TESU Psychology courses & grad school prospects.

[cookderosa]

Hello everyone,

First of all I'd just like to thank everyone who contributes to the enormous wealth of information available to non-traditional students on this board. It has been a huge help in planning my education.

When I began planning my Psychology degree earlier this year, I had been set on testing out of as much as I could and taking upper-level courses through secularcourses.com/study.com. My plans for after graduation were originally to teach English overseas, but recently I've been instead considering pursing graduate work. In doing research on admissions for clinical psych programs (at least funded ones), I've realized that graduating from TESU without graded major course work is going to be a considerable hindrance. So my thoughts now are to perhaps pay for the comprehensive tuition plan and spend a year taking the majority of my upper-level courses with TESU.

My question for those of you with relevant experience is, would it be reasonable to think that over the course of a year I could develop solid enough relationships with psych instructors to ask for letters of recommendation?

For those of you who may have taken some of the online psychology courses offered at TESU, what was the difficulty like? How were interactions with professors?

How competitive might I be to grad admission offices with a TESU degree? I realize I'll probably have to explore REU options as well as postbac research options to strengthen my chances. I will probably, at some point, make a second post in the grad sub-forum dealing specifically with admissions concerns.

I look forward to hearing any thoughts or opinions; all of the posts on here have been incredibly helpful thus far.

Thanks!

This is exactly what happened to me. I started at TESU with a very different plans than when I began studying, and ultimately decided to take all the courses in my major for that very reason, to have graded credits (my major was/is social science, so mostly psych and social psychology). It is my opinion that if you plan to study something in grad school, having at the very minimum taken the courses in your major will be important. I do not, however, think you'll get enough of a relationship out of the interaction at TESU for letters of rec. TESU doesn't employ professors, only mentors who deliver canned curriculum- it's kinda flat. Not that you won't learn anything from the content, but what they contribute to the process is very limited. After I graduated I took a graduate Abnormal Psych course through Harvard Extension and had a lot of interaction with the professor and TAs. Though that was my only graduate psych class there, I'm confident that I could have built relationships with them.
I don't really have an answer except to say that beginning with the end in mind is more important if the end includes additional schooling. I think you can get into grad school with an undergrad from TESU but I don't know about a funded doctorate, and that's what you asked, so if that really is your new goal, you might want to see if you can find a more traditional 4-year college that will accept the credit you have already earned and go from there.