Give Your Professional Life a New Direction With a Psychology Career

People hold on to odd assumptions about certain lines of work, and those assumptions quietly shrink the list of careers they'll even consider. Psychology is one of the fields that suffers most from this. When my sister told the family she planned to major in it, my honest first reaction was a blunt question: what on earth do you do with a degree like that? I pictured years and years of school stretching ahead of her. It never occurred to me that a whole range of psychology jobs exist that ask for nothing beyond a bachelor's.

Picture the field and you probably see the same scene I did: a psychiatrist in a chair, notepad ready, a patient talking across the room. That image is real, but it covers a tiny slice of what's actually out there. The area keeps expanding, and the work inside it has become surprisingly varied. Sorting through the options to land on the one that fits you turns out to be a genuinely enjoyable process rather than a chore. A job should interest you and good money matters, sure, but it also has to be something you feel a pull toward.

What makes these careers worth a second look is that most of them don't announce themselves as psychology work. You have to sit with the idea for a minute before the connection clicks. The field is big. If you choose it as your main course of study, the number of directions you can head in is larger than most people guess.

It also works well as a secondary focus. Plenty of employers will hire someone whose degree is in something completely different and then train them for a psychology-related role. That part trips people up, so let me use my own path as the example.

Given that I thought my sister had lost her mind picking this as a major, you can safely assume I went a different route. I did. English was my undergraduate field, which, as anyone will tell you, is not exactly overflowing with job listings either.

During college I kept gravitating toward the psych courses, and my academic advisor floated the idea of adding it as a minor. The suggestion paid off. I finished with a BA in English and a psychology minor alongside it. At the time I had no clue that minor would eventually become my working life. Things tend to fall into place in ways you can't see coming, and I'm happy with where mine landed.

The actual door opened while I was substitute teaching. A position came up for a Wraparound therapist in my area, and I took it. The work suited me so well that I set the teaching aside and moved into the therapy role full-time. Funny how I'd once wondered what my sister would ever do with her degree, and here I was building a career out of the same subject.