In high school, I worked on the school newspaper and quickly developed a passion for print design and layouts. I had it all figured out: My future career would be designing and laying out print newspapers and publications.
I was psyched when I was accepted into the University of Maryland, College of Journalism, where I thought I would jump right into design and graphical layouts. But, after just a couple months, I was more confused than ever. Many prerequisite classes I needed for my degree were geared towards reporting and writing, two subjects I was not interested in.
I wanted to change my major, but to what? Needing to stay on track with credits, I took an intro psychology course and then it hit me — what about a career in psychology? I couldn’t really see myself in a clinical setting or as a professor, but as I learned more about psychology as a profession, I realized how multifaceted it was. I took many courses in I/O psychology, social psychology and personality psychology. In my junior and senior years, I volunteered in a biopsychology lab and in a family and child development lab. It was a great learning experience, and I really enjoyed assisting in data collection and running subjects through different tests.
After I graduated, I was trying to figure out what to do. I remember looking at job ads for technical writing, and even advertising and marketing jobs. Then, I met someone who said, “You’re a psychology major? Would you be interested in a job at APA?” Very much trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to do, I took her up on the offer and applied.
A few months later, I was hired at APA as a technical information analyst in the Office of Publications and Databases (OPD), and I made my way through the production track before joining the “Systems” satellite team, which was responsible for importing production work into the database. This was the beginning of my interest in computers and information technology in general. It fascinated me how computers worked and how data were stored and retrieved.
It was about this time when I made my first website — a simple HTML website for my brother’s company. From there I just kept reading tutorials online about web development, absorbing as much as I could from people around me. It was such a rush for me to work on code and instantly see results. I was hooked.
Then, a new position opened in the OPD for a product development specialist. This job seemed like a stretch to me, as I had a psychology degree, and not an IT degree. But I asked around, did a ton of research, studied the skills listed on the job application and applied for the job. I was essentially given the opportunity to change my career when I got this job, focusing on vendor search platforms, databases, search and usability.
The usability work I did became my new passion — it was like both a science and an art form to me, as I made interfaces, platforms, and sites more user-friendly. I worked in that job for about four years, and during that time started going to user experience (UX) and action design meetups, where I learned about building products that helped users change their behavior. It was so cool to meet so many other people who did the same kind of work that I did, and I also started learning about how cognitive psychology and human-computer interaction related to what I was doing at work. It all seemed to be making sense for me… the path I had taken and where I was going.
Then a new job was posted at APA for a UX manager, and this piqued my interest. I finally felt confident in my career and where it was heading, as my work life and hobby of making websites started to meld.
Sometimes you might not know what you want to do, and that’s ok. You can evolve, just as your interests evolve and the world evolves. Having an undergraduate psychology degree can be a bit scary when you don’t really see yourself in clinical, research or academic areas after you graduate (it was for me at least), but there are other options. You just have to put yourself out there and go for it.
If things don’t work out with your major or your career as you expect them to, then try something new. I never would have thought my career would have taken me to where I am now.
About the author
Brian graduated with a BA in psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park. His passion with websites centers around user experience, user interfaces, search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising. He is currently the UX optimization and transactional experience solutions manager at the American Psychological Association in Washington, D.C. His interests include collecting, traveling, animals, biking and seeing live music.