental problems (I'm actually trying to self diagnose my own psychosis)"
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'I just like talking to people' - every psych major I've ever worked with.
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I lot of people default into it because they suck at other things.
I knew a kid who switched to psych after a single semester of undergraduate economics. Neither of these are at all hard, and yet you decide to aim for the one that's even less well-paid.
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Depends. In my experience foids who suck at other subjects (and on scrotes heyooo) go into nursing
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Or teaching
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Nursing is now a profession for idiot
single 
mothers who want the shortest amount of time to pretend they are smarter than you.
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Hey at least you know they put out
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and they wash out, because its surprisingly hard degree for wiping crackhead butt.
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*education
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Someone I know with a psych degree, who dropped
out at the thesis stage 
of her masters, is one of the dumbest people I have ever met, didn't know basic 
every day words, and failed 
at life in more ways than one. It made sense that she is from Indiana since she thought 
that she couldn't get pregnant 
via intercourse, if she didn't enjoy it.
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lmfao can you imagine
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Now look at the gender breakdown of psych degree holders
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It's favoured towards a gender except for neuroscience
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Good morning
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Is there any logic in spending money on going to the university for any degree other than those which require labs and equipments? (Engineering, Medicine, Applied Physics, Chemistry and a few others?)
Even subjects like Law, Linguistics, Economics are not worth going to school for. Just make each one of these have a criteria of certifications like the bar exam or actuarial exams (without a degree prerequisite) and make it longer.
Let's say you have to clear 5 exams over 6 weeks to get a certification in Economics after which you get a license to be an advisor in economics in the Federal Reserve or a certification in linguistics allows you to get a job offer in the NSA. It completely rips away any "elite" stamp from "top" universities.
If you are smart enough, you could be working somewhere, maybe doing scut work for meager pay, but not only would you not be going in debt you would actually be making money while studying at your leisure and get certified within 12 months of passing high school. You can download all the relevant materials from the internet for free or buy used books at a fraction of the price. You can also visit some prestigious archive to study some esoteric shit you want to.
!r-slurs !commenters please let me know if you think this would be worse than the current system. I am actually interested to know what the flaws in my views are.
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The problem is all the early hiring filtering is done by AI or HR foids who don't know about the field they are hiring for so having a degree a is treated as the bare minimum to get your foot in the door. Thats the detail boomers miss when they say having a degree is useless. Yeah it's no longer a guaranteed job but it's also now the only way for those of us without nepo benefits to get our foot in the door. I have a lot of uni connects with professors and lab researchers but none of them have any open spots for me or know anyone who does because not everyone in a professional field is able to secure spots for everyone they meet
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pure math is a grind of insanely difficult problems to prove you are a smart person and deserving of any job, requires no equipment but does require absolute full time commitment.
It is also about teaching you how to think about problems in a different way
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Get into a study group? If everyone is studying by themselves, you can make a study group and meet up every other day in the afternoons
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That's what university math departments are but with the chinese/jews/indians filtered in
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Connections neighbor.
I wasted most of my time at university but the random connections I made paid off like crazy. I'm not a big networking guy but I ended up meeting people that got me jobs that I would not have met elsewhere. I'm not even that good at what I do but I'm living very comfortably because I happened to know a few of the right people.
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IEEE has chapters. So does CISCO. But noone goes to them to connect because they do all their networking in universities. There are plenty of networking opportunities in those places.
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Mommy is soooo proud of you, sweaty. Let's put this sperg out up on the fridge with all your other failures.
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No
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That's literally what capitalism allows. It just expects it to be your burden, not society's. !anticommunists
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communist worldview has them not studying psychology because they died of starvation
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This is so disingenuous. He is probably claiming a BA, MA, and PhD all in the same field as three separate degrees. It's technically correct, but it's literally just continued studies in the same field and getting incremental Achievements
along the way.
!sophistry !ifrickinglovescience
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Of course a professor would brag about it, credentials are all they have. I probably make twice as much money as him with just a BSc.
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He could easily be replaced by an AI chatbot and he knows it.
Psychiatry > Psychology.
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Most psychiatrists could be replaced by ChatGPT too tbh. T he majority of their cases is just some
complaining about her anxiety depression (throw SSRIs at her) or a 
trying to get an adderall script for their "ADHD" (fried brain from 17 hours of TikTok daily (but give them the script anyway because amphetamines are based and more people should be on them)). If For the rarer schizo or manic bipolar, load them up with antipsychotics. Or someone showing obvious signs of a personality disorder? SSRIs and benzos to shut em up.
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No one with a PhD would think that way, so it's just another teenager or overgrown NEET on reddit.
What did you expect?
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Anyway this is why I need my useless degree subsidized by the taxpayer.
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I do and I am
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What's the problem? Are there not enough positions in HR?
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This ain't a new phenomenon, when I was still working 15 years ago at least 80% of the waitresses I knew were in Psychology. At least a third had already graduated and were still waiting tables.
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!engineering This is gonna be comp-scicels and codemonkeys in t-5 years, while we the engineechads shall thrive
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It does seem to be somewhat the case for the entry level market. I already have a job but post covid it's only gotten worse and worse.
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Nursing seems like a good route but it's bad for flunkie types who can coast through ezpz psych classes. I know a woman who works essentially a psychiatrist as an NP.
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I'm pretty confident psychiatry is way way more thorough than psychology. Psychiatrists are more on par with doctors and can do useful shit like proscribe hardcore psychotropic meds. They aren't just listening to dumb problems and fricking up marriages.
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Psychiatrists are literally doctors. That's the entire difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist.
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You can become a doctor of psychology too
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psychiatrists are medical doctors
psychs get PhDs
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Yes, but psychiatrists are MDs first and foremost, their residency is what they do in psychiatry.
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Right, you go to medical
school 
and just do a psych residency to be a psychiatrist.
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Not an MD
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It's pretty funny, a decent amount of her job is finding out whether her patients are actually in need of psychiatric help or if they suffer from what she calls "shit life syndrome". I'd personally trust her or someone medically trained over a regular psychologist.
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The purpose of Psychology is to find a husband to actually earn money during your time at university
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They call that an MRS degree
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No please, I need more manipulative marketers to tell me that every person who breaths air longer than average is a narcissist, buy my course.
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Sad to see psychology go the way of computer science
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Explain.
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People who go into the gamedev route more than likely have tinkered with programming/assert designing/engines before going to a university, it's just that many people choose to go to a CS course because they think that if they are obsessed with videogames then designing them should be as easy, but then get confronted with the truth much later into the course (if they don't outright drop it first). Is that what you meant by explain?
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There's honestly no excuse for still getting a meme degree in 2024. If you did this shit 20 years ago like I did that's one thing, but even I figured that out and went back to school to get a useful education
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My dad got a meme degree (something about industrial printer operation from a no name university) and now he's a GM at big pharma. Standards were way lower back then degree wise I'd imagine, because there simply were less people with them.
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Yeah there
was a point 
where 
"any degree 
will do" but in the modern 
job market, it's quite reasonable to say that over 60% of university 
degrees are utterly useless. The humanities is bloated, and even some STEM degrees don't open any doors 
without at least a Masters.
Formerly Chuck's.
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It's rare in CS, but I got my first job as a dev because I had a master's degree. My company exclusively hired people with MS degrees for their new grad dev program.
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It's good if you follow through all the way to PHD. Other than that, probably not super useful
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You mean, PsyD. A PhD doesn't allow you to prescribe meds.
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Two kinds of psych majors:
Pre law
Psychotic narcissists
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Neighbor literally all of psychology is pseudoscience and pop-psych bullshit
Why do you think the whole field changes its consensus every three months?
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As someone who actually hires people at a big company I can assure you degrees don't mean shit.
HR doesn't even share aptitude test results with us until after I make the decision because they don't want us forming a bias based on them.
Most hires come down to how I feel about them on a gut level and how little of a pain I think they'll be.
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But then you need the degree so HR actually moves your resume from the "trash pile" to the show to someone else pile. Its so hard to even get considered unless you are lucky and your connections are hiring
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I disagree. I have literally
been screened out of jobs because despite 
having a Masters, I didn't have the one they wanted, despite 
only listing "Masters Required" and before 
I did that and had no degree 
at all, good luck getting a job making more than $15 hour in retail as some wage slave. I work in academia now and this is the easiest shit I've ever done in my life and I get paid more than I would 
have doing 3x as much anywhere else.
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As opposed to all the pseudoscience you learn in a psyche degree, where more than 50% of big results fail to replicate.
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When I took a 200-level psych elective and the professor told us on the first day of class to join his lab if we were considering applying to PsyD programs that's when I realized it is truly a dead-end degree for foids with no other prospects
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My niece started college
last year and intends to do Psychology 
as her major. I told her not to do that because that degree 
will only get you a job in HR, Social 
Work, or working 
as a Case manager 
at an old folks home.
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It's because for 9 out of 10 of them you can tell that they are pretending too give a shit and seem too know as little about actual life and guidance as you do.
Jewish lives matter too me.
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This. Therapy has only been useful for me as exposure therapy for dealing with women
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Most women are nice too you as long as you are not trying too frick them but you should never let a woman run you're life for you because that will end up with one of you crashing and burning by the end of the day?
jewish lives matter too women and children.
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That's not what I needed exposure for, I got uncontrollable boners around any non related women until 22
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jewish lives matter too women and children.
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In Australia, psych undergrad is pretty useless on it's own, and you need at least an honours to go on to anything. Meanwhile you also need to make sure you have a good psych degree i.e. one that teaches you stats as a skill early and often.
The real value of psychology is statistical comeptancy and if you don't excel at that, you aren't getting an actual job at Honours or PhD level which is Government or Private research. These pay pretty decently.
In Aus, a Masters is required to practice, and can result in a decent living depending on what you do - especially since there is a shortage of psychologists. But it varies.
But yeah, psych as an undergrad is fine for a STEM postgrad degree by teaching you stats and strong research competance / reasoning (since there are way fewer definitive answers in psych compared to biology etc) but you should pair with other classes that give you the background to your ultimate goal.
It is 100% an oversaturated degree that people don't use in their long term planning which is why it goes awry for them.
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Snapshots:
https://old.reddit.com/r/universityofauckland/comments/144ouc7/psychology_degreeso_not_worth_it_please_do_not/:
undelete.pullpush.io
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
https://summer.harvard.edu/blog/why-choose-psychology-as-your-college-major/:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/9-00sc-introduction-to-psychology-fall-2011/:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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