After last year's "anti-extradition" movement, the half-year-plus scourge of the "Wuhan pneumonia", and the National Security Law rolled out in early July, Hong Kong's social atmosphere has been badly torn, its economy and livelihoods left in the doldrums, and city-dwellers confronted with enormous financial and psychological stress; mental health has, against this backdrop, gradually come under the spotlight. The "Counselling and Psychology" honours bachelor's programme at TWGHs College is the only degree course in Hong Kong that combines training in both "Psychology" and "Counselling", and it has always drawn a crowd of HKDSE candidates scoring around 18-22 to apply. The course content of "Counselling and Psychology" and my reflections from the interview are not what I'll be discussing here. Instead, this article focuses mainly on (1) the things "official channels" won't necessarily tell you directly, (2) the things you only discover after you've enrolled, and (3) the questions Treehole students care about most — career prospects and how the qualification is recognised — so that readers can make the best possible mental preparation and decisions, and walk a path that lets you feel truly content.
Your performance in three subjects has already decided your honours classification at graduation?
First of all, the goal of getting into university is, of course, to study! Unlike at other universities, your academic results in the first year at TWGHs College do not affect the honour classification on your graduation certificate — they only affect whether you can progress smoothly to the next year. That said, your academic transcript will still show your results for every subject across all year levels. On another note, in my student days there was a popular bit of lore that three "Psychology" compulsory subjects — taken in Year 1 and Year 2 respectively — were enough to decide your eventual honours classification: namely "Statistics for Social Sciences", "Biological Psychology" and "Cognitive Psychology". Borrowing the multiplayer battle game "League of Legends" as an analogy, scoring well in these three subjects is rather like getting a buff after slaying the jungle monster "Baron" — you can almost tell who's going to graduate with first class honour.
Perhaps you might raise the following objection: students need to take nearly 40 subjects to graduate, and the weighting of each one is roughly the same, so isn't this piece of lore utterly unconvincing and not worth mentioning? My personal answer is that the lore isn't entirely without reason, because the different sets of abilities these subjects "test" do, I believe, carry a certain degree of predictive power: (1) statistics is designed to cultivate students' ability to manage, analyse and present data, and this knowledge is closely tied to students' ability to complete tutorial assignments in other subjects later on, and even their dissertation; (2) biological psychology purely tests a student's ability to concentrate, persevere and memorise (at least that's how I see it), which is of course related to academic ability; (3) finally, cognitive psychology in fact tests students' "abstract thinking", reasoning and logical ability, because the content covers many psychological phenomena invisible to the naked eye (such as memory models, language development and even consciousness) — one example being how to reason out that humans possess "short-term memory", "long-term memory" and "working memory". So this piece of lore doesn't lack a leg to stand on!
Before you ever counsel anyone, you first have to be counselled?
The "Counselling and Psychology" programme requires all four-year students to complete a year-long, 50-day full-time internship in counselling. Because the college places great emphasis on "experiential learning" — holding that students can only counsel others once they have first been counselled themselves — students must accumulate at least 15 hours of "being counselled individually" and 15 hours of "being counselled in a group" during the first three years, and provide proof of it. In recent years the college's policy has been to allow students to receive counselling services at outside organisations (including free counselling services from social-service bodies), but whether this leads to a "too many monks, too little porridge" situation with free counselling — and thus long waits when you need an appointment — remains an unknown.
(Three) 75 hours of "community service order"
Besides "being counselled", students must also accumulate at least 75 hours of counselling-related service (which cannot include paid work) before progressing to Year 4, as well as attend 75 hours of extra, non-credit-bearing counselling training courses provided free of charge by TWGHs College's Counselling and Psychology department. (Note: back in my day the requirement was at least 150 hours, so I often joked with my fellow students that this was a "community service order".) Unlike the arrangements for "being counselled", apart from the social-service organisations recommended by the college (such as the Y_, the K_ Social Service Division, and the social-service arm of the B_ Lutheran Church), students can also apply on their own to take part in counselling-related volunteer programmes run by outside organisations — for example, the S_ Society — and in my day I volunteered as a hostel buddy with the "Hong Kong P_ Health Society" and worked as a phone responder on a certain hotline. Because of the heavy mandatory hour requirements, students need to allocate their time more flexibly (especially Year 4, the one year when coursework and internship run in parallel — even the internship coordinator advised against students still holding down part-time jobs that year). So I'd advise students to clock up enough "being counselled" and "community service order" hours during their first year if at all possible.
(Four) The counselling association "recruiting" new blood
As I pointed out in the article I wrote last year, "counselling" is not a legally defined "profession" in Hong Kong. Unlike doctors, lawyers, engineers and so on, it carries no legal or institutional protection whatsoever, so anyone at all can simply call themselves a "psychotherapist", "counsellor" and the like without facing any legal sanction. Mindful of this, a group of counselling academics and frontline practitioners at TWGHs College set up an organisation called the "Asian Professional Counselling and Psychology Association (Asian Professional Counselling and Psychology Association, APCPA for short)", which seeks to establish industry self-regulation (e.g. a voluntary registration system) in order to lobby the government to make "counselling" a legally recognised profession, and for the APCPA to become the only legitimate body conducting Accredited Registration (AR) and supervision for the counselling profession. Representatives of this organisation (including some of TWGHs College's part-time supervising lecturers) hold regular briefing sessions, encouraging students to join and to identify themselves as "professionals".
However, this is not the only counselling organisation that recognises a TWGHs "Counselling and Psychology" bachelor's qualification: the eight UGC-funded universities have another counselling association (which recognises only the counselling master's degrees or higher that they themselves offer), named the "Hong Kong Professional Counselling Association (Hong Kong Professional Counselling Association, HKPCA)". This association is likewise vying to become Hong Kong's sole counselling professional accreditation and supervision body. I'd advise students to first browse both associations' websites separately, in order to judge which organisation has the greater chance of successfully securing Accredited Registration status.
(Five) Is the recognition really that poor?
As a local non-JUPAS private college, how well the degree is recognised is absolutely a student's primary consideration. If you ask me whether the "career prospects" or recognition of studying "Counselling and Psychology" are poor, I'll answer you: "It depends which line of work you go into." If your sole intention is just to coast through and finish a degree, then take up some other line of work career-wise (such as administration, marketing or even Sales), then the recognition of this degree isn't much of an issue — generally speaking, there's no great difficulty. Quite a few "Counselling and Psychology" graduates have also gone on to successfully study taught postgraduate degree professional qualifications at the other eight UGC-funded universities — for example a Postgraduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) or a Master of Social Work — and some people have even been admitted to study occupational therapy, speech therapy, or a clinical/educational psychology master's. That said, if you intend to go into psychology research and become a Lecturer/Academic staff (such as a Professor) in future, I'd advise you to (1) secure a first class honour graduation classification and (2) consider studying abroad (on the funding front: some countries' universities can provide tuition/living-cost subsidies).
Conclusion
This article is purely an account of my own experience; its content is absolutely shaped by bias and personal subjective judgement, so it is offered only as a reference — please take it with care. If you still have some doubts about counselling, you might like to consult the following article: "About psychological counselling: 6 things you need to know".
Postscript
Friends who have been following Treehole's updates all along may have noticed that this article appeared once in late July, and was taken down for a time. That's right — this was because, after the original was published, it provoked dissatisfaction among some "professionals" affiliated with a certain counselling-related organisation, who "kindly reminded" me that my standing was not suitable for commenting on them, that I could not represent them, that the matter was deemed serious, that the department was already aware of it, and that publishing the article would only be playing with fire and getting burned, and showed no respect whatsoever towards them (that association). Admittedly, the original's wording was indeed too inflammatory and emotive. After a month-plus of soul-searching pain, and after discussing it with friends, my own conclusion is this: I don't think my original motive was wrong (the whole affair may not even have had any right or wrong to it at all — it was just that a few well-meaning individuals deliberately whipped things up and turned them into a "black-and-white" matter), I only wanted to tell the other side of the story, and so I decided to revise the original and republish it. As Mother Teresa (frankly, to some extent she's my role model for learning) said: "Saying the right thing takes the guts to say it out loud."
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