Hi there
I've been lucky (truly lucky actually since my marks weren't spectacular) and been offered a funded PhD program in humanities at a good school. I've always enjoyed this area, but never really excelled in it. You know some students get straight high A's? Well I'm more of a B or high B student. Still good, but not really %26quot;professor%26quot; quality. I always felt I was better with people rather than theories, and recently that's gotten me thinking about maybe doing something like psychology.
Now the problem is, to do psychology I would have to start from scratch, do two years of making up undergraduate studies, then another four years of PhD, and that's assuming I can support myself financially to do it. I don't know if I will.. and if I have to do it part time it could take up to ten years, I don't think I can do that.
I basically want to work closer with people and help them.. So should I blow off this PhD offer to take a big risk in something new (I mean.. I might get two years into a new area of study and not love it either, but I could really love it)? Or have I had my chance at a career and I should continue along in what I've majored in?
I hear about all these people changing to other careers like psychology when they're 30 or 35, but I have no idea how they manage to support themselves while they study full time if they don't get a scholarship.
I seriously have no idea what I'm going to do after I would do this PhD though, I have no particular desire to get into academia, and policy bores me to no end.. I'd be doing it because the topic is interesting and I'd be getting paid for a PhD and just see where I stand afterward.
What do you think?
Should I change study area before I commit to a PhD program?
I think of going into a Ph.D. program as something you should be really excited about. It's OK to not know where it will lead (lots of folks start out thinking they'll be professors but end up doing something totally different), but it seems to me that it should at least seem a lot better than the alternatives. A good alternative for you might be a master's in counseling, for which you generally don't need to have majored in psych or even have had more than a few basic psych or counseling courses. At my university it it common for humanities majors to get master's degrees in counseling ... and the only prerequisites for the master's are one introductory counseling course and a statistics course.
