Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behaviour. It unravels the mystery of how we make sense of the world. However, being able to understand human behaviour is not the same as reading minds and is a misconception about psychology. What psychology can do, however, is give insight into the reasons for our actions so that we would be able to make sense of, and predict other people’s behaviours.

HKU is renowned for its research excellence and teaching, and our psychology programme is consistently ranked as one of the best in Asia. Our programme aims to provide students with top-grade teaching, contemporary knowledge, experience, and facilities to understand and master psychology throughout the course of study. To augment this, we offer undergraduates the opportunity to study abroad for a semester or a year at other distinguished universities, such as NUS, UBC, UCLA, McGill, Yale, Toronto, Lund, Beijing, and Tsinghua.

Psychology happens to be a degree that can be studied by students from different backgrounds. Students from both the Arts and Science stream in secondary school have been performing equally well in our courses. Scientific reasoning is naturally useful in psychological science while mastery of written and oral language is useful for studying any social science subjects, including psychology.

Psychology graduates are equipped with both technical and soft skills that different industries are looking for and so they have the flexibility to go for a large variety of career options in both private and public sectors. Recent survey findings indicated that the vast majority of psychology graduates were employed in Educational Institutions, while others were employed in the Commerce & Industry, Community, Social Services, and Civil Services.

The career and educational trajectories of HKU psychology graduates are abundant. The Bachelor of Psychology provides a clear pathway to psychology and other helping professionals.  Many of our talented graduates have successfully gotten into our UGC-funded, accredited, professional training at the post-graduate level in Clinical Psychology or Educational Psychology and have become excellent scientist-practitioners, with some of them being leaders in their professions. Other graduates have pursued similar post-graduate programmes in Columbia, Illinois, Oxford, Waterloo, and York.  There are also Mental Health-related trainings such as Counselling, and advanced research training in psychology related fields include Cognitive Science and Neuroscience.

Other than professional training in Clinical Psychology or Educational Psychology, our alumni with an interest in research were able to secure post-graduate scholarships and post-doctoral fellowships in Hong Kong, the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia. Some of our graduates have moved on to teach at universities in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Singapore, Australia, as well as in Europe and North America. 

Either a bachelor’s degree in psychology, or postgraduate certificate in psychology, or diploma in psychology, or master’s degree in social sciences in the field of psychology will do. 

Most of our courses are structured in a way that there will be weekly lectures delivered by lecturers where students will all learn the fundamental concepts related to the specific course. On top of that, there will be regular small group size tutorials led by tutors, where each class will only have 10-20 students depending on the course’s design. The tutorials are designed to be complementary to the lectures. They are here for students to have in-depth discussions on a specific topic. The tutorials also serve as a platform to carry out problem-based / experiential learning activities.