what credentials might I need in Clinical Psychology? & how many years of school does it take to get a degree?
Submitted on Monday, 9 November 2009
5 Comments
5 Comments
Candie™ asked:
I’m trying to find out because i wan to become a psychologist when I get older. I just wanted to know a few things. Also, what are the employment opprotunities in Clinical Psychology?
Tags: employment opprotunities, Psychologist, credentials, clinical psychology I’m trying to find out because i wan to become a psychologist when I get older. I just wanted to know a few things. Also, what are the employment opprotunities in Clinical Psychology?


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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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