MSc

Psychology (Conversion)

Our innovative online MSc Psychology conversion course provides you with the Graduate Basis for Chartership with the British Psychological Society, the essential first step in becoming a registered psychologist.

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Key Course Details

  • Start Date

    September

  • Location

    Online

  • Campus Code

    A

Fees

  • Home students

    £11,060*

  • International students

    £17,900*

  • Full-time fees are per year. Part-time fees are per 20 credits.

  • Start Date

    September

  • Location

    Online

  • Campus Code

    A

Fees

  • Home students

    £1,229*

  • Full-time fees are per year. Part-time fees are per 20 credits.
Make an Enquiry

You will work with our external partners on live briefs and an applied dissertation project, giving you the opportunity inspire real change during your studies.

DESIGNED FOR

Designed for graduates from any discipline who are returning to study, changing careers, or even changing direction after graduation. Our course is designed to support graduates in integrating their existing expertise with their developing understanding of psychology.

Accredited by

  • British Psychological Society (BPS)

Career paths

  • Counselling Psychologist (with further study)
  • Clinical Psychologist (with further study)
  • Educational Psychologist (with further study)
  • Academic Psychology Researcher
  • Social Researcher

Skills taught

  • Problem solving and evidence-based solution finding 
  • Communicating to external and internal audiences
  • Reflection and self-appraisal 
  • Project management 
  • Research and evaluation 

We make a difference in practice, not just on paper. Our courses are designed by people who offer jobs - and taught by people who have real work experience.

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Three psychology students sitting at a table happily working on a university project
Two students having a conversation in a psychology classroom

Course Highlights

Real World Impact

Your assessments address current challenges faced by our external partners, supporting them to find solutions that help real people.

GBC with the BPS

Graduates from any discipline can gain the Graduate Basis for Chartership with the BPS.

Flexible Online Study

Online delivery gives you flexibility in your studies with options for evening study and a blend of synchronous and asynchronous sessions.

Career-Ready Graduates

Working directly with our external partners gives you great psychology-based work experience that can open many doors for your career.

Module Overview

You’ll explore the core areas of psychology that are necessary for the Graduate Basis for Chartership - the essential first step toward becoming a registered psychologist. As you dive into the foundations, you’ll connect them to real-world scenarios and discover how they apply to everyday life. There will be a strong emphasis on themes of environment and community, atypical development, and social justice.

Psychology: Contexts and Debates
We will cover the core underpinnings of the concepts and debates surrounding psychology, helping you apply this knowledge to contemporary issues and unearth valuable solutions.

Psychological Investigation in Practice
You will learn how to critically appraise the suitability of research methods to test psychological questions in different settings and how to identify the ethical and practical considerations we need to address when doing this testing.  

Applied Social Psychology
We will explore how our views and decisions can be affected by other people and the groups we belong to. You will then have the opportunity to critically apply this knowledge to find solutions for our external partners.

Lifespan Development in Context
You will examine contexts and factors that affect how we behave and develop across the course of our lifetimes.  You will use this to suggest evidence-based strategies for our partners to help them work with children, young people, adults or older adults.    

Brain and Cognition
In this module we will take a tour of your brain to understand the role it plays in making sense of the world, learning and remembering information and helping us to make decisions.    

Getting Ready to Research
We will examine different ways of getting others’ perspectives on psychological interventions and issues and will use this knowledge to develop your own proposal for your applied dissertation.   

Dissertation
You will conduct an applied research project to test a topic of interest to you.  You will have the option to choose an independent topic or join one of our bespoke dissertation groups working on challenges set by our partners.   

Course Highlights

How you’ll learn

The course is delivered using a mix of online “live” teaching sessions and activities to work through at your own pace. These activities will include videos, readings, online discussion forums, quizzes, and reflective and interactive activities designed to help you apply your learning to real contexts.  

You will have a total of six taught modules, each taught in a 10-week block. Full-time students complete two taught modules in each block, whereas part-time students will complete one. There will also be teaching sessions to support you with your dissertation that will run alongside taught modules. 

Assessments are live briefs set by external partners and include online presentations, reports, podcasts, webpages, posters and case study assessments – all of which can be fed back to the partners for use in their own work.

Teaching staff

The course is delivered by staff in the Psychology team who have teaching, research and practical experience of working in collaboration with our partners. Currently the team are working on projects which focus on community, nature and sustainability, the well-being of children and young people, workplace well-being and culture, and the experiences of those with additional learning needs or disabilities. Our team are passionate about evidence-based practice in partnership working, teaching and learning, and are completing projects on students’ experiences of completing “live brief” assessments such as the ones on your course.   

The teaching team also contribute to USW’s Psychology Podcast, hosting engaging discussions on ‘The Psych Sofa’. These episodes highlight how psychology changes lives for the better through the lens of psychology academics and their work.

Facilities

As an online student, you’ll have a range of virtual facilities available to you throughout your studies. This includes specialist software like Gorilla, for designing and conducting Psychology experiments, and the Blackboard Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) where you can access learning materials and collaborate with your peers. While the course is delivered entirely online, you’re more than welcome to join in with activities on campus and use the Psychology department’s impressive set of facilities, such as the Neuropsychology lab, featuring EEG and ECG monitors and an eye tracker. The teaching team are dedicated to creating a supportive social learning community online and encourages students to meet and trial the facilities, though this is entirely optional.  

Placements

Live briefs provide a flexible and practical way to gain experience by applying your knowledge to real-world situations. Throughout the course, you’ll tackle live briefs and challenges set by our external partners, creating summaries across the group to form reports and top tips for our partners to take forward. In our Contexts and Debates module, you will have the opportunity to showcase your work at an online conference, presenting alongside your course mates and our partners. Our external partners are from a diverse range of sectors, including nursing, nature and sustainability and housing, using partners such as Linc Cymru.  

Accredited by

Careers and Employability

Graduate careers

Our MSc Psychology (Conversion) course opens doors to many different interesting and exciting career paths across a wide range of fields. Many Psychology graduates find themselves developing, implementing and testing interventions in business, public and charitable sectors. This MSc equips you with the skills to find evidence-based solutions in these settings through the completion of life briefs. The Graduate Basis for Chartership with the British Psychological Society is also a well-positioned next step for those looking to becoming a registered psychologist in educational, clinical, health, sport and exercise, occupational or Neuropsychology. 

Possible career paths

Trained psychologists are hugely valuable across many different fields of employment, such as teaching, social work, police work and marketing. There are many traditional psychology career routes that you can enter following the Graduate Basis for Chartership, or you could use your degree to enter a career path in psychology research and evaluation in academia or private and third sector organisations.

Careers support

As part of this course, you’ll have access to optional online careers sessions, featuring guest speakers - including USW Alumni - who apply their psychology skills in different settings. The teaching team takes their time to understand the interests of each student cohort, carefully selecting speakers whose expertise aligns to ensure the sessions are as relevant and beneficial as possible. As part of these sessions, there will be opportunities for students to talk to the speakers and gain valuable perspectives on a variety of career destinations.

ENTRY REQUIREMENTS

Typical qualification requirements:

A minimum 2:2 Honours degree in any subject

International applications welcomed:

We welcome international applications with equivalent qualifications of our entry requirements. For more details related to your country of residence, please view our dedicated country pages.

English language requirements

International applicants will need to have achieved an overall of IELTS 6.0 with a minimum of 5.5 in each component/TOEFL 4 overall and a minimum of 4 in each component or equivalent.

Equivalents can be located on our English Language pages.

If you have previously studied through the medium of English, IELTS might not be required, please visit our country specific page for further details. If your country is not featured, please contact us.

If you do not meet the English entry criteria, please visit our Pre-Sessional course pages.

Contextual offers

We may make you a lower offer based on a range of factors, including your background (where you live and the school or college that you attended, for example), your experiences and individual circumstances (as a care leaver, for example). This is referred to as a contextual offer, and we receive data from UCAS to support us in making these decisions.

USW prides itself on its student experience and we support our students to achieve their goals and become a successful graduate. This approach helps us to support students who have the potential to succeed and who may have faced barriers that make it more difficult to access university.

 

We're here to help

Whether you a have a question about your course, fees and funding, the application process or anything else, there are plenty of ways you can get in touch, and we'd love to talk to you. You can contact our friendly admissions team by phone, email or chat to us online.

 

Fees and Funding

UK Full-time Fee

£11,060

per year*
International Full-time Fee

£17,900

per year*
UK Part-time Fee

£1,229

per 20 credits*

Further Information

Studying at university is one of the most significant investments you'll ever make. Whilst you’re studying, you’ll have two main financial obligations – tuition fees and living costs. There’s lots of financial help available from the University of South Wales and external funding sources, that may provide loans (which have to be paid back) and grants, scholarships and bursaries (that don't).

*Full-time fees are per year. Part-time fees are per 20 credits. Once enrolled, the fee is anticipated to remain at the same rate throughout the duration of your study on this course except as described below.

Please be aware that we may increase the maximum fee for home students on full-time undergraduate courses only where the Welsh Government increases the permitted level of inflation of fees. Fees for all students (including part-time, postgraduate and international students) may be amended in accordance with our applicable Fees and Debt Management Policy.  We will ensure that students are given clear, intelligible, unambiguous and timely information about our courses and costs in good time, ahead of the next academic year.

 

Fees and Funding Scholarships and Busaries Alumni Discount

ADDITIONAL COSTS

As a student of USW, you’ll have access to lots of free resources to support your study and learning, such as textbooks, publications, online journals, laptops, and plenty of remote-access resources. Whilst in most cases these resources are more than sufficient in supporting you with completing your course, additional costs, both obligatory and optional, may be required or requested for the likes of travel, memberships, experience days, stationery, printing, or equipment. 

 

 Students will be expected to pay for a DBS or certificate of good behaviour from their home country. The DBS fee includes £49.50 for the enhanced DBS certificate, the Post Office Administration fee and the online administration fee

Cost: £64.74

Subscription required for each year of the course for a yearly fee of £16. Please note the service has to be joined within 30 days of receipt of your enhanced DBS certificate

Cost: £16

 

As this is an online course, students would need to have appropriate computer equipment and access to the internet to be able to access the University’s VLE and associated applications such as Panopto and Microsoft Teams. Full details of IT requirements will be supplied to students prior to joining the course

 

University Quality Assurance

At USW, we regularly review our courses in response to changing patterns of employment and skills demand to ensure we offer learning designed to reflect today’s student needs and tomorrow’s employer demands.

If during a review process course content is significantly changed, we’ll write to inform you and talk you through the changes for the coming year. But whatever the outcome, we aim to equip our students with the skillset and the mindset to succeed whatever tomorrow may bring. Your future, future-proofed.

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Psychology Plus

Our psychology degrees offer hands-on experience, plus free opportunities through Psychology Plus to boost your skills and stand out in jobs or further study.

Find out about Psychology Plus opportunities

UNDERTAKING THE MSC PSYCHOLOGY (CONVERSION) COURSE WAS A TRANSFORMATIVE LEARNING JOURNEY. WITHOUT THE HIGH EXPECTATIONS AND TEACHING STANDARDS FROM THE STAFF AND THE INSPIRING SUPPORT FROM FELLOW STUDENTS, THIS EXPERIENCE WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE.

Wenyan Roberts

MSc Psychology Conversion Student

Studying at USW

Our courses are designed with industry leaders and provide the practical skills and experiences industry demands. Our flexible courses reflect the need for life-long learning. If you value education in practice, not just in theory, then USW is for you.

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Postgraduate fees and funding
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Pontypridd Campus, Treforest
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How to apply

There is an online application process for this course. Please choose the application form for your preferred start date and mode of study (i.e. full-time or part-time).

International admissions

Please see our international admissions advice for further information about how to apply as a prospective international student.

Related Courses

Behaviour Analysis and Therapy - MSc Learn more
Clinical Psychology - MSc Learn more

Next Steps

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