Schools urge students toward atypical careers

Psychology programs prompt students to find creative uses for their training.

By Bridget Murray
Monitor staff

At first glance, Laura Riggs and Eileen Russo have little in common besides their grounding in psychology. They?re separated by training specialty, career stage and the Appalachian Mountains. Russo, 36, is a Philadelphia-area business consultant with training in social psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. Riggs, 31, is working on a dissertation in clinical psychology at Loyola University of Chicago.

But the two do share a noteworthy similarity: Both are pursuing atypical psychology career paths. And both thank special initiatives of their traditionally academic training programs for encouraging that bent.

Riggs is the recipient of a new Loyola fellowship that rewards 'nontraditional' career pursuits. Russo says she?s benefitted from Pittsburgh?s requirement that students minor in an area outside social psychology. Both initiatives are emblematic of a movement among psychology programs to urge students? exploration of areas beyond standard academic research or clinical practice.

Riggs, for example plans to use her $10,000 Victor J. Heckler fellowship to help employees adapt to corporate restructuring and to steer adolescents away from risky sexual behavior. In addition, she hopes to continue her doctoral research on managed care?s impact on practitioners.

Russo, meanwhile, uses her business minor from Pittsburgh?combined with her social psychology training?to craft leadership training programs for business managers.

Psychology administrators view such awards and minors as ways to add an innovative spin to their programs? staple curriculums.

The Loyola award, for instance, sends a message that students can parlay their core psychology training into nonstandard careers, says Isaiah Crawford, PhD, chair of Loyola?s psychology department.

'It encourages students to use their breadth of skills in settings outside the usual clinical and academic arenas,' says Crawford. 'We believe students should view their professional horizons as wide open.'

Programs? responsibility?

Some educators think it?s not a psychology departments? job to train students for the marketplace. Among them are David Edwards, PhD, who fears that market-focused training leads students to overspecialize in trendy areas.

'There?s a danger in just focusing on career trends of the moment, because by the time you get your training in place, the marketplace has changed,' says Edwards, psychology professor and former chair of the psychology department at Iowa State University. 'If you hold to the basics and train students intelligently, they can handle any kind of marketplace when they get out.'

But Roberta Klatzky, PhD, head of Carnegie Mellon University?s psychology department and chair of the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology (COGDOP), says teaching marketable skills is a department?s responsibility.

'Marketable skills should be part of the core curriculum, not a separate add-on,' says Klatzky. She and Edwards wrote essays on marketability issues for a national conference on graduate psychology education in 1987. (Their essays appear in the proceedings from the conference, 'Preparing Psychologists for the 21st Century,' edited by Leonard Bickman, PhD, and Henry Ellis, PhD, and published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in 1990.)

Quality core training provides excellent preparation for such innovative areas as health administration and social policy, says Crawford. However, unaware of the breadth of their skills, and looking to faculty as role models, students often pigeonhole themselves into an academic or psychotherapy career path, he says. Thus, training programs can help them recognize other options.

Rewarding ingenuity

Pursuing career options outside the norm requires planning, says Crawford. Students wishing to land Loyola?s Victor Heckler Fellowship must show they have solid plans for their fellowship dollars in addition to a high GPA and good credentials. Their training and experiences must square with an unconventional career direction.

That?s the intention of Heckler, the psychologist behind the award who was trained at Loyola as a clinical psychologist and now applies his skills in corporate consulting. The award invites students of clinical, developmental, perception and social psychology to tap such areas as health promotion, public policy, business consultation and management. It also encourages unusual blends of interests and aspirations?a case in point being the combination of research on health-care policy and applied work in business and disease prevention that Riggs plans.

In addition to the $10,000, fellowship winners also receive tuition support for up to six credit hours and exemption from dissertation supervision fees. This spring marks the launch of the yearly prize.

The top three candidates for this year?s award plan careers in health administration, vocational rehabilitation and prosocial marketing. One candidate hopes to develop an inventory for job applicants that weeds out sex offenders without causing applicants embarrassment. He plans to market the tool to parole officers and human resources departments.

Another candidate plans to promote such prosocial behaviors as condom use, recycling and drug-free driving by studying media marketing and social persuasion tactics.

Encouraging specialization

Meanwhile at the University of Pittsburgh, students in the social psychology doctoral program must choose three or four courses in a specialty outside social psychology.

The minor equips students with extra skills for the job market, says Richard Moreland, PhD, a psychology professor in the program. Popular minors include marketing, business, health and organizational behavior. Specializing in statistics is less popular but particularly helpful because it?s one of the few areas that still provides plentiful teaching jobs, says Moreland.

Program graduates blend, chameleon-like, into many job settings, he says. Russo, for example, uses her social psychology research skills to develop leadership training instruments and her business skills to understand the kind of leadership development that business managers need. Her company, Human Resources Development Quarterly in King of Prussia, Pa., near Philadelphia, sells the instruments to corporations via a catalog.

Russo says her business minor helped her transition from academia to the business world. But the social psychology training gave her the fundamentals she needs in her job as the company?s vice president of research because it 'taught [her] how to think.'

If your program has an initiative to encourage students to pursue atypical careers, please let us know about it by e-mailing us.