Why do you want to be a psychologist? Versions of this question are asked from the moment you sit down to apply to graduate school (or maybe even undergrad) until the day you apply for your last job.
Why did you do this?
But as everyone who has successfully applied to graduate school, clinical internship, postdoctoral fellowships and eventually jobs knows, there are all kinds of unspoken rules about what can and cannot be the reason you want to be a psychologist.
Among them are:
Don't say because you want to help people- it's bland and everyone wants to help people. That won't make you stand out.
DON'T talk about your own mental health history. Unless you do it in a sanitized way that is comfortable for us to read.
Don't talk about your experiences with the mental health of your family or your friends. Unless it's for a brief few seconds right at the beginning of your essay.
Don't talk about how having a PhD increases your earning potential compared to an MSW or a degree for most other helping professions.
I don't know what most folks' experiences are like with writing this essay, but for me this meant that I never told the story of why I actually wanted to be a psychologist. I came up with version of it. Like below when I applied to graduate school I opened my essay with:
I actually wanted to be a writer. It was only when I began to realize that it was the characters, not the stories themselves that made reading and writing so interesting to me that I began to think about psychology. When I did begin to think about it however, I couldn’t stop and by the time I was ready to apply for college, I was sure it was what I wanted to study. What I remember most from my process of selecting an undergraduate university is an information session at the school I later attended. During this information session a faculty member candidly described the psychology program. He stressed the department’s emphasis on undergraduates getting involved in research and the importance of students taking charge of their own involvement in the department. These same two points have been motivating factors throughout my undergraduate and post-baccalaureate research career and helped shape my decision to apply to graduate programs in clinical psychology.
Or when I applied to clinical internship:
When I was 21 I spent a year working in an Applied Behavior Analysis based school program. One of my students, 8-year-old Andrew, was completely non-verbal and knew only a few signs. The day that I met Andrew for the first time he signed “hug”. He leaned over to snuggle his face into the ends of my hair as I wrapped my arms around him. From that moment I knew- this kid had my heart. And then he buried his teeth in my arm and from that moment I knew- this was going to be complicated. My experiences with my students led me to focus my clinical work on children with ASD, language impairment, and very often with severe disruptive behaviors.
But now as an adult, there's a part of me that, having made it through school and training, wants to tell the unfiltered truth about what I made the decisions I have.
When I was in high school we all used to park our cars in a giant lot outside the school. Before the first bell we would run back and forth between each other's cars chatting, gossiping, getting ready for the day. After school instead of driving home right away we'd lounge against car door flirting, laughing, running to McDonald's next door for snacks. One day one of the guys in my friend group, we'll call him David, hopped in the passenger side of my car.
"I need you to ask me questions," he said.
"How are you?" I asked.
"No, not like that," he said. I raised my eyebrows, confused.
"Like, deep questions," he clarified.
I didn't know what was going on yet, but looking back knowing what I know now, I realize that he was noticing the ability I had with my friends to ask the right questions and let them talk. Something was wrong, he was struggling, but he couldn't just say it. He needed someone to ask the right questions. Over the course of the next few weeks he, and other friends hopped in the side of my car, often with their sadness or fears or anger and just talked. And waited for me to ask questions that would let them say what needed to be said.
"I failed a test in my favorite subject."
"My college essays are due tomorrow."
"Why is our friend leaving class all the time? Do you think she's okay?"
And, when I finally did manage to ask David the right question: "I'm gay."
David cried in my car (being gay in Catholic school is an awful experience) while I held his hand. Neither of us said anything but it was the last straw. I distinctly remember thinking- That's it. If people are going to keep doing this, I better get some training. I'm fighting dragons with a butter knife out here.
And that moment sent me down the path towards becoming a psychologist. There are other decision points along the way, like why I decided to work with Autistic children, and anxious children, and why I'm a psychologist and not a nurse or social worker but that was the moment that set my path in motion. It also makes the answer to the question "Why did you become a psychologist?" a complicated one for me. I know, of course, that realistically I did have a choice. But to me it's always felt like the world made the decision that I was a psychologist- or at least a therapist- and I couldn't in good conscience disagree.
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