Psychology Conversion Course

Course Overview

The Psychology Conversion Course is designed to provide a pre-professional qualification equivalent to a bachelor degree in psychology. The course is accredited by the Psychological Society of Ireland (PSI) and allows students proceed to postgraduate education, including higher degrees by research, and to specialize in an area of professional psychology. It is a two year full-time course based on lectures, tutorials, laboratory classes and research projects.

As graduates, you have most of the academic skills you need to succeed on the Psychology Conversion Course. Our main objective is to facilitate your entry into the profession of psychology and to train you in the discourse of a new academic discipline. We feel this transfer is best effected via active learning and discussion and to facilitate this much of your learning will take place in small groups where you are encouraged to be active and collaborative learners.

While some of your classes will be taken with other psychology students, we are the only psychology course still providing very small group academic tutorials to our students. Throughout your two years you will meet with an academic staff member every fortnight in groups of just 2/3 of your Psychology Conversion Course peers. This module is intended to complement the core programme and to assist you in your introduction to the academic discipline of psychology as a whole.

Our aim is to train our students to be critical consumers and active producers of psychological knowledge. To that end all teaching in the School of Psychology TCD is research-led and delivered by active researchers in the field. You will be encouraged from the outset to get involved with the many research groupings in the School, whether you want to just sit in on research meetings and talks to experience the diversity of psychological research being conducted or to participate more actively as a research assistant.

In short, we aim to provide a rigorous and comprehensive primary training which will inspire you to take the next step towards a career in or using psychology.

The course aims to provide an understanding of the nature of psychology as a profession, the psychologist’s professional responsibilities, standards of performance and ethical issues; to enable students to acquire advanced knowledge in relevant areas within psychology, to extend skills in formulating research problems, gathering and analysing data, interpreting and communicating research findings; and to help students explore their own interests and capacities in the field and to prepare them for further training.

For professional work in psychology it is usually necessary to proceed to a higher degree by research or course work in the speciality of one’s choice. The School of Psychology at present offers postgraduate courses in Counselling Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Clinical Supervision, Applied Psychology, Applied Behaviour Analysis, Psychoanalytic Studies and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees by research. For further information about these courses, please select the appropriate menu option on the left.