Careers in Health Psych

The speakers who came in to speak to our class gave me a much better idea of someone with a speciality in Health Psychology would expect in graduate school and in a successful career beyond research.  Hearing about how intertwined  Social Psychology and Health Psychology were was really helpful for me to understand how best to utilize the information we have learned in this class.  What was most interesting to be was how certain psychologists will preemptively expect patients to opt out of the psychologist communicating with their doctor, because I expected most people to want that dialog to happen so that the psychologist is almost an advocate for the patient to their doctor to help conclude the best treatment for them.  Another interesting thing to me was the language barrier that I assumed there was a better system for interacting with non-English language speaking patients.  I am currently learning about the system for ESL students when they change schools and how new that is but I would have assumed in a field such as medicine where accurate information needs to be communicated effectively for someone’s health, there would already be a functioning system.