Should I study sociology or psychology?
Are you crazy?
Or do you just want to drive yourself crazy trying to make sense of all the other nuts
out there?
What do you mean?
Psychology has few career options outside of counseling.
I could get a job as a criminal profiler.
You watch too much CSI.
You’d be more likely to get a job as a negotiator, MBA managerial track position or marketing.
Psychology has nothing to do with marketing.
That’s only what companies want you to think.
What do sociologists do?
They sometimes work in marketing, performing opinion surveys and studying demographic trends
of the customer base and its shifting preferences.
I thought they worked for non-profits studying people and determining public policy.
It’s rather hard to get a decent paying job at a non-profit these days.
You might make more money at a think tank.
Or a senior track position in sociology.
Fewer than one in four doctoral candidates in the liberal arts get a tenure track teaching
position today.
So much for teaching.
At least psychology is taught to nurses to better understand patients, police officers
to handle criminals, liberal arts majors who want an easy science class and business majors
who want to understand what sells other than sex.
I’ve heard that companies hire sociologists.
For marketing, sometimes.
But they hire psychologists for things like improving worker productivity by minimizing
distractions, reducing stress and finding out what is messing people up.
You’re making it sound like all the good paying positions are in business.
Marketing requires an understanding of human nature via psychology to improve the odds
of a sale.
They need an understanding of sociology to market that message to a whole lot of people
or manipulate opinion on a large scale.
Or I could study evolutionary biology.
That just makes you look stupid at parties to blame everything on evolution except your
own failure to find a way to make a living with a liberal arts degree.