Written by: Anika Warrier
People-Person, Empathetic, Good Listener…
If that is you and if you are interested in pursuing psychology as a profession, here are some of my key learnings that I’ve picked up firsthand from actually speaking with various mental health professionals, plus a few resources! down with therapists myself.
What These Conversations Taught Me About This Field
Earlier this year I started interviewing mental health professionals for a series called Therapists Off the Clock, part of our Mindful, Beautiful, and Thriving podcast. I went in thinking I had a rough idea of what “being a therapist” meant. Five episodes later, I don’t think that anymore — and here’s why.
The biggest surprise was realizing “therapist” isn’t one job, it’s an umbrella over several very different ones.
- A licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) often blends actual therapy with hands-on advocacy: untangling insurance denials, navigating hospital systems, sometimes even courts, on a client’s behalf.
- An LMFT/LPCC tends to zoom out from the individual to the whole family system; one guest walked me through something called the “designated patient,” where the person everyone assumes has the problem often isn’t where the problem actually started.
- A clinical psychologist (PhD) might do therapy, testing, or both, in settings ranging from a private practice office to a hospital NICU.
- And a neuropsychologist specializes in figuring out why a brain works the way it does, mostly through structured testing rather than ongoing talk therapy. Same broad field, but four very different day-to-days.
What struck me just as much was how little any of it followed a straight line. One guest changed majors four times before landing on psychology. Another told me she became a therapist as her “second career,” after years spent reading and just living first. Even the guest who says he knew in high school, because he watched his own brother go through addiction treatment still seriously weighed becoming a psychiatrist before choosing psychology instead. So if you don’t have your path figured out yet, that’s apparently the norm here, not a warning sign.
And yet, for all the different routes in, the advice itself barely varied from guest to guest: stay curious, don’t judge people’s stories before you’ve actually heard them out, and get real experience being around people: camp counseling, tutoring, coaching, volunteering, before you worry about which theory or specialty to choose. Nobody, not once, told me to start with a textbook.
The part that surprised me most, though, wasn’t academic at all. More than one guest spoke candidly about the emotional weight of the work: It was sitting with someone’s trauma, or a parent barely holding it together mid-divorce, and how they’ve had to build real practices around carrying that, rather than just pushing through it. One guest described a specific mindfulness ritual she runs between sessions just to stay present without burning out. It made me realize the “soft skills” side of this field is much less optional than I’d assumed.
On AI, Specifically
AI came up naturally in conversation with a few of the guests, and their takes were more specific than a simple “it won’t replace us.” One already uses an AI tool to help write faster, more thorough reports, while insisting the actual testing and connection can’t be automated, as she put it, there are things AI is good at, and things only humans are, like real-time empathy. Another sees AI eventually becoming a genuinely useful tool for quick answers and self-education, but was candid that it’s only as good as the data it’s trained on, and that how it might respond to someone in an actual crisis is still an open, risky question worth working through carefully. A third put it more simply: we’re wired for connection, and the kind of healing that happens in therapy comes from being with another person — something no model can replicate. Faster paperwork, more informed clients, maybe useful data down the line, but not a stand-in for the relationship itself.
Reading List, Courtesy of Our Guests
If any of this has you curious to go deeper, here’s where I’d start — beginning with the books our guests recommended directly.
For general psychology: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, Determined by Robert Sapolsky, and Patient H.M. by Luke Dittrich.
For specific conditions and neurodiversity: Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz, MD; Unmasking Autism by Devon Price; the How to ADHD YouTube channel (now also a book); Reel 2e, a great resource on giftedness and neurodiversity; Liz Angoff’s Explaining Brains; An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, on bipolar disorder and psychosis; and The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, on trauma.
And two I’d add from my own shelf: Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin, which captures neurodivergent brains at their finest — how a brain can carry real strengths tucked inside what looks like a weakness — and Psych 101 by Paul Kleinman, which is basically psychology in a nutshell: the basics, the statistics, the core concepts, all in one place.
B.A. or B.S.?
Last thing, since it comes up constantly: both degrees are solid, and it really comes down to fit. A B.A. tends to be the more humanities-geared path, a good fit if you’re drawn to counseling or people-facing work generally. A B.S. keeps the door open toward more STEM-adjacent specialties. When I asked one guest directly which she’d recommend, she told me she genuinely doesn’t have a preference either way; what matters more, she said, is the opportunities and experiences you build around whichever degree you pick, not the letters themselves.
Getting Exposure Before You’ve Picked a Specialty
You don’t need to have any of this figured out to start building toward it. The single most consistent thing our guests pointed to — more than any class or credential — was just working with people. It doesn’t have to be complicated: find a cause you actually care about and show up. Volunteering, camp counseling, tutoring, any job that puts you around kids — this is the real foundation, long before grad school enters the picture.
Beyond that, try building a passion project of your own — not for college applications, not for anyone’s approval, just to learn something about the field. (A simple one: test whether people remember words at the end of a list better than ones in the middle. That’s the recency vs. primacy effect, and you can run it with nothing more than a list of ten words and some willing friends.)
Read widely, and not only psychology books — one guest specifically credited reading literature broadly with teaching her more about people than her coursework ever did. Network shamelessly; ask around, reach out, and don’t be shy about it. And if you’re choosing classes, AP Psychology or Psych 101, AP Seminar/Research, Sociology, Anthropology, AP Biology, and Statistics all came up as genuinely useful foundations — several guests specifically mentioned biology, statistics, or anthropology as classes they still draw on today, years into their careers.
