Master of Counselling

The Graduate Centre for Applied Psychology offers a 36-credit, course-based Master of Counselling (MC) program. The MC is a distributed learning, mixed delivery master's program designed to meet the graduate academic requirements for the career paths of professional counsellor or counselling psychologist. The program incorporates core and specialization courses to ensure that all students attain competency in the fundamentals of counselling psychology as well as a particular area of specialization.

The MC program includes seven core courses that focus on the fundamentals of counselling theory and practice. All students are required to complete these core courses. The following courses are three credits unless marked otherwise. The core courses are:

• GCAP 631 Models of Counselling and Client Change
• GCAP 632 Professional Ethics
• GCAP 633 Infusing Culture into Counselling
• GCAP 634 Assessment Processes
• GCAP 635 Intervening to Facilitate Client Change
• GCAP 671 Developing a Working Alliance
• GCAP 691 Methods of Inquiry

All students are also required to complete an Advanced Counselling Practicum:

• GCAP 685 Advanced Counselling Practicum (6)

Students may opt to focus their specialization courses in the following areas of concentration:

• Master of Counselling: Counselling Psychology
• Master of Counselling: Career Counselling
• Master of Counselling: Art Therapy

Students in the Art Therapy specialization take their art therapy courses through the Vancouver Art Therapy Institute.

Students may be successful in being selected to complete a thesis as part of the Counselling Psychology Specialization. In this case, they complete the following additional courses:

• GCAP 692 Advanced Quantitative Methods

• GCAP 693 Advanced Qualitative Methods
• GCAP 696 Thesis I
• GCAP 697 Thesis II

Students in the Counselling Psychology specialization are automatically enrolled in the course-based exit route. Students in other specializations must choose this route. For the course-based exit route, students complete two courses in their area of specialization (three courses for art therapy) and the following culminating course:

• GCAP 695 Specialization Seminar – Knowledge Transfer as their third elective course.