By Alexander Williams, M.S., Northwestern University
Preparing internship applications is among the most time consuming and effortful tasks of a clinical trainee. My intent here is to provide clinical graduate students early in their graduate years (years 1-4; at least a year out from the application cycle) with general internship principles and tips that I have not come across elsewhere.
(1) Be mindful of internship early in your graduate career. There is an opportunity to view the final step of internship as something that could guide your early training steps (as opposed to something scary and looming). This can be as simple as asking yourself the question “How might this practicum prepare me for internship?” or “What is missing from my training and how could I address that?” Asking these questions could help you create an outline of a clinical training path during graduate school that leads naturally into your clinically-focused internship year. These questions might lead you to pursue intensive outpatient experiences which could set you up for the inpatient level of care during internship, for instance.
(2) Learn how to track your clinical hours, then carefully track them. When I was a second-year graduate student, I was given the clear and frequent guidance to “track my hours.” I also obtained access to the most common service for hours tracking, called Time2Track. After years of tracking my hours, I realized that I never took the time to learn the best way to do this. My decision not to investigate this topic early in graduate school translated into a weeks-long hours auditing process just before I submitted my internship applications. To learn how to track your hours, I recommend first visiting Time2Track’s help page. Following this, you could arrange a meeting with a student currently on internship to see if they can help you review how you have set up your Time2Track. This is the time to ask if you aren’t sure what any Time2Track categories mean. Finally, reviewing former students’ Time2Track summary reports can answer many questions.
Time2Track Tips:1
– Tags can be challenging to use because if you forget to place the tag on every activity it applies to, it will be difficult to efficiently verify your hours count. Rely instead on custom activities and settings (see Time2Track help page) which you can use to track specific kinds of assessments and therapies provided. For instance, instead of the general “Individual Therapy” activity type I created “Adult DBT Individual Therapy” and “Adult CBT Individual Therapy”. For a research lab where I administered assessments, I created a custom setting for the lab (“ADAPT Lab”) rather than the more general “Department Clinic” default. Taking these steps made it easier for me to detect errors in my final hours audit while posing no issue to the ultimate summary of my hours. This is because custom settings are automatically converted to the default Time2Track treatment settings in the end.
– To easily track clients, use codes like “DBT001” to track clients seen within a certain practicum.
– Create a password protected excel document that stores all client demographic information with your client codes. You can use this to guide and confirm what you enter in Time2Track.
(3) Maintain two documents to help with essays and recommendations. One document can store the current internship essay prompts and essay ideas. The other could log your practicum contributions and achievements that potential referees could comment on. While I would not recommend drafting your essays any earlier than a few months out from the internship application deadline (typically 11/1), I think that early in your graduate career you can be intentional about collecting raw material that could be used in your essays. Here, I’m thinking about notable clinical breakthroughs, lessons you’ve learned, and examples of how you’ve applied therapy techniques with clients. The intent of the second document is to give you a head start on what I call “reference guides” that describe your major contributions and qualities that could be commented on in letters of reference. For example, if you did excellent clinical work with a client, you could take a few notes about this. Then when it comes time to ask for reference letters, you can include this as an example of something a reference writer could discuss. In my own case, I found it difficult to remember my clinical experiences and contributions in each practicum because I had not made brief notes about these as I was going.
While applying for internship can be intimidating, taking a few simple steps in the early stages of your graduate career can go a long way towards making it more approachable.
Other Helpful Resources:
There are many helpful resources to guide your internship application process. Here are the ones I found the most helpful:
- The American Psychological Association of Graduate Students publishes a very helpful internship workbook called “Internships in Psychology: The APAGS Workbook for Writing Successful Applications and Finding the Right Fit.” Other than the guidance on essays, I found this to be the most helpful resource. Former students in your program may have an older copy for you to use.
- Another helpful resource is titled “From Scratch to Match: Russ & Noah’s Guide to the Internship Application Process in Clinical and Counseling Psychology.” This one is a quick read with especially useful tips on interpreting site brochures and essay writing. Before interview season, “From Scratch to Match: Russ & Noah’s Guide to Internship Interviews” can be helpful. Both resources are available here.
- I also found this Psych Grad Corner website helpful. In a less formal manner, the guidance touches on all components of the application process and nicely complements the information provided in the more formal resources above.
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Footnotes:
1 The reason that Time2Track is so popular is that it integrates directly with the internship application system called the AAPI, thereby streamlining the transfer of your clinical experiences. I strongly recommend you investigate whether your department provides students access to the program.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this newsletter are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Psychological Clinical Science Accreditation System (PCSAS).