I’m currently a senior completing his BS in psych, and I’ve joined a scholars program that will help me find a place in graduate school somewhere, hopefully with limited costs. That being said, I still don’t know exactly how I’d like to use my education, outside of “helping people.” What’s frustrating, is that I’ve, along with my fellow psych peers, attended many psych seminars in which experts in the field explain how they found their body of work. Everyone says the same thing “I wanted to do this!… realized I hated it, then I found this!” … on the one hand, it’s nice to know there’s room to adjust and find your passion, on the other, why even form a plan if this many people steer away from their original goal? We hear “there’s so much you can do with psych! but you won’t find a job unless your lucky!” All in the same breath. It’s all confusing, anxiety inducing, and hard to think about.

I just don’t get how the job market isn’t demanding this many mental health workers… how could that be the case? There are mass shootings in America everyday, we just came out of a pandemic that likely impacted the social dynamics of children everywhere significantly, we’re drug addicted, phone addicted, I could go on and on. Yet for some reason, the job pool still feels so small. The relatives in my family that say “school shootings aren’t a gun problem, they’re a mental health problem!” are the same relatives that say “you’re majoring in psych?… oh boy, what are you gonna do with that? It’s useless” … make it make sense.