[PSY]

Hello, and welcome to TeenHelp! =) I'm sorry you didn't receive a response sooner.

I was also a psychology major, and unlike many people, I DID know what I wanted to do. Well, sort of. I knew I wanted to help people, but I didn't know how advanced of a degree I wanted to obtain (BA/BS vs. MA/MS vs. PhD/PsyD), I didn't know what kind of population I wanted to work with, and I didn't know what kind of setting I wanted to work in. Basically, even after figuring out my major, I still had to figure out my CAREER.

Now that I'm in my mid-20s, I understand that developing your career is an ongoing process. Yes, there's a lot of pressure to figure out your degree at a young age, but your degree doesn't have to determine what you'll do for the rest of your life! What I would encourage you to do is seek out learning opportunities, whether they're in the form of internships, volunteer opportunities, jobs, research positions, or something else. If you think you might like something, then try it... and if/when you decide you don't like it, you can cross it off your list and try something else. Volunteering with TeenHelp helped me discover that I want to work with teens, and that I probably want to do it within a non-profit agency. That's one volunteering opportunity I pursued while in college, and other volunteering opportunities taught me other valuable lessons as well (e.g., that I don't want to do research, so a PhD/PsyD route wouldn't be right for me).

Since you're interested in anthropology and criminology, you might want to seek out people with those majors who have graduated and obtained jobs. Ask if they'd be willing to meet with you one-on-one so you can learn more about how they got to where they are today! There are definitely people with those majors who have paying jobs, and you may not have to go all the way to Portugal to gain valuable experience within the field of criminology (you may be able to take classes outside of your major and find a position that will lead to more job offers further down the road - many people "break into" fields outside of their majors, and while it may be difficult, it's certainly not impossible!).