PSYCHOLOGY

Cover Letter



Cover Letter

Dear Mr. Bloggs

I am writing to you with regard to the vacancy for a Research Fellow in Psychology (Ref: HQ03012) advertised on jobs.ac.uk. As requested, I attach a copy of my curriculum vitae, which includes the names and contact details of two referees. I have recently been awarded a BSc (Hons) in Psychology and am looking to secure a challenging and powerful research position.

I was attracted to the advertised position, as I have retained an interest in applied cognitive psychology from my undergraduate education, which entailed numerous components relating to human cognition. I find the prospect of contributing to an internationally renowned cognitive research unit exciting also find the range of responsibilities entailed by the above post appealing. I should like to point to some of aspects of my previous academic and work experience, which I feel would make me a suitable candidate for this position.

Although the field of counselling and psychology is relatively new, counselling practitioners, educators, and researchers pursue a vast array of professional topics. The field of counselling and psychology have both benefited and oppressed culturally diverse populations. People in Psychology have identified three major lines of inquiry—vocational testing and guidance, qualities of optimal counselling and therapy relationships, and training and supervision of counsellors and therapists—as the most promising for counselling psychologists to pursue during the years ahead. As interest in culturally diverse populations in counselling and psychology has gained tremendous momentum during the past decade, researchers of counselling phenomena are normally expected to recognize the implications of cultural and other types of differences for their methods, findings, and conclusions.

Research in counselling has its roots in diverse traditions. Early in the 20th century, most psychotherapy was delivered by psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers trained in the psychoanalytic tradition. At that time, the U.S. military began to employ psychologists to provide vocational testing and non-psychoanalytic personal adjustment counselling to military personnel. To aid the placement of recruits into appropriate work roles, the military hired psychologically trained researchers to develop and test career and personality screening batteries (Gray, 2010).

By mid-century, colleges and universities were also beginning to make use of vocational and personality testing to guide students toward appropriate majors and programs, and psychologists were hired in university counselling centres to provide these services. In short, various counselling psychologists concerned themselves with the development of norm-based tests—the goal of which was to identify individual differences from group norms for the purposes of classification and placement. In this way, one of the first and most popular uses of counselling psychology—vocational testing and guidance—came into being (Fernald, 2008).

While psychological knowledge is often applied to the assessment and treatment of mental health problems, it is also applied to understanding and solving problems in many different spheres of human activity. Although the majority of psychologists are involved in some kind of therapeutic role (clinical, counselling, and school positions), many do scientific research on a wide range of topics related to mental processes and behaviour (typically in university psychology departments) or ...