What Makes a Psychology Graduate Distinctive?
Abstract
This paper explores the question of what an individual gains from having undertaken and completed an undergraduate (a 3-year bachelor) degree in psychology in the United Kingdom. It addresses the question in two ways. The first is by describing a set of skills and knowledge which an individual can be expected to acquire as a direct result of taking psychology as a subject. These fall into three groups: first, specific skills such as numeracy and literacy; second, knowledge resulting directly from the content of a psychology degree (bearing in mind that these can vary considerably in content and orientation); and third, synthetic skills derived from the epistemological characteristics of psychology as an academic discipline. The paper then goes on to discuss some of the more general outcomes of, or benefits from, the study of psychology. It addresses the question of psychology as a liberal education, and of the internalized and automatized nature of much psychological knowledge, since the latter often acts as a barrier to a full awareness of what an individual has actually gained from their course.
References
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