Speaker 1: Welcome to Grad Life Grind. If you're new to this channel, thank you for checking it out, and if you're already a subscriber, thanks for being back again. My name is Arielle, and I'm a PhD student in clinical psychology, and in this channel I bring you information about the mental health field and talk about my journey as a PhD student. In today's video, I want to address another really common question that I get about the field of psychology, and that is, what is the difference between a PhD and a PsyD? So to break that down pretty simply, a PhD is a Doctor of Philosophy, and you can get a PhD in any field, and a doctorate degree is typically the highest one you can get in a given subject. So you can get a PhD in philosophy, in sociology, in education, and it's not the same as a medical degree or MD, which I talked about in a recent video, but the PsyD is also a doctoral degree, also the highest you can get, but it's specifically a Doctor of Psychology. And when I was trying to figure out whether I wanted to get a PhD or PsyD, I consulted some people that I knew in the field, and when I decided that I wanted to pursue psychology as a career, I had no idea that a PsyD even existed. I thought it was just bachelor's, master's, PhD, like every other field, and once I was doing my research about which graduate programs that I should apply to, I found out about a PsyD. And typically the main distinction between PhD and PsyD is research, since research is a really big part of what clinical psychologists do, research is also a huge part of clinical psychology PhD programs. Now PsyD programs involve a dissertation, but they aren't as research-heavy in their curriculum, so the way to decide which degree is right for you is really based on your career goals. I cannot tell you which one you should go for, it really depends on you. So if you know that you want to have a more academic or research-based career in the future, then the PhD might make more sense for you. If you know that you want to do more clinical work at the doctoral level, then a PsyD might be more right for you. And there's definitely also a little bit of crossover, so there are definitely clinical psychology PhD programs that are super clinically oriented, and the research isn't such a huge component of the curriculum at that school. On the other hand, there are also clinical psychology programs that are very research-heavy, and they aren't really breeding students who want to be therapists in the future. In that case, then maybe a PsyD is the option for you. And there are also people that I've worked with who have a PsyD that are running their own research lab, so there is definitely a possibility for crossover. The reason why I felt like a PhD was right for me is because I wanted to have more options. So I knew that at some point in my career I was going to want to work as a therapist, I knew that at another point in my career I might want to focus on research or an academic position, teaching as a professor, or maybe having an administrative role, and I felt that having a PhD would give me a little bit more options so that if at some point in my career I want to switch to something else, or if I want to hold many different roles at the same time, I felt like the PhD would make more sense. Another reason why I went for a PhD is because not a lot of people know what a PsyD is, and they may not know that a PsyD is still a doctoral degree, and I feel like most of the time when you hear the word PhD you know that that's the highest level, and that might seem kind of trivial, but I wanted to make sure that the letters after my name mean something to people, and like I said a PsyD is still doctoral degree, it's still the highest that you can get, so you're still doctor of psychology, your title will still be doctor, whatever your last name is, but I really felt like the PhD was a better fit for me because I love so many different things about the field. I love research, I love clinical work, I love being a mentor, I love having the ability to be a teacher, so that basically breaks down the difference between PhD and PsyD. If you have any other questions please drop them in the comments and I will respond to you personally as soon as I can, and if you want to understand the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist, I just recorded a video on that so you can find that in the description for this video as well.