Yesterday I visited the Open House organised by the National University of Singapore (NUS) Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), where I will be spending the next three or four (if doing honours) years of my life. The purpose of the Open House was to showcase the wide range of programmes on offer within FASS.
To say that an FASS student is spoilt for choice would be an understatement. The number of majors and minors is staggering! I myself am a little overwhelmed, because so many things look very interesting and useful and I wish I could study them all, but I have to be realistic in terms of the workload I will be able to handle.
I am most keen on two of the majors: Psychology, and Communications and New Media (CNM). There were talks for them, which I attended. Certainly, the cool air-conditioned comfort of the lecture theatre was a welcome respite from the heat outside! The talks were delivered by senior faculty members from each of the respective departments, and were... enlightening but elicited rather different feelings from me.
The Psychology professor was brutally honest in presenting his programme. The title of his presentation was "Psychology - for me or not for me?" but he might as well have called it "101 reasons why you should not study psychology". He pulled no punches and sugarcoated absolutely nothing. None of what he said surprised me, and most of it I actually covered in my previous blog post. I happen to also be a believer in telling prospective students the truth about psychology. When I was in poly, I volunteered at a couple of Open Houses, and I always emphasised to visitors that the "psychology" shown by the media is pure fantasy. I suppose the professor was trying to protect those students from junior college from getting a rude shock when their expectations of psychology turns out to be far from the reality. Having studied psychology before, I have the advantage of prior experience. Nonetheless, hearing such a distinguished academic laying bare the visceral ugliness of the field made me feel a little discouraged and frightened about possibly selecting psychology as my major.
On the other hand, the CNM professor was truthful about his major but tempered it with obvious passion and excitement in what his department had to offer. He did caution that CNM is, contrary to popular belief, not all fun and games and is actually quite theoretical, but went on to present some examples of projects in which CNM students applied those theories to solving real-world issues. Interestingly, he took pains on a couple of occasions to differentiate CNM from the course offered by the Wee Kim Wee School of Communications and Information at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). To avoid the risk of sparking an argument, I shall not elaborate on what he said, but I felt that it was a good move on his part to address this. After all, visitors to the TP Open Houses often used to ask me the difference between the psychology course at TP compared to the one at Ngee Ann. All in all, his talk left a better overall impression of CNM as a course of study.
I was quite pleased at being able to recognise certain phrases used in the presentations. Funnily enough, the psychology professor did not use any jargon and he deserves great credit for that. However, the CNM professor mentioned that students could expect to "struggle with calculating the t-test" (one sample? independent samples? paired samples?) and learn about "theories of persuasion, stereotypes and biases" (Cialdini, Malone, Kahneman, Tversky, Giegerenzer...). Lucky me, I have learnt these before! I think I still have my old lecture slides somewhere...
Listening to both talks made me feel a little queasy and uncertain about the future. I still want to do psychology in some shape or form, primarily so that my diploma training will not be a big waste. However, I really have no idea whether I want to commit to doing it as a major. At this point in time I do not intend to enter a graduate programme (i.e. Masters) immediately after getting my degree as I want to go to work as soon as possible. Having psychology as my major would bring me serious problems when it comes time for me to look for a job due to its lack of industry relevance, especially at Bachelor level. In contrast, CNM degrees are highly sought-after and I was advised by an authoritative source that its value will continue to rise in the coming years as the "New Media" part of the training becomes more useful with increasing digitalisation of the world.
Perhaps I can do both Psychology and CNM? A double major is an option, but brings with it its own set of problems. For one, there is the issue of which to designate as the primary major. This will appear on the degree scroll upon graduation, and also is the discipline in which the honours will be in. The difficulty lies here: psychology is more useful to have as an honours but adds less value being on the degree scroll, whereas CNM would make the degree more attractive to employers but is less crucial to do honours in. I will have to think long and hard about which to be my primary major, if I do a double. Of course, doing a double major would also mean taking more modules. Coupled with the fact that CNM has a compulsory internship programme which may result in time away from school, I will most likely need to overload my other semesters to fulfil the graduation requirements within the normal timeframe, or delay my graduation by a year. Neither is a very appealing prospect to be honest.
This leaves me with one other course of action: I can demote one of the two to a minor. Obviously, if I do this, psychology will have to be the one to go, simply because CNM as a minor makes no sense career-wise. Doing a minor in CNM is akin to not doing CNM at all. On the flip side, Psychology complements CNM beautifully. Subjects like cognitive psychology and social psychology contain theories and concepts that will crop up in CNM too. The aforementioned familiarity I have with stereotypes, biases and theories of persuasion illustrates this fact. Abnormal psychology may prove useful too, as CNM has collaborated with mental health organisations in the past on campaigns to raise awareness of issues related to mental illness. A minor in psychology would support the CNM major nicely, giving me greater depth of knowledge while allowing me to retain some semblance of manageability in my academic workload.
Decisions, decisions. And through all of this, I also have to fight the nagging feeling in the back of my mind. What if I am making the wrong choices without even realising it? Maybe I will only discover my mistake years from now when it is too late. What if...?
So many questions, not enough answers. Damn, this growing up thing really sucks!
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