Category Archives: Graduate School

Living at the Intersection: Reflections on the Graduate Student Experience

Guest columnist: Craig

Describe an instance where you were “forced” to choose or represent one identity over another. How did you negotiate this instance? What did you learn from this experience?

As a life-long stutterer, I am often faced with a dilemma every time I speak with someone in both my personal and professional life: Do I align with my identity as a stutterer by speaking with repetitions, prolongations, and blocks, or do I maintain my fluency by speaking in a coherent, smooth, and consistent manner? This quandary is cognitively and emotionally present in all contexts that involve spoken language. Magnifying the difficult decision is the stutterers’ often keen ability to “hide” his dysfluency. Unlike other apparent identities, stuttering is more covert, often hidden under the guise of fluent speech. Thus, during conversations with others, I often ponder three questions: Do I disclose my stutter? Will the other person figure out I stutter? How long can I maintain fluent speech?

Much to my dissatisfaction, I will often conceal my stutter, in order to align with the identity of being a nonstutterer. This “false” identity is accompanied by a lack of disclosure, embarrassment and shame, following a concerted effort to talk in a manner that involves absolutely no repetitions, blocks, or prolongations. I recall one instance in which I chose to hide my stutter from a 14-year old male client. The client asked, “Mr. Craig, do you stutter?” I replied, “Um, no, I don’t. Sometimes I get caught on my words.”

I chose this response to avoid any discussion that may have revealed my true identity as someone who stutters. I quickly changed the subject without hesitation. In essence, the opportunity to be vulnerable with my client by revealing my own imperfections (stuttering) was quickly shut down to avoid my embarrassment and shame.

I learned an important and valuable lesson from this encounter. Being vulnerable with another person implies uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. However, it also provides an opportunity to forge deep bonds of affection toward another. I lost this opportunity with my 14-year old client. As I reflect on this experience, I realize that it is only through my imperfections and fallibility that I can be an effective therapist. This means that I may stutter when I talk with clients. It may take me a few more seconds to utter a sentence. I, like my clients, am not perfect. I mistakenly believed in that moment of response that my ability to maintain fluent speech was connected with my competency as a therapist. I now realize that this was a great misperception—to be an effective therapist means being comfortable with my own vulnerability. This means befriending my stutter with an open heart and genuine curiosity when it emerges in session. By doing so, I subtly invite my clients to also be vulnerable with their pain and suffering. After all, at the end of each session, both therapist and client are human, all too human.

This column is part of a monthly series highlighting the experiences of students and professionals with diverse intersecting identities and is sponsored by the APAGS Committee on Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity and the Committee for the Advancement of Racial and Ethnic Diversity. Are you interested in sharing about your own navigation of intersecting identities in graduate school? We would be happy to hear from you! To learn more, please contact the chair of APAGS CSOGD: Julia Benjamin or APAGS CARED: James Garcia.

Want to be a member of the APAGS Leadership Institute’s inaugural class?

What does it mean to be a leader? APAGS will help you strengthen your competencies. (Image source: Beth Kanter on Flickr. Some rights reserved.)

In 2013, when APAGS wrote its new five-year strategic plan, one of our three core focus areas was devoted to leadership.

We know that to be a successful and viable discipline, we need rising generations of psychologists to be ready to lead teams, develop and evaluate programs, advocate as experts on issues of social importance, and champion interprofessional collaboration.

Our goal of increasing the number of students leading, organizing, and creating change came closer to fruition earlier this month when we released application materials for the first-ever APAGS Leadership Institute.

This Leadership Institute was the culmination of months of planning by a cross-cutting working group led by APAGS member-at-large Casey Calhoun, with consultation from members of APA’s Board of Directors as well as organizers of existing leadership academies. We are very pleased to offer this new benefit to our members who are seeking to develop their leadership skills, gain leadership experience, and network with current and future leaders in psychology.

For a year beginning this summer, selected participants will engage with mentors and their peers in a handful of virtual leadership classrooms, use partial reimbursement to attend APA’s Annual Convention in Denver (to both co-lead and participate in leadership sessions), develop a project of significant impact, and hopefully pay it forward by mentoring the next cohort in summer 2017.

We’re looking for five to seven individuals to fill our inaugural cohort. Applications are due April 1, 2016. Read more about eligibility and application instructions and download this flyer (PDF) to share with others.

Finding the Time for Advocacy

Two years ago, I got swept up in mental health advocacy taking the state of Oregon by storm.

With legislation reform affecting social justice, access to quality care, and education, I was fascinated by the ability to create change within my community. In a whirlwind, I found myself discovering the new language of advocacy, being inspired by my mentors, and getting to know fellow students who are paving the way of transformation across the nation. I could picture individual patients who would be greatly affected by legislation coming out of Oregon. My passion to positively change the lives of many sprang into action.

And then…reality set in.

In the midst of my drive to engage with the APAGS Advocacy Coordinating Team, I still had papers to write, meetings to attend, and clients at my practicum to think about. I was overwhelmed with “finding the time” to participate in advocacy that meant so much to me, while still pass my classes. This reality hits close to home for so many graduate students and often can be the greatest deterrent when deciding whether or not to join a local, state, or national advocacy movement.

Dr. Carilyn Ellis is an early career psychologist working in primary care and a champion in the advocacy field in Oregon. She admitted that advocacy was a bit daunting when she started out as a graduate student George Fox University, but said that advocacy must begin in school. She said, “The bills, amendments, and other advocacy efforts that we are putting into action now, will be most relevant to current students, who will be practicing with these changes in effect.”

Three tiers of advocacy

Writing a letter can help shape policy in your community. (Source: User dangerpup on Flickr. Some rights reserved.)

Dr. Ellis explained that there are multiple levels of engagement in advocacy that can vary in time spent focusing on advocacy—flexibility that a graduate student often needs.

The first tier of engagement involves person-centered action, such as becoming a member of a local or national advocacy group (e.g., your state psychological association, your division, and APAGS), writing letters to your local representative, signing petitions, attending state legislature meetings, and contacting representatives directly. Writing a letter (or filling in your contact info through an auto-generated email) often takes less than five minutes.
The second tier focuses on supporting the organizations that advocate for mental health change, whether by providing financial support, time through phone calls, or more extensive email writing. Even a donation as little as $10 can make a difference.
The third tier involves staying informed about the relevant issues and contributing to collective support. Simply understanding the basic factors impacting mental health within your community can lead to a greater awareness and understanding about complex systems. This can be achieved through signing up for listservs, checking in on legislative reports related to human services, and reading the websites of other legislative bodies focused on mental health.

These tiers of advocacy demonstrate that there is no perfect formula to being an advocate. Every student has a place at the table. Even when it seems like the accomplishments of graduation, and becoming a psychologist are so far away, the advocacy work that is taking place now will directly affect the way in which the field looks in the future.

As for me, I am still navigating both roles as graduate student and advocate. I find time (an average of 2 hours) throughout the week to write emails, engage with my local Oregon Psychological Association, and connect with other people who care about the same issues that I do. Honestly, some weeks are more productive than others, but I see this time as an opportunity to take some chances, rise to new challenges, learn about a new way of impacting my community, and develop my own professional voice. These are all goals that I also have as a graduate student, and I can see how my engagement with the advocacy community is pushing me to improve as an advocate, a student, and future psychologist.

How about you?

Which tier of advocacy do you see yourself working in? Feel free to leave a reply; it may inspire others to join you!

Editor’s note: Roseann Fish Getchell is a clinical psychology Psy.D. student at George Fox University and the Northwest Regional Advocacy Coordinator for the APAGS Advocacy Coordinating Team.

Match Day: May the Odds be Ever in Your Favor

APAGS hopes the odds are ever in your favor. (Source: “The Hunger Games” by duncan on Flickr. Some rights reserved.)

For many of us, Match Day is reminiscent of the Hunger Games. We are entering into a lottery for our future, and that is certainly terrifying for many. For clinical, counseling, and school folks, this is the culmination of the better part of a year spent on writing applications, mock interviews, anxiously awaiting interview invitations, traveling the country, Skyping, ranking, and then waiting for the all important email on Match Day.

Today, many students will be thrilled to match; even more thrilled if they match to a top choice! Celebrations kick in and plans for next year quickly begin. For far too many others, the experience will be much different. A heartbreaking email revealing they have not matched and an invitation to participate in yet another round of applications, interviews, and a matching process.

To those who matched this year, congratulations! For those of you who did not, we have some support resources, and we stand in solidarity with you. Whatever your outcome was today, I wish you the best in your next steps.

What We Know Today

Here’s the data APPIC released this morning about the 2016-2017 internship cohort:

3,725 applicants participated in the match (i.e., submitted final rankings). 3,648 of these students were from accredited doctoral programs.
3,235 applicants matched in Phase I; an 87% overall match rate.
84% of applicants who matched got one of their top three choices.
There were more available positions (3,800) in the match than applicants who submitted final rankings. At the end of today’s Phase I, 490 applicants remain unmatched, 565 internship positions remain unfilled, and 263 of those are accredited.

For individuals who did not match today in Phase I, this last point provides hope — but may be of little solace to lessen the heartbreak of not matching. The implications of this imbalance are significant. It hits us deeply in our pockets, as an extra academic year could mean additional unplanned debt. Another year in school could mean delaying other major life events such as getting married, starting a family, or buying a house. While we certainly could look at the “silver lining” of not matching — such as a focused year to complete dissertation and gain additional, possibly specialized, clinical training — the pain and the crisis remain.

An Upswing Since 2011

Since the 2011-2012 match, APPIC has reported a yearly increase in match rates. However, it is important to understand that APPIC only provides data on students who participate in their match, and today’s data is limited to Phase I. For a complete picture of students from accredited doctoral programs who need — and who receive — internships (particularly accredited ones), we turn to data we’ve requested from APA’s Commission on Accreditation. Here’s the information we have:

Internship year	Match rate of students from APA accredited doc programs to any internship	Match rate of students from APA-accredited doc programs to APA accredited internships
2011-2012	83.1%	51.9%
2012-2013	88.8%	54.6
2013-2014	90.1%	57.7%
2014-2015	93.0%	60.1%
2015-2016	95.3%	68.4%

For current interns, the overall match rate looks good, with 95.3% of students from an APA accredited program matching to any internship. At the same time, we continue to see a sizable gap in students from APA accredited programs who match to APA accredited internships; a mere 68.4% match rate. We are optimistic that the match rates for accredited internships will continue to climb for the 2016-2017 internship cohort. Today’s data from APPIC shows that 72.9% of all ranking applicants from APA and CPA accredited programs matched to accredited internships (this number may look different when CoA releases their data for the 2016-2017 internship year).

Our Advocacy Efforts

For APAGS members, committee and staff, the internship crisis continues to be a grave problem. It is a crisis that remains on the top of the agenda for your APAGS leaders and other advocates within the discipline. The internship stimulus package has supported the growth of internships, and programs continue to reach out for guidance in the development of accredited internships. Champions are tirelessly advocating on behalf of students for the reimbursement of intern services through Medicaid, which could substantially change the status of this crisis along with greatly serving the public. Still, there is much work to be done.

APAGS has been working tirelessly over the past years on advocacy efforts related to the internship crisis. Here are the areas where we have focused particular energy:

The $3 million internship stimulus package has helped to create 157.5 accredited internship positions at 29 different sites as of January 2016.
We produced a video about the internship crisis, highlighting student experiences and the devastation of not matching.
A panel at the 2014 Annual Convention brought together students and other stakeholders to discuss the internship crisis and to explore creative approaches to end the crisis, resulting in an academic paper. Work on these ideas is ongoing.
We have been meeting with members of various psychology training councils to prioritize accredited internship development in places with untapped potential for growth; for example, university-based psychology training clinics, community colleges, and school districts.
We provide information to applicants to graduate school on how to find a program that best meets their needs, and how to interpret publicly available data about programs, including match rates.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Unlike The Hunger Games where there is only one winner, Match Day brings a winning outcome to many participants. While the odds are improving, it’s up to each of us to change the nature of this game.

Please encourage your program to become active in advocating for the development of an internship program.
Talk with your practicum sites about the value of hosting an accredited internship.
Share the APAGS video about the internship crisis with everyone you know, along with the administration at your school.
Engage your state psychological association to become involved in the advocacy efforts for medicaid reimbursement.
Share your experiences with us through a guest blog post.

We would love to hear your internship story and your advocacy efforts (additional ideas here). The more we can share ideas, collaborate on solutions, and raise a loud collective voice, the sooner we can end this crisis.

The Learning Scientists: Our Story

Recently, I had been trying to come up with creative ways to help my students link concepts from class to the real world. Improving learning is one connection. But there are many others, such as how we might frame an advertisement to help it sell, or how we can improve procedures in the criminal justice system to avoid false convictions – like Steven Avery’s first conviction. (The many who watched Making a Murderer have probably thought a lot about this connection to cognitive psychology, possibly without realizing how much of a role it plays!) Anyway, I decided to create an assignment requiring my students to interact with one another and make connections with popular psychology-related articles on Twitter. The first step was creating a Twitter profile for myself, and building it up with psychology-related tweets.

One random night, I saw that Yana was tweeting many messages to a lot of different Twitter handles. It turns out Yana had been feeling guilty that she wasn’t doing more to reach out to the community with her work on improving study strategies. Somewhat impulsively, she tried searching “test tomorrow” on Twitter, and realized that TONS of students were tweeting about upcoming exams. Many students were tweeting about being unprepared, not knowing how to study, or being unable to concentrate.

So, Yana started tweeting advice and encouragement to the students: wishing them luck on their exams, asking them what strategies they used to study, and whether they’d tried practice questions or writing out everything they knew on the topic from memory. I thought it was such a cool idea that I decided to join in. I suggested we start using the hashtag #AceThatTest, and overnight that hashtag had turned into our joint Twitter account: @AceThatTest. That was January 22^nd, 2016.

Since then – in under a month – we have gained almost 700 followers on Twitter, tweeted well over 2,000 times, hired a student intern, made a website with a blog (learningscientists.org), been asked to help out with a book on learning, and forged many new connections with researchers and educators around the world. The project really took off in ways that I think neither of us had anticipated! The passion we both bring to the project comes from our mutual frustration with the lack of communication between science and educational practice.

We want to improve communication between the various educational experts. Education is an extremely important topic, and we believe that there are many experts in this realm, each bringing an important perspective that can serve to improve education. Teachers who have been practicing in the classroom for years are experts. Students, by the time they graduate high school, and may be considering entering into higher education, have 13 years of educational experience under their belts, and could be considered experts. Professors, like Yana and myself, who both research learning (sometimes in the lab, sometimes in live classrooms) and teach undergraduate students in our own classrooms are experts. Professors who are working with teachers in training in institutions of higher education are experts.

If you have an “it takes a village” mentality, like we do, then the idea of having so many experts with diverse experiences and perspectives is extremely exciting. No one person can solve every problem that comes up, but a diverse group has serious potential to get things done. Unfortunately, many of these groups are not communicating with one another as much as we believe they should be. The situation is not entirely dissimilar from the schism between research and practice in clinical psychology. In an ideal world, researchers would clearly communicate their findings and make them easily accessible to practitioners. Meanwhile, practitioners would communicate any practical concerns they have with implementation to inform further research. Yet instead of this type of symbiotic relationship, there is a strained relationship between clinical practice and clinical research, and the lines of communication are not as open as they should be, and need to be if we want clinical psychology to be maximally beneficial for the profession and the public as a whole. Clinical psychologists know this, and have been addressing the problem; there have even been special APA Convention programs and even special journal issues to address the lack of communication.

The same problem occurs in education – communication is simply not open, and it’s time for the many educational experts to address this. We have to talk to each other if we want to improve education. It seems to us that we can’t complain about a lack of communication while keeping our heads down in our own silos. For this reason, Yana and I started the Learning Scientists community.

Please help us spread the word, and open lines of communication between all education experts. There are many opportunities for you to get involved: Tell colleagues outside of psychology about this work, follow us on Twitter and tweet at us, comment on our blog, or even write a piece on something you’re passionate about and send it to us. You can get in touch with us through our website via our “contact us” tab, or on Twitter @AceThatTest.

About the authors:

Megan Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology department at Rhode Island College. She received her Master’s in Experimental Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis and her PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Purdue University. Megan’s area of expertise is in human learning and memory, and applying the science of learning in educational contests.

Yana Weinstein is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She received her PhD in Psychology from University College London and had 4 years of postdoctoral training at Washington University in St. Louis. The broad goal of her research is to help students make the most of their academic experience.

Together they co-founded the Learning Scientists (@AceThatTest on Twitter) to make scientific research more accessible to students and educators.

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