Graduating from college with a degree in social psychology will definitely set you up for long-term success in a wide variety of counseling and/or therapy settings. For those who long for a career that helps others, that’s good news. Even better news is that there’s no shortage of entry-level counseling opportunities that you could explore. But what are those options? Which ones require advanced degrees, and which ones don’t?
Writers at Best Counseling Degrees have highlighted three relevant career paths that might warrant some consideration: (i) substance abuse counselor, (ii) juvenile counselor, and (iii) college counselor. A number of people have found those professions extremely rewarding and personally fulfilling.
Another benefit of at least experimenting with those options is the ability to accumulate some field experience, which is considered invaluable for a long-term career in counseling and/or therapy. That being said, transitioning to certain related fields would remain out of reach until you obtained a graduate degree, which is effectively a universal prerequisite for more advanced practice. A bachelor’s degree only lets you apply your knowledge as a generalist, whereas your graduate degree will let you specialize. The latter is clearly more challenging, but it remains worthwhile for a great many practitioners.
Say you decide to begin your career as a juvenile counselor to help adolescents adjust their life trajectory. After a few years of exposure, it’s possible you might want to prevent that same population from reaching you in the first place. In other words, you might feel like you’d do more good if you were positioned to be more proactive instead of reactive. A career as a school psychologist or school counselor could suddenly sound far more appealing. It wouldn’t hurt to research those careers, too. Kendra Cherry at Very Well Mind wrote a salient article highlighting those two careers along with a few other paths. That would be a decent place to start.
Remember that because you’d have now worked for some period of time, your other life circumstances might be entirely different. You could be living in a different city or married to a spouse with career obligations of his or her own that must be taken into account. At that point, the notion of up and relocating across the country for graduate school could seem far less realistic. Nobody could blame you. Fortunately, the digital age has given rise to several viable alternatives to higher education. Don’t underestimate online school counselor programs. Countless options exist that might fit your unique situation. Just be sure to do your homework first.
“I always wondered why somebody doesn’t do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody.” — Lily Tomlin