Tag Archives: doctorate

APAGS on the Road! California: 9/20 and 9/21

APAGS is coming to California in one week to offer a half-day workshop for students and recent psychology graduates.

In sponsorship with the Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards and The Trust,  we will present sessions to help students and recent grads grapple topics such as:

  • Building a private practice — identifying different types of private practice, discerning what types of practice you might envision for yourself and developing a plan to start that practice.
  • Loan forgiveness — brief overviews of the National Health Service Corps Loan Repayment Program, Federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program and NIH Loan Repayment Program.
  • Psychological services in the digital age — applying key ethical principles to evaluate risks, benefits and appropriateness of using electronic communication and social media in professional practice.
  • Preparing for the EPPP — best practices for studying for the licensure exam.

Advance registration is $15 before Sept. 15, 2014. On-site registration is available for $20. Follow these links to register:

See you in California!

Spreading Awareness and Taking Action on the Internship Crisis

IMG_6735This spring, a group of APAGS members recorded a short video about the real struggles that doctoral students are facing as a result of the imbalance between internship applicants and positions — and how these struggles inform the field we care so deeply about. We hope that you can use this video as a tool to spread awareness of the internship crisis and catalyze solutions to ending it. Please watch it here:

When you click the link at the end of the video — http://on.apa.org/internshipcrisis — you are brought to a page with a number of awareness, advocacy, and action steps. The video shows that we have a large stake in the issue. The list of steps reveals that we have the skills and ability to do something about it!

APAGS intends for this video to be a stepping stone on the way to solving the internship crisis. Please share it amongst your friends, colleagues, and faculty. What did you think? What action will you take? Leave your comments on our blog.

Editor’s note: Todd Avellar is a doctoral student studying Counseling Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was a Member at Large on the APAGS Committee through August 2014. Applications for APAGS subcommittee members are being accepted through 9/10/14.

Applying to graduate school? Ask these 15 questions

Getting in to graduate school is hard. I know this. And like many of you, I obsessed over the “Will I be liked?” question as I waited for any offer to come in. I now see that focusing on that question obscures another equally important one: “Do I really like the programs I am applying to?”

In my role, I sometimes hear students recount how different their program is compared to the slick marketing they’ve received from schools attracting candidates. While I can offer no advice on which institutions should be on someone’s list, I do want to shift the power dynamic in your favor. Let’s get thinking about how to find the graduate programs that will help you meet your professional goals and provide you with the highest quality training experiences possible in the field of psychology. Sound good?

Last month, I co-presented (with Dr. Nabil El-Ghoroury) a workshop at APA’s Annual Convention. The workshop was centered around 15 questions that “smart shoppers” should ask of the programs on their list, but it also included some information about different types of degrees and subfields, and the cost of education.

To learn what you should be asking, view the slideshow below or download the slides directly:

[pdf]http://www.gradpsychblog.org/wp-content/uploads/Smart-Shopping-Convention-2014.pdf[/pdf]

Please also check out the resource page on our website for more tools from APAGS and our colleagues in the Education Directorate. If you want to hear a live version of this presentation, we’ll be in Los Angeles on September 20 and Berkeley on September 21. Stay tuned to our Facebook page for announcements of future webinars, live workshops, and more tutorials.

May you make this decision with eyes wide open to the objective and subjective factors that will make your future graduate school the right fit for you. Best wishes.

Are we producing too many trainees for internship—but not enough for the nation?

The psychology workforce is a numbers game. Are we winning or losing? (Source: Numbers by Stimpdawg on Flickr. Some rights reserved.)

The psychology workforce is a numbers game. But with the internship crisis, are we winning or losing? (Source: Numbers by Stimpdawg on Flickr. Some rights reserved.)

Given that 1 in 4 students who enter the APPIC match do not actually match (and nearly 1 in 2 fail to match directly from APA accredited programs to APA accredited internships – see #11) it seems natural to entertain the idea that we have too many trainees. Or that we are producing too many psychologists who are flooding the market, cheapening the field, and so forth. But is any of this really true?

Researchers Parent and Williamson (2010) did find that some programs contribute disproportionately to the match imbalance by sending significantly more students on internship each year. That might be enough for some to jump to the conclusion that these programs are just too big. Although, I ask: too big for what?

See, I worry that the internship crisis is causing us to identify red herrings, or fake culprits. While lots of students are unequivocally a problem in the crucible of poor match rates and failed matches, this doesn’t say anything about the need for more or less psychologists in the workforce.

Whether you agree or disagree with Malcolm Gladwell, who said in his latest book that we should stop connecting class size with educational outcomes, it’s important to think through what a change in the number of healthcare providers means in the United States. As a baseline, I found that about 5,400 people sit annually for the EPPP, our profession’s licensing exam and on average, 3,800 pass the exam each year. And now I’ll provide three and a half data sources suggesting we may actually need more psychologists in years to come:

1)      New psychologists are finding jobs. According to the latest data we have available—the Doctorate Employment Survey (APA, 2011)—psychologists within one year of graduation had an unemployment rate of 6%, at least 2-3% points lower than the historical national average. More than two thirds of graduates had a job within the first three months of completing their programs and 72% said their current job was their first preference.

2)      NAMI estimates that 11 million people in the U.S. with mental illnesses lack insurance coverage. The Affordable Care Act (better known to some as Obamacare), combined with our earlier Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, will bring more people than ever before into our nation’s insured healthcare system, almost certainly increasing demand for mental health services.

3)      As of January 1, 2014, the United States counted 3,896 known, designated mental healthcare professional shortages across the country. These are shortages of core professionals—psychologists included—that by definition cannot meet the basic mental health needs of whole geographic areas, specific facilities, and/or underserved groups before there are so few practitioners relative to the population. Every state has a demand for more mental health care in some way or other. 

3.5)     As of this month, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates increased employment of 18,700 psychologists by 2022. They say, “Employment of clinical, counseling, and school psychologists is projected to grow 11 percent from 2012 to 2022, about as fast as the average for all occupations. Greater demand for psychological services in schools, hospitals, mental health centers, and social services agencies should drive employment growth.” Notes: This estimate doesn’t cleanly separate the need for doctoral-level psychologists from those with Masters training, and also includes non-health-service psychologists. This data point only gets a “3.5” instead of a standalone “4” because the newly released BLS numbers are not as strong as they were a month ago (a 2010 to 2020 projection), and I’m curious to see what this means for workforce demand. You can see how projections are calculated here.

If you are quick to ask for smaller class sizes, especially in light of the internship crisis, it is crucial that you have some understanding about how this could impact our nation’s ability to care for its people. For what appears to be a problem in one light may actually be a solution in another.

My data points are by no means a substitute for a workforce analysis, and one is needed to definitively answer the question: Just how many psychologists do we need?  (An even better analysis would tell us where in the country to send providers based on their training.) If we come to find that we actually need more psychologists than there are internship positions, what else can we do to responsibly get rid of this bottleneck in the internship match? That’s the real million dollar question.