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Asked by anon-283680 to Simon on 11 Mar 2021.
Question: Did you know that this was the path you wanted to go down straight away or did it take a while
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Simon Payne answered on 11 Mar 2021:
Hi Phoebe. I didn’t know that I wanted to be a psychologist until probably my second year of college, and even then I presumed it would be solely in the sport arena. I specialised in sport and exercise psychology after doing my degree at university, but I’ve always been interested in the application of psychological principles in other areas of performance. I’ve done quite a bit of self-employed consultancy in performance psychology, but decided to return to the university sector and become a lecturer because I’d enjoyed teaching so much during my time as a PhD student. Now, from my base as a lecturer I get to teach, do cool research, and some consultancy, as well as supervising student projects and generally mentoring my tutees, so it’s a pretty nice variety of activities. Not all psychologists are uni lecturers, of course, some are purely practicing psychologists, and there are lots of job opportunities that make use of psychology even though the job title might not include “psychologist.” Pursuing psychology opens doors, so it’s a good option if you are committed to further study even if you aren’t sure of the precise path you want to go down. I hope that helps! Best wishes, Simon
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laurenmcgale commented on :
I knew I wanted to study psychology (my 2nd choice was to be an english teacher), but beyond that I wasn’t so sure. It is a very popular course and so doing masters/phd can be competitive as there are so many people studying. I did my degree and then I took several years out, I tried lots of different jobs (offices, call centres, bars, shops) and decided they weren’t for me, and I wanted to focus on something health related. I was deciding between a MSc in Health Psychology and maybe something more vocational like occupational therapy. I decided on the MSc in the end as I thought the modules all sounded really interesting, and it snowballed from there. I loved the uni, and the course, the modules were different because they were all focused on health which was my favourite part of my undergraduate course and so I loved every single part of the course. That’s where I discovered you could specialise in eating behaviour, and the rest is history! I didn’t do my MSc until I was 26. I think it is good to get experience in different areas as much as you can, I had done some health care work and knew I loved it, I also tried the other jobs and knew I really didn’t like those, and so that helped me narrow it down a bit in the end.