Best Part of Being Psychologists

[PhDStudentCP]

I've been a part of the SDN community for a few months now and have really enjoyed reading everyone's perspectives about the variety of topics discussed. Although I've noticed that sometimes it seems like some comments can be skewed toward the negative/ pessimistic side about the field in general. (Might just be my interpretation, but sometimes that's the impression I'm left with) ... so as a rising 2nd year PhD student who is (for the most part) looking forward to a career in this field, I'm wondering what everyone thinks the BEST part of their jobs are? What makes you happy that you chose this path? What would you say are the benefits?

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[beginner2011]

I've been a part of the SDN community for a few months now and have really enjoyed reading everyone's perspectives about the variety of topics discussed. Although I've noticed that sometimes it seems like some comments can be skewed toward the negative/ pessimistic side about the field in general. (Might just be my interpretation, but sometimes that's the impression I'm left with) ... so as a rising 2nd year PhD student who is (for the most part) looking forward to a career in this field, I'm wondering what everyone thinks the BEST part of their jobs are? What makes you happy that you chose this path? What would you say are the benefits?

There are practically innumerous aspects of this field, profession, and discipline that make me happy I chose it. I know myself better, I'm more able to be helpful to people, I have a lot of independence, I'm able to participate in intellectually stimulating and clinically significant questions that meaningfully impact my own work and the work of others, my colleagues are sharp, challenging, caring, curious, and generous people. This is just off the top of my head.

I remember when I was working in industry for a few years between undergrad and grad school and life felt unfulfilling -- I don't experience that at all anymore, and haven't since I left industry.

 

[PsychPsyance]

Not necessarily "psychology" specific, but I love working with graduate students. Training young psychologists-to-be is easily the best part of my job. As a faculty member, I also appreciate the freedom I have to set my own schedule and work agenda. As a psychologist, specifically, I like that I am able to do so many different things across the spectrum of our discipline (training students, teaching courses, conducting research I'm interested in, seeing patients, conducting assessments [I also have a private practice], reviewing grants, etc.). The list goes on and on, and far outweighs the things I don't like about being a psychologist. For me, it's been a great ride

 

[Sanman]

At the moment, the best part is being able to work remotely and safely from home while maintaining my full salary. A lot of people in this country cannot say that and I am thankful for that everyday.

Beyond that, I am one of the few people I know that genuinely enjoys my job and would not quit working if I won the lottery (though I might move to PP). I could never survive sitting in front of spreadsheets all day like my wife does.

 

[BuckeyeLove]

In terms of personal meaning/fulfillment: I get to meet some really amazing and interesting people. Just as important, I have the privilege to help those people through tough times/situations/circumstances (---not changing lives like good will hunting, but small stuff, which in the long run can be huge). I get the chance to help Courts answer tough questions. I get to play detective (...to a certain extent) in helping Courts answer tough questions.

Pragmatic: I get paid well. I have great benefits and retirement. I have a ton of flexibility in my jobs.

 

[ClinicalABA]

1. Job security/options- not really worried about losing job, and confident I'd quickly find another if I did
2. Pay- good salary and benefits from "day job"- I hustle and work hard, but am not overworked
4. Easy Access to "side gigs"- for me, this is mainly adjuncting
3. Task Variation- I can do assessments, treatment, teach, research, program development, administration, etc. I currently really like doing assessments with very young children, so that's what i put on my calendar. If I get bored or want to keep my skills up, I'll schedule a 4.5 year old for assessment. Once every year or so I'll take on a therapy or clinical supervision place. I currently avoid any administration responsibilities.
4. Autonomy- I'm given global expectations for billable hours/receivables, and am left to meet those as I see fit
5. Having people count on me and my clinical and administrative problem solving skills, and being able to deliver and actually be helpful. I'm at the point in my career where I'm the senior clinician in my area, and it feels kinda nice to have people look to me as an "expert", as well as to have the opportunity and responsibility to actually display expert level skills

 

[ClinicalABA]

Beyond that, I am one of the few people I know that genuinely enjoys my job...

I'd put myself in that category

...and would not quit working if I won the lottery (though I might move to PP). I could never survive sitting in front of spreadsheets all day like my wife does.

Now you're pushing it! I love assessing toddlers, but I love fly fishing, being in the woods, and just chilling out even more!

 

[Fan_of_Meehl]

I've been a part of the SDN community for a few months now and have really enjoyed reading everyone's perspectives about the variety of topics discussed. Although I've noticed that sometimes it seems like some comments can be skewed toward the negative/ pessimistic side about the field in general. (Might just be my interpretation, but sometimes that's the impression I'm left with) ... so as a rising 2nd year PhD student who is (for the most part) looking forward to a career in this field, I'm wondering what everyone thinks the BEST part of their jobs are? What makes you happy that you chose this path? What would you say are the benefits?

At the end of the day--in a clinical treatment context--my job is to ultimately facilitate people adopting and acting upon a focus of taking more responsibility for their daily lives and how those lives work out, including symptom reduction. There are many nuances and pathways to this facilitation but--at the end of the day--their psychological problems are their responsibility to manage. As long as I am doing everything I can to leverage clinical psychological science for that task, I'm doing my job, regardless of outcome.

You can't save every puppy. You can't slay every dragon.

 

[cara susanna]

I love how intellectually rigorous it is. I feel like I use my brain everyday. I also love research--both conducting it and consuming it.

 

[R. Matey]

I think the ability to choose meaningful work is really important to me. Like others, I have more freedom and opportunity to choose what I want my day to day to look like than many people in other professions. For all of the hand-wringing we do on our relatively low salaries, it's my experience that people who make more spend much of their working hours wishing they were doing something else. Can't say that for my career in psychology thus far.

 

[GradStudent2020]

I love the work I do and have done in this field.

Assessment is pretty flexible in terms of working hours and location independence.

There are so many ways to work in this field, if you get burnt out you can do something different every 5-10 years and never run out of options. Clinical work, research, teaching, consultation, writing, etc.

I can make a great salary even as an ECP. (I’m
not even licensed yet and making a pretty comfortable salary at an informal post-doc).

I get to work with colleagues that have similar values, are social justice oriented (and not just keyboard warriors), and genuinely care about helping people.

 

[WisNeuro]

I'd say flexibility. Easy to relocate or find a job in an area that I want to be in. Make my own schedule, good salary for relatively low hours. Good amount of time to pursue legislative advocacy work on the side, which is fun if you're into that sort of thing. Also, being able to do my job pretty much any way that I see fit, within reason.

 

[erg923]

Although you can (and inevitably will) bring your doctoral training in mental health and psychological science (most importantly) to the table, I would argue the best part is that you are not limited to being a "psychologist" per se for the rest of your working years. There are opportunities to expand to do more than direct clinical service or "oversee" those who do it under your clinical or administrative supervision. Having your roots here can have alot of benefits to various businesses and/or positions/lines of work.

I know quite a few who have their Ph.D, but don't practice (or supervise clinical service) in their current roles. I maintain about 6-10 hours of something clinical, personally, at this time. This is actually required by my current company. And they carve out 8 hours/week for me to do it. So no weekends are needed. Some really, really high level positions (and the money) sound great. Others sound awful and/or I have no interest in it.... or couldn't really do it well even if I tried.

I am bit limited here, however. For example, if given opp for a position that would require more than 2 computer screens or a **** load of potential "thrown-under the bus"and/or inevitable weekend work or checking-in ...I would be out. Again, the amount of computer screens one needs in their office seems important here. I also have zero interest in moving anytime before my kids are out of high school.

Also, flexibility of schedule/work hours IS amazing, and should not be over-estimated. Today I mowed and did some landscaping, big bike ride, some other nonsense. All while being able to "work."

 

[AcronymAllergy]

Like others have said, the independence and flexibility are great. Working in an area that requires me to use my brain, and in relation to things I enjoy learning about, is another big bonus. The pay can be good, when combined with the flexibility, opportunities for outside income, and level of patient responsibility (e.g., I'm not on call and getting paged into the ED or onto the floor). I feel like on most days, what I do is meaningful for the patients and their families. Like Sanman, if I won the lottery, I don't think I'd stop working; I might just change locations or contexts.

And yeah, by having a doctorate in psychology, people are going to assume you know a lot about people and why they do what they do, whether or not you actually think you do. Professionally, this can be advantageous.

 

[deleted343839]

As others have said, autonomy, flexibility, variety, and intellectual stimulation are big pluses.

It's also feasible (not necessarily easy, but doable) to reinvent yourself in this field. I love talking to psychologists with really interesting jobs. It seems they almost never started out doing the same kind of work.

 

[AbnormalPsych]

I appreciate the intellectual stimulation and never feeling bored. It is kind of cool to get paid to talk with all kinds of people and get paid for it.

 

[erg923]

I appreciate the intellectual stimulation and never feeling bored. It is kind of cool to get paid to talk with all kinds of people and get paid for it.

To each their own of course, but treating "doc I am sad..." doc I am anxious" ....and "doc I can't sleep" is incredibly boring over a period of years...even with patient back stories.

Ironically, I probably could have held out a few more years in a SUDs IP/IOP in the VA...or even doing something with schizophrenia. Although, even then, like most practitioners (psychiatrists, psychologists, LCSW), I am not particularly interested in treating florid madness psychotherapeutically in the long-term.

Maybe this is my former VA years speaking, but I found the scope of what I/we do to be quite limited, even if sometimes varied and philosophically interesting/exploratory. I am just not cut out for anything approximating a full-time therapy role I guess? I would like to say that the MMPI and extended SCIDs magic held on...but after a while it just didn't.

 

[borne_before]

Sometimes, I really make difference. Not all the time. Not as often as I'd like. But, I really do help occasionally.

 

[futureapppsy2]

I've seen some of my research have tangible social and clinical impact, so that's cool.

 

[AbnormalPsych]

To each their own of course, but treating "doc I am sad..." doc I am anxious" ....and "doc I can't sleep" is incredibly boring over a period of years...even with patient back stories.

Ironically, I probably could have held out a few more years in a SUDs IP/IOP in the VA...or even doing something with schizophrenia. Although, even then, like most practitioners (psychiatrists, psychologists, LCSW), I am not particularly interested in treating florid madness psychotherapeutically in the long-term.

Maybe this is my former VA years speaking, but I found the scope of what I/we do to be quite limited, even if sometimes varied and philosophically interesting/exploratory. I am just not cut out for anything approximating a full-time therapy role I guess? I would like to say that the MMPI and extended SCIDs magic held on...but after a while it just didn't.

Leaving the VA helped me significantly with this.

 

[PsySeeker]

To each their own of course, but treating "doc I am sad..." doc I am anxious" ....and "doc I can't sleep" is incredibly boring over a period of years...even with patient back stories.

Ironically, I probably could have held out a few more years in a SUDs IP/IOP in the VA...or even doing something with schizophrenia. Although, even then, like most practitioners (psychiatrists, psychologists, LCSW), I am not particularly interested in treating florid madness psychotherapeutically in the long-term.

Maybe this is my former VA years speaking, but I found the scope of what I/we do to be quite limited, even if sometimes varied and philosophically interesting/exploratory. I am just not cut out for anything approximating a full-time therapy role I guess? I would like to say that the MMPI and extended SCIDs magic held on...but after a while it just didn't.

Generally speaking I rarely feel that my patients, their stories, or their problems are “incredibly boring.” To me that sounds foreign, and more like burnout, cynicism, or maybe just that therapy came to be a poor fit for your personality/interests/strengths.

 

[Unipsychler]

I'm doing clinical work in a small group practice. I love that I get paid a good salary to talk to fascinating people all day. I love that I can scale my caseload up or down depending on what's going on in my life. I love that, even outside of pandemic conditions, I can do all my admin work from home whenever I want.

I've found that if I'm working with a population I click with, I am never bored. I specialize in personality disorders, so I often get patients referred to me who other clinicians have found to be "too much" for their setting. But I find them to be so vivid and passionate and fascinating, and it's the best feeling in the world when I can help them figure out how to make their unique traits work for them instead of against them.

 

[Ollie123]

For me, simultaneously the best and worst thing about our field is how easily everything either falls under the umbrella of psychology or can be harnessed and utilized as part of it. Our field is unbelievably diverse. This is good because I can study virtually anything I want to and call it psychology. As a soft money faculty in an AMC I sometimes joke that my job description is basically "Do whatever the hell you want, just make sure you pay for it yourself." This is bad because - being who I am - I feel the need to study everything and thus often feel like I don't have an expertise.

Fields I have collaborated with now or in the recent past:
Oncology, internal medicine, thoracic surgery, genetics, molecular biology, marine ecology, computer science, computer engineering, nursing, public health, neuroscience, cognitive science, counseling, education, infectious disease, biostatistics, sociology, bioinformatics, exercise science, user-centered design/human factors.

In the one sense, this is awesome. Quite literally, yesterday I was on a Zoom call with NIH and a computational neuroscientist discussing an upcoming grant application where we will be attempting to translate new mathematical models of memory into a novel exposure therapy protocol we think has the potential to vastly improve efficacy. After the call I emailed with a collaborator who exclusively studies marine ecology but given they are routinely 10+ years ahead of anything we do to study activity patterns, is working with me to develop a new digital health transdiagnostic assessment method. He sends me an article on bird flight patterns that I promptly scan because yes - it turns out that understanding things like bird migration and how sonar affects whale movement patterns is relevant to my job as a clinical psychologist and I desperately wish I knew more about it. I then put on my therapist hat and called a couple patients to get back on my schedule and did some brief supportive therapy/problem-solving by phone. This is not an atypical day for me, by any stretch of the imagination. The downside is that it can be utterly exhausting because keeping up on all these things is impossible. I could work 16 hour days, 7 days/week and still feel like I'm falling further and further behind. So it has pros and cons In retrospect, I should probably have been a bit more focused from the get-go and then branched out more carefully, but that ship has sailed at this point.

edit: I forgot physics, radiology and philosophy!

 

[PsyDr]

1) For the most part, when all is said and done, the job is just sitting down and talking to a stranger.

2) Liability is super low. So long as you practice like a rational, non criminally inclined, informed person, you’re fine. (Side note: I wonder if online hook up apps are correlated with declines in professional sexual misconduct. Like how the availability of online porn is negatively correlated serial killers in a region).

3) It’s the right combination of obscure and legit for my tastes. Right combination of demand and responsibilities. No one is paging me in the middle of the night. But it’s not like other medical professionals think I’m useless either.

4) I’ve dated enough physicians and nurses to appreciate that my work almost never has to deal with poop, Pee, blood, genitalia, etc. I’m pretty happy about that.

5) The field has established the fact that one can do many types of things with this degree and license. I don’t think people appreciate how important that is. As far as anyone knows you have advanced training in math, biology, human behavior, etc. but no one knows how deep that education goes for you.

6) it’s paid per hour, and has extenders. This opens many opportunities.

7) it’s a pretty small profession at the more established levels of smaller sub specialities. Nice to be able to get information easily, nice to be able to socialize with someone at the top of your profession because he/she doesn’t have a ton of other options for others to talk to in the profession.

8) People don’t know exactly what we do. That’s awesome.

9) Theres always something else to learn.

10) Then, you know, the money, the power, the women, the fame....

 

[Sanman]

2) Liability is super low. So long as you practice like a rational, non criminally inclined, informed person, you’re fine. (Side note: I wonder if online hook up apps are correlated with declines in professional sexual misconduct. Like how the availability of online porn is negatively correlated serial killers in a region).

I need to know more about this...

 

[PhDStudentCP]

Thanks so much all, for your thoughtful responses

 

[singasongofjoy]

Mine echo what others have said - job stability and flexibility are def part of it. And in normal times, my day to day interactions with clients is just really fun, or at least super interesting when it's not. It's security against boredom. Right now, though, I'm kinda running on fumes emotionally and very little sleep physically due to work demands all scrambled up and turned upside down by COVID + redeployment within our small clinic to work at larger hospital + staff being out, so this thread was a nicely timed reminder. Thank you.

 

[boomshakalaka]

He sends me an article on bird flight patterns that I promptly scan because yes - it turns out that understanding things like bird migration and how sonar affects whale movement patterns is relevant to my job as a clinical psychologist and I desperately wish I knew more about it.

Ahhh, it looks like the " "A Human-Raven Affinity: On Merging Nature and the Human" dissertation was ahead of its time

 

[Ollie123]

Ahhh, it looks like the " "A Human-Raven Affinity: On Merging Nature and the Human" dissertation was ahead of its time

I would be amazed if the author of that thing understood 50% of the words in my last email exchange. Heck, I barely cracked 80%.