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I think you are creating a false dichotomy here. You seem to imply that "science" students are somehow better equipped to become psychologists. The corrolary of this argument is that broadly educated students with degrees in the humanities or other social sciences are somehow less well equipped to conduct research or to be psychologists than persons with a "science" background.
Is not the converse true?? Anyone can conduct research, run stats and publish a paper on a topic. But students with a background in the humanities or other social sciences may be far better at understanding the meaning and implications of research because their world view is broader and more comprehensive. I have a masters in psychology and have work mainly as a therapist but I also have a doctoral degree in social anthropology from a world class British institution (from back in the stone age of the 1980's). The central question that anthropology asks as a discipline is "what does it mean to be a human being." Would not someone like myself be able to understand psychological research from a vastly broader and more comprehensive worldview than a person with a degree in chemistry?? I should also note that persons active in other social and behavioral sciences such as anthropology or sociology don't engage in this incessant neurotic hand wringing over professional roles and educational models. In contrast to the other disciplines, psychology seems wracked by identity crises.
To some degree this is because specialists in the other social sciences are far less fixated on experimental methodologies and have made extensive use of ethnography and other more qualitative methods. Sociocultural anthropologists are quite confident in ethnography as a methodology and are not particularly concerned about the "science" in the field. I have the feeling that psychologists are so deeply concerned about "science" because psychologists perceive themselves as falling short in relation to the physical and biological sciences. Some have dubbed this as "physics envy" on the part of academic psychology.
Conversely, many psychologists in academe (Timothy Baker and Richard McFall perhaps) regard fields that don't use experimental methods as something less than scientific (ignoring the reality that fields such as astronomy and astrophysics use observational rather than experimental data). The flip side of the inferiority complex is a sense of superiority with regard to other disciplines such as sociology and anthropology and their associated methodologies. Of course professional applied roles are different. Applied anthropologists and sociologists also do not to work in health care as "providers" but instead function as consultants and researchers and so they don't have an inferiority complex vis a vis medicine. Of course, psychology's inferiority complex with medicine is directly related to its longstanding inferiority complex vis a vis physics and biology. Psychology as a field needs to "grow a pair" and regard itself and its methodologies with true confidence while conversely appreciating data generated from other fields. It also should have the confidence to embrace multiple visions of itself. Dysfunctional systems have enormous difficulty embracing more than one worldview so in this sense the field of psychology is dysfunctional and the endless angst is a reflection of this.
This made me smile as it sums up my perspective on the dichotomy as it stands within psychology. Bravo and well stated.
We're both mature adults and can adapt (or make the decision to break up) because we're in a healthy relationship. If your partner doesn't approve of your study (or demands you go pt), then part-time study is the last thing you should be requesting.
