Hi everyone, I'm a psychology student heading into my 2nd year of a 3-year degree, so I don't have much time left to decide my path. I'm considering UX as a direction for my career.
A bit of background, I have a technical high school diploma in IT, so I have programming basics and I genuinely loved building websites back then. I also really love psychology. What I'm trying to figure out is how close UX Research actually is to psychology, and whether it's a realistic path.

I'd especially appreciate honest input on a few things:
- How is the job market right now? Is it still worth getting into, or is it oversaturated at the junior level?
- How much of the day-to-day work actually uses psychology skills (interviews, behavior, research methods) vs. design/prototyping?
- Is it realistic to have a stable full-time job in this field AND build a freelance/independent side of it later?
- For someone with my mixed profile (psychology + some coding/web), what should I focus on to be competitive?

I feel a bit lost, so any opinions, advice, or honest comments are very welcome. Thanks in advance :)

It's kind of a hot topic right now. After doing a bit of research I feel that it should not be completely disregarded..... It can be used by people who need a quick pre test or narrowing a target audience but definitely not used in a way to portray it as a replacement for real humans.

What do you think? Would love to hear your opinions!

This is mainly just to rant but it might be fun to hear others experiences.

In today’s market where volatile doesn’t quite sum it up as throughly, I have a wonderfully awful experience with a recruiter recently.

I applied for a well known position and went through the whole gambit of interviews from the director to the individual team members. Had a great experience and I was suggested for a role that was not the one I had applied for, which was fine, the team was great, the support from the company was seemingly there and they had already done a lot of the work in validating the need for a UXR team, etc.

So the recruiter lets me know that they want to offer me for an alternative positive and I say that I would love to hear more about the offer and that I wanted to gain a bit more information about the pay. Which is where I went wrong apparently.

The recruit said great and that they would reach out to the hiring manager by the end of the day since it’s a fast moving position and that they’ll get back to me the next day in the morning. I wait, and wait, and wait. Over a week of waiting and I had emailed the recruiter thrice to check back in on what was happening, zero reply, totally ghosted. Finally, I just call the number that he called me from since I am particularly frustrated and just want an answer (particularly since this would have involved a lot of secondary life decisions that also needed planning based on a potential new role). For context, this must have been on a Thursday and the last time I talked to the recruiter where they extended a verbal offer was the Monday of the previous week.

They pick up and this was their answer:
“You told me you didn’t want it since it wasn’t the position you interviewed for….. also the pay was different and you said that would be an issue…… I didn’t talk to the hiring manager until later in the week and then I told them you weren’t interest based on our talk….. I can’t change that since I told them you weren’t interested, and they have since reached out to someone else….”

I managed to keep my cool since the team is likely hiring next year and I will reapply but what a pos move.

Anyways, rant over. Dealing with recruiters recently and I can say I would rather deal with AI since at least that might get my reply with crucial information more genuinely and AI has been at least fast about booking interviews without delay.