what credentials might I need in Clinical Psychology? & how many years of school does it take to get a degree?

5 Comments »

psychgrad said:

For Clinical Psychology, you need 4 years of undergrad, 4 years of grad school (with about 1200 hours of concurrent externship or practicum experience), a one year full-time internship, and at least one year of postgraduate work to be licensed. You also need to complete a dissertation. The opportunities are pretty limitless, depending on where you want to work. You can work with children, adolescents, families, adults. You can work in a prison, school, community clinic, private practice, or hospital. You can also work in an office setting. You can teach, do therapy, do assessment, or be a consultant. Basically, most areas have a psychological component.
- 10 November 2009 at 12:38 pm
Kate H said:

Depends where you are. Usually you need a masters degree at the least. And that requires a 4 year bachelors, plus 3 years graduate school…. if you go full time.
- 13 November 2009 at 8:49 am
Tim said:

At my college (and I’m not going to pretend that everywhere is like this), as a psychology major, we were forced to choose a focus within psychology (i.e. industrial, criminal, couseling, educational, gerontology). And if you are a “good student,” it’ll take 4-5 years to complete your Bachelor’s and another 1-2 to complete your Master’s.
As far as careers in clinical psychology, I found (I wanted to be a clinician myself) that clinical psychology doesn’t exist anymore the way it did in the 50’s and 60’s.
- 15 November 2009 at 10:52 am
Max Power said:

it depends where you study..
and you can work almost everywhere were is needed someone to work with people`s issues, or you can work alone with patients, crisis intervention, giving group therapy to diabetics, alcoholics, drug addicts, anxious people, etc
- 17 November 2009 at 9:47 am
jodybird511 said:

You cannot be a clinical psychologist without a doctoral degree (you can be a counselor or a school psychologist with only a master’s degree–but not a clinical psychologist) and a license, which means first a bachelor’s degree (usually 4 years), then a master’s degree (typically another 2 years), then a PhD or PsyD (usually another 2 to 3 years after the master’s), then a year long predoctoral internship) and finally 1 to 2 years postdoctoral training….so altogether, about 10 years on the short end.
- 18 November 2009 at 11:08 am

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