Psychology - Applied Psychology

The particular strength of this course lies in its applied ethos. Our MA graduates have found their engagement with external partner organisations through the programme to be particularly beneficial in supporting their successful application to specific professional education courses in psychology.

Work-Integrated Learning

Work-Integrated Learning is an educational approach involving three parties - the student, educational institution, and an external stakeholder – consisting of authentic work-focused experiences as an intentional component of the curriculum. Students learn through active engagement in purposeful work tasks, which enable the integration of theory with meaningful practice that is relevant to the students’ discipline of study and/or professional development.

Our MA students have the opportunity to gain relevant work related skills and experience.

A core feature of the MA in Applied Psychology is critical community psychology. Engagement with community-based settings is a central programme component. Service Design and Evaluation is a project-centred module in which students work on real-world design and evaluation projects to experience and develop a critical understanding of the roles that applied psychologists can play in the design and evaluation of services, for example; Service design as a user-centred approach to creating, developing, implementing, and evaluating services; User participation (patients, community activists, staff, etc.) in design and evaluation; the lived experience of organisational processes and politics in services, trauma-informed service design.

Applied Psychological Research Dissertation

Dissertation supervision is managed by a number of faculty associated with this MA programme, but also other MA programmes in our Schools. This ensures that our students have access, via our faculty, to different areas of expertise and knowledge of different professional domains (e.g., social justice, mental health/healthcare, positive psychology, child and family psychology, etc.). The MA Applied Psychology is also of interest to students interested in pursuing research careers through progressing to doctoral studies in their area of interest. Our School offers both funded and self-funded PhD opportunities.

For full details of the non-EU application procedure visit our how to apply pages for international students.

• In UCC, we use the term programme and course interchangeably to describe what a person has registered to study in UCC and its constituent colleges, schools, and departments.
• Note that not all courses are open to international/non-EU applicants, please check the fact file above. For more information contact the International Office.

English Language Requirements

Applicants who are non-native speakers of the English language must meet the university-approved English language requirements. Visit our PG English Language Requirements page for more information.

On completion of this MA you will have acquired many skills including:

Further competencies developed through this course include interview, assessment, communication, and presentation skills.