History PhD Admissions

juillet
Wed, 28 Sep 2016 21:44:15 +0000

Oh, and two other things:

-Yes, psychology and philosophy research are very different. Psychology is all behavioral research, so you’d be doing experiments, observational, or survey-based research (or some combination thereof) with humans or animal models in laboratories or community/field settings. For example, my PhD work involved giving people with HIV surveys over the course of several weeks and then analyzing that data using statistics to look at how trends changed over time. I have friends who did things like gave rats cocaine to see what would happen,* or ran people through cognitive tasks in the lab, etc.

Philosophy research is much less behavioral and more about lots of deep reading and writing. I am much less familiar with this, but I have never known a philosopher to do an experiment or a survey. I think there’s lots of archival work and many of them also have reading knowledge of Latin and Greek, and/or maybe German or French or Sanskrit depending on the kind of philosophy they did.

-Yes, clinical psychology is the most competitive, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go for it. If you want to be a clinician and/or you want to do research on clinical work and practice, then that’s the way to go. Two alternatives, though, are counseling psychology (very similar to clinical, but less competitive) and school psychology (the provision of mental health services in schools and other educational settings). Another related alternative is doing an MSW and then a PhD in social work (70% of clinical mental health providers are actually social workers, and with an MSW or a PhD you can be licensed to practice social work. The academic job market in social work is also a lot better than it is in psychology much less the humanities, so there’s that).

-Actually, a third thing I just thought of. If you want to be a professor in general, there are certain fields that actually have a shortage of professors. Business is one of them. If you are interested in psychology, but can direct your interests towards behavioral economics or industrial/organizational psychology or management - things that business schools would be interested in - you have a much better chance of being a professor than if you studied something like social or developmental or clinical psychology.

Economics also has better prospects than most fields, especially if you go to a top program, so if you are at all curious about how and why people buy things behavioral economics might be a good intersection to investigate.

And nursing has excellent prospects. There are lots of programs for people who didn’t major in nursing in undergrad to get their BSN -> MSN -> PhD smoothly, and nurses do a lot of research that overlaps with psychology and mental health, particularly if they are mental health or psychiatric nurses. You’d also have the flexibility of clinical practice/health care provision. Even the big name universities like Penn and Emory are practically begging for nursing faculty.