Hi,
I am trying to decide between two schools (University of Washington (Bothell) vs. Eastern Washington University). I want to major in psych and minor in business. UWB has only “community” psychology while EWU has just plain psychology. I’d really rather go to UW for various reasons but I’m just unsure of the “community” part of their major. Will that close me in or hinder my chances of getting a job that isn’t directly related to “community” psych? One of the main reasons I’m doing psych is for its versatility. Possibly considering a career in HR as well. Any advice would be much appreciated!
That’s pretty weird!
Community psychology is a specific subfield of psychology that is concerned with, well, the psychology of communities. It’s a much more applied and interdisciplinary version of psychology than general psychology or other subfields - it draws from a lot of other fields like sociology and human geography to understand how people’s communities affect them and vice versa.
I’m not sure why a university would offer a subfield of psychology rather than a general version. My guess (just a guess) is that they don’t really have the faculty yet to offer a full-fledged major in psychology, so they are drawing from course offerings in other areas they do have more faculty in to build the community psych program. A look at the course offerings seems to sort of support this theory (most of the courses you can take in the major are not traditional psychology department courses, and the research methods course is “Introduction to Social Research” which I suspect is very likely to leave out the experimental underpinnings of psychology.) The list of faculty in the area also support the theory; only two of the faculty in this area have PhDs in psychology (and one is in clinical-community psychology; the other is in developmental psychology; the rest have PhDs in other social sciences fields.)
So, this major is going to be different from a more general psych major you would get at EWU or elsewhere. However, that’s not necessarily bad, and you can still have a career in HR and some versatility with this major, too!
The downside I could see is that general psych has a heavier emphasis on learning research methods and statistics, and that could be useful in certain fields like marketing/market research and social science research in think tanks.
I see. Thank you so much for the information!!!