If you are just interested in psychology, then you may not have to choose this major, you can read on your own, sit in on courses including open courses abroad, or even take a double degree or minor, and in fact, everyone who learns a little bit of psychology will be more or less helpful to their own psychological growth - studying psychology is not the privilege of psychology majors.

If you want to choose this major, it is better to learn more about the specific courses and contents of the major, as well as the direction of development and employment situation, and to suit your own ability (generally you have to learn statistics, and those who are doing the basic direction have to learn brain science, programming, designing experiments, etc., so the psychology department of Peking University only accepts students from the sciences), so as not to be shocked by the results when you enter the department. --Psychology majors are usually a million miles away from what many people think they are.

Personally, I like my major (clinical psychology) very much, and I've been able to improve my self-improvement and professional ability during my graduate studies, and I'm quite satisfied with my employment situation. I used to be very pessimistic about the development of the counseling and therapy industry in China, and I would not recommend many people to choose this industry based on their interest alone. Now my attitude is slightly more optimistic than before, but also cautiously optimistic. At least from the economic situation to consider, I personally feel that the psychological counseling and therapy industry is not suitable for students whose family economic income is below the middle level, because participating in professional training requires a certain degree of economic investment, and the level of income at the beginning of the work is usually not high (boys wanting to live in a first-tier city, in particular, should consider their family's affordability, and carefully weigh their personal interests and financial responsibility for the future of the family), and if you are If you go into counseling and therapy with the mindset that you are in a great hurry to make money, it may very well affect the mindset and effectiveness of your work, so you need to be careful.

Returning to the state of the psychology department at a college I understand.

Generally speaking, after graduating from undergraduate school, half of them are academics (university teachers and researchers, mainly PhDs), half are non-academics (corporate human resources, user experience, university high school mental health work, a small number of other, master's degree is the main one; very few of them are employed directly after graduation from undergraduate school, and according to my personal understanding, most of them are doing non-psychological work directly related to the work).

Specifically:

Bachelor's degree

Graduates 1/3 to 1/2 or so go abroad or go to Hong Kong (mainly the United States, but also the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, etc.) to read PhD, to the direction of basic psychology (cognition, cognitive neurology, psychostatistics, etc.), but also some direction of applied psychology (industrial/organizational, development/education, social, cultural, clinical general feel) It is more difficult to go abroad, but it is not without precedent, another can refer to "Chris-NYC" blog post U.S. Graduate School of Psychology Application FAQs (clinical/counseling direction)_Chris-NYC_Sina Blog and its related microblogging).

Most of the remaining students went on to study psychology at major universities or research institutes in China (Peking University, Beijing Normal University, Tsinghua University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, etc.), and a few of them changed their majors.

There are very few graduates who work directly, and those who work directly seem to be mostly engaged in non-psychology directly related to corporate work.

Master's degree

Divided into two classes, the headquarters and the Shenzhen Graduate School (but in the future, the Shenzhen Graduate School's class has been discontinued, and replaced by the headquarters of the training of the 2-year professional master's degree), after graduation, some of them will continue to go abroad to study for a doctoral degree (basic and applied psychology in both directions, the difficulty of the basic application is relatively small), or to study for a doctoral degree in the country, SZGS will continue to further study a little less, but there are a number of them.

But no matter which side there will be a lot of graduates start to work, basic psychology side do not know much about the direction of applied psychology is mainly divided into three pieces - organizational management (more to go to the enterprise engaged in HR work, but also some go to consulting firms), development education (seems to have their own kindergarten, and the combination of education and scientific research). (It seems that some of them have opened their own kindergartens and combined education and research, which is very strong, and they should also go to other educational institutions), clinical (in the past, they used to go to psychological counseling centers of universities, and this year, two graduates from our lab went to psychological counseling centers of major universities to work as full-time counselors or teachers, one went to a large state-owned enterprise to work as an internal EAP, and one went to a major middle school to work as a psychologist teacher. (the only one not looking for a job will go to the US to study a cool non-psychology but psychology-related major at a famous school).

Doctorate

Whether you study abroad or domestically, you should basically be engaged in education and research in universities or research institutes after graduation. The Department of Psychology at Peking University is basically a place that only accepts outstanding returnees in the future, and is mostly oriented towards basic psychology.

Overall, my experience is that the employment of psychology is mainly three pieces:

Academic research

The need to read the doctor, it is best to go abroad, the domestic is also okay, but may go to the first-tier city of the key colleges and universities will be very fierce competition. It's a great test of academic ability and interest, and you need to publish papers, and a few key universities will require SCI or SSCI.

Enterprise-related work (human resources, user experience, business consulting, consumer research, etc.)

Master's degree is the main focus. There's a lot of demand in this area (mainly for HR, but more and more people are going into UX these days), but of course it's very competitive to find very good jobs.

Psychological counseling and therapy, mental health education

At least a master's degree.

This area is a mixed bag, the quality of education and further training is not guaranteed, the public's understanding of and trust in psychological counseling and therapy is still limited, and the cost of several dozen to several hundred dollars per hour is not affordable to the general working class - all of these will gradually improve in the future, but it is hard to say exactly what will happen. All of this will gradually improve in the future, but it's hard to say exactly how many years it will take (Update: I've recently learned that many people in first-tier cities can afford to pay for counseling, and that the spending power of first-tier city residents on counseling should be on the rise).

Income is said to be pre-investment-based (high training costs), the latter depends on the development of individuals, different people may be very different, do a good job of the situation is very good (especially to provide training income is higher, but can provide training are experts), to do a good job of general income is also very general, it is said to be not enough to support their families. Don't believe the training providers who promote counselors as a high-income profession - there are high-income ones, but ultimately they are in the minority .

The good thing about this profession is that being able to provide service and assistance to others (especially students) can be helpful and enjoyable, though occasionally disempowering. If the service is provided to the community at large, it may be much more difficult to work with than the student population, as the high fees also bring high expectations.

This profession has high requirements for personal mental health, psychological quality and professional skills (if one really wants to do a good job in the profession rather than fooling people), one's own mental health and professional skills are skilled before helping others, so one needs to constantly strengthen self-growth and professional training, otherwise one's help to others may be very limited, and an excessive desire to help others may even be a psychological The manifestation of the difficulties encountered.

The employment of this industry is not easy, go to universities or primary and secondary school counseling centers and other more stable and development platform, the competition will be very fierce, because this profession is also very many graduates each year, and the number of such jobs is very limited, unlike the enterprise jobs will increase with the development of the enterprise. And such a job usually has a medium or even low salary income, other income needs to be obtained by spare time part-time work, this piece depends on personal ability.

Other

Of course, there are some psychology majors who are engaged in other aspects of the work, such as consulting firms, marketing, sales, civil servants, etc., but it is still a small number, mainly depending on their own planning and arrangement of university life, to name a few.