Employer site visit/mentor Interview

An employer site I developed questions for was http://www.psych.org/, American Psychiatric Association. When looking at this site I asked myself questions like what is the general job outlook, nature of work, any positive experience stories available to site browsers, and is there any down side to having this occupation.
Answers I got were basically the same as the rest of the websites I went on when doing research on my career college research paper.
There were a lot of links about what type of research psychiatrists are doing at the moment which is something that caught my being that's what I want to do. There was a link called Psychiatric Research Report where psychiatrists give updates on how certain research on different mental illness or disorders are going. There's even a link on how the funding for research is going.There were different foundations such as for autism, ADD, child development and specifically the The American psychiatric Foundation. There were hundreds of positions stated on the website also from child and adolescence substance abuse counseling to substance abuse criminal justice programs. I was disappointed to not find any Success stories about people who became psychiatrists, there were stories though on those who recovered from substance abuse or mental illness and described how going to therapy and different group programs helped make them new people.

Groups

For our final for the class we have to do a group presentation and were put into certain groups. I thought the way our group was set up went hand and hand because there were two of us from the group who wanted to work in the field of psychology while there were two in the group who wanted to work in the field of criminal justice. When being a police officer there's a lot of psychology involved in the work, when interrogating a suspect or solving a case. You have to think how the suspect thinks and why they would do such a thing and so on. Same goes for psychology trying to heal one from their mental illness trying to figure out how they think to solve the problem or make it better etc.
I not to sure yet of how we are going to do our presentations. We might do a skit where a police officer and a psychologist are interrogating a suspect but I wouldn't take my word for it. There's so many ideas on how to make this creative and with four different brains and personalities our ideas can hopefully can up with something that won't make other students look at their phones every five to see if the clocks change or keep their eyes from shutting.

Chapters 4 and 5

In chapter four of Turning Points , the author gives a lot of advice on finding the right career for you. There was some advice given that I already did or knew, but there was also some advice that made me think about my decisions a little or started giving me ideas on getting closer to the questions I still needed to answer. There was a segment I thought was helpful called What are some good sources of information?, where she gives the reader were some reference books and magazines I could easily find in the library. It gave me the idea to look up some psychologist books, maybe biographies and informative articles about the field and getting to understand how it affects other aspects of your life. There were also some good websites that I took a look at when even doing my career/college research paper.

While searching for universities or four year schools I felt it was the hardest to find tuition fees on the website. Those universities seem to hide the link well, but I eventually got to finding them and probably took me god knows how long to find what I wanted. In chapter five it helps give me some advice on some questions to ask myself when browsing a college website, what programs the university/four year school has to offer. Since I'm going to be a transfer student I thought about if a college had any programs to offer for transfer students rather than just freshmen. The most important to me is what types of scholarships are available and what does it take to actually get into this school? I felt that trying to find these questions on the college webiste were kind of hard, which is so frustrating. I can never find the answer to one simple question. collegeboard.com and collegegrad.com were some websites I discovered while on the that famous double o search engine and came out pretty helpful to answering my questions. Thanks google.

Lingering Thoughts

During class we did an activity called lingering thoughts where we closed our eyes and threw away all the thought not having to do with CEP or our career and think about something might be troubling me or something that crosses my mind now and again. Some thing i have been having a problem with since taking this class is how I'm going to start getting experience in the field I'm interested and I feel that the more research I do on my "Dream" job the more I find myself drifting away from it. I do want to work in the field of psychology. It's something I love and gets the nerd out of me, but as I do more research on psychiatry the more I hear myself saying that's just not me. It is starting to get frustrating to me because soon enough when I transfer to a four year school in September I'll have to choose between pre-medical or psychology. Its not that I think medical school looks hard that has nothing to do I'd love to take the challenge but, I think my love for psychology will always rule over science. Which is starting to make me think about the career of a research psychologist. The more i read on that the more I find myself in it. hopefully my decision comes clear in September when it time to chose my major.