There are roughly 500,000 psychology majors in the United States and about 75% of them go straight into the business world with only a bachelor's degree. Given the tentative nature of career decision making in a complex and changing economic and job environment, Eric Landrum and Paul Hettich provide students with innovative strategies for succeeding after college with an undergraduate degree in psychology. Considering the undergraduates' transition from college to career in a practical manner, the authors introduce major career preparedness topics that summarize research and data, provide strategies, include self-report exercises and offer further recommendations. Combining the empirical data with their practical experience with thousands of students, Landrum and Hettich provide key advice and tools to help psychology majors survive and thrive in the workplace.
Features:
-Provides overview of multiple career options available to psychology baccalaureate graduates.
-Extensive coverage of networking shows students how to build a strong network and develop sustaining relationships in their areas of interest.
-Exercises in each chapter help students chart their course to their career.
-Describes a career-oriented action plan for students to implement during their time in college.
Author Biography:
Paul I. Hettich received his PhD in general Experimental Psychology from Loyola University Chicago. Subsequently he was program evaluator for the federally funded Cooperative Education Research Laboratory, Inc. At the Intext Corporation he worked as an applied research scientist managing driver behavior research and training contracts. His experiences in military, non-profit, and corporate settings gave him a “real-world” perspective for a 35-year career at Bara College (later Barat College of DePaul University) where he taught various psychology courses, chaired the department, and served in administration as academic dean, grants writer, and institutional researcher. He completed a post-doctoral summer session in program evaluation at Northwestern University and subsequently directed the evaluation of a three-year federally funded Women in Leadership Learning program at Barat College. He was a member of the Danforth Foundation for Teaching excellence and the first recipient at Barat College of the Sears Roebuck Foundation Award for Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership. He has several professional presentations—nationally and internationally—as well as publications on diverse topics such as study skills, professional development of faculty, teaching methods, program evaluation, cognitive development of college students, and workplace readiness. He is a Fellow in Divisions 1 (General Psychology), 2 (Society for the Teaching of Psychology), and 52 (International Psychology) of the American Psychological Association and a Life Member of the Midwest Psychological Association.
R. Eric Landrum is a Professor and Chair in the Department of Psychological Science at Boise State University, receiving his PhD in cognitive psychology from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He is a research generalist, broadly addressing the improvement of teaching and learning, including the long-term retention of introductory psychology content, skills assessment, improving help-seeking behavior, advising innovations, understanding student career paths, the psychology workforce, successful graduate school applications, and more. Eric has 425+ presentations, 23 books/textbooks, and published 85 peer-reviewed journal articles. He has collaborated with 300+ research assistants and taught 18,000+ students in 28 years at Boise State. During Summer 2008, he led an American Psychological Association (APA) working group at the National Conference for Undergraduate Education in Psychology studying the desired results of an undergraduate psychology education, and at the 2014 APA Educational Leadership Conference, Eric was presented with a Presidential Citation for outstanding contributions to the teaching of psychology. With the 2015 launch of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology journal, he served as inaugural co-editor. He is a member of APA, a fellow of Division Two (Society for the Teaching of Psychology/STP), a fellow of Division One (General Psychology), and served as STP President (2014). He is a charter member of the Association for Psychological Science (named fellow in 2018). During 2016-2017, Eric was President of the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association and was President of Psi Chi, the International Honor Society in Psychology in 2017-2018. In August 2019, he received the American Psychological Foundation’s Charles L. Brewer Distinguished Teaching of Psychology Award, the highest award given to teachers of psychology in America. will serve as the 2015–2016 president of the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association.
