Tag Archives: internship

Match Day: The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

For doctoral students in clinical, counseling, and school psychology who are applying for internship for the 2014/2015 training year, today is the day that many have stressed over and dreaded since they began the application process last summer.

For many, the overwhelming sensation will be one of relief. However, for others the reality of their match results will be more complicated. Perhaps they matched to a site that will require a move away from their families. Even worse, a critical mass of students will not match at all. They will feel heartbroken, shocked, and angry.

The internship crisis remains one of the biggest challenges for psychology graduate students. While trainees must secure a doctoral internship to meet the requirements for graduation and licensure, there are simply not enough positions to go around. The crisis is even more severe when the number of accredited positions is considered.

2014 Data

Today’s preliminary match statistics show the following:

  • 4,335 students entered the match, with 3,974 completing the process and submitting a rank-order list
  • 3,501 positions were available through the match, with 2,588 of those positions accredited
  • 3,173 students matched to any internship site, with only 2,474 matching to an accredited internship site

This makes the 2014 match rate for doctoral students to an APA- or CPA- accredited internship 62%. This is unacceptable.

2014 Internship Match Day Blog - screensot w refsThe Crisis Lives On

While this year’s numbers are an improvement from last year, the number of trainees who did not match to an accredited internship position should be of grave concern to the training community. Students from accredited doctoral programs in good standing, who have been deemed ready and qualified to obtain an internship position, should be able to do so.

There is also much more to the internship crisis than the match rate. Qualitative data from APPIC’s 2011 survey on the internship imbalance found that, for students with both positive and negative outcomes, the internship process was experienced as being “extremely stressful,” “overwhelming,” “inhuman,” “demoralizing,” and “traumatizing.” When asked how they felt on match day, responses ranged from “defeated,” “angry,” and “betrayed” to “heartbroken” and “devastated.” The system, with significantly fewer positions than the number of students seeking an internship, takes a substantial emotional toll on applicants.

Things need to change. Now.

APAGS’s Response

APAGS cares deeply about the internship crisis, and it has remained a top priority for the committee over the past several years. Along with key stakeholders in the training community, APAGS continues to tirelessly advocate for solutions to ameliorate the imbalance. Here are some highlights on what is being done:

  • In 2012, APA passed the Internship Stimulus Package, which provided $3 million in grant funding to increase the number of accredited internship positions.
  • APAGS regularly advocates for increased funding for doctoral training through the Graduate Psychology Education (GPE) program and the Health Research Services Administration (HRSA).
  • Working with state psychological associations, APAGS is advocating for interns’ services to become eligible for Medicaid and insurance reimbursement (which could potentially create a sustainable source of funding for creating new positions).
  • Most importantly, APAGS is leading an effort with doctoral training councils to develop a thoughtful and comprehensive plan to solve the internship crisis.

Moving Forward

Unfortunately, change has been slow. The internship crisis is a systemic and multifaceted problem that will require complex solutions to eradicate. However, there are several things that you, as a trainee, can do to help solve the problem.

  • Encourage your doctoral program to create an affiliated internship or develop internship positions in the community. Programs, in this way, would contribute positions and not just applicants to the pool, and would be able to create placements for a number of their own students.
  • Participate in advocacy efforts at both the federal and state level, on issues that affect funding for training and reimbursement options.
  • Finally, APAGS welcomes the input and collaboration of passionate individuals on this important issue. Consider writing a blog post that features your thoughts and ideas.

If you were one of the students who was able to match to an internship today, congratulations. We hope you can celebrate and enjoy your accomplishment. If you were unable to match this time around, please know that you have support. APAGS has resources for students who did not match. As fellow students, it is important to support our colleagues during this time. The internship crisis is a stressful and grueling process for all involved. Many well-qualified and exceptional students do not match through no fault of their own. The system is broken. If we all continue to work together as students and advocates, change is possible. But we must fight for it, fight together, and fight now.

Are you ready to rank? Seven tips from now until next week

????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????If you are participating in APPIC’s internship match system, you have likely experienced a demanding few months. You may find yourself wondering if the exhaustion is a sign you did something right, or just the profession’s odd way of saying “thank you” for your hard work.

The good news is that the end of this process is in sight with just a few more hurdles to clear. Next up: Ranking. You have until Wednesday February 5th to submit your ranking lists for Phase I. Finally, something you can control. Feels good, right? Yeah right!

To help you in any way we can, APAGS compiled some tips for you, taken directly from the third edition of our Internship Workbook by Carol Williams-Nickelson, PsyD, Mitch Prinstein, PhD, and Greg Keilin, PhD.

  1. “The most important thing to remember is to simply rank internship programs in the order in which you want them. That is all you need to worry about” (p. 102). Rank the program you prefer most as number one, and so on.
  2. “Do not, under any circumstances, take into account such things as how you believe a site is ranking you, how well you think you have impressed a site, the feedback that you are getting from a site, and so forth” (p. 102). Even if a site violates Match policies and tells you that they’re ranking you their #1, if they are not your #1, don’t list them as such.
  3. The matching program is designed to favor you — to preference your needs and wishes — allowing you to rank sites as you would them, not the other way around. The system will strive to get you the highest ranked site possible from your list, not the other way around. A site will never learn where it stood on your list.
  4. Rank a site even if you’re not sure they will rank you. There is no penalty for doing so. The computer will skip over that site on your list with no reduction in changes of you actually matching. Even if you’ve learned from a site after you’ve submitted your rankings that they will not rank you, the same truism applies. No penalty.
  5. “You should submit [a Rank Order List] if you are absolutely, positively, 100% sure that you are ready to accept the internship to which you are matched” (p. 103). Because the decision is binding, you should think twice about ranking a site that you’d rather stay on campus instead of attending.
  6. The specific order of your rankings will only determine where you match, not whether you match (p. 80). In other words, if you match, it has nothing to do with your list. This also means that if you don’t match with list in ABCD order, you would not have matched with a list in BCDA order either.
  7. Remember when the lights went out on Beyonce’s halftime show at the Superbowl last year? Well, anything’s possible, including loss of electricity and internet. Don’t wait until the last minute! While you can change your mind and rank and recertify until the deadline, give yourself some peace of mind and celebrate knowing you got your choices in!

Best wishes. Breathe. Let us know in the comments what you are doing to take care of yourself this week!

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.

You CAN afford to apply for internship – If you follow these tips

Applying for internship can be expensive, particularly for graduate students on a very tight budget. The average cost for the entire process was $1,812 in 2011, inclusive of application fees, attire, and travel. This cost can be expected to increase given APPIC’s fee increases this year (due to changes in their technology vendor):

APPIC Fees 2012-2013 2013-2014
First Application $35 $50
Applications #2-15 (each) $10 $25
Applications #16-20 (each) $25 $40
Applications #21-25 (each) $35 $50
Applications #26+ $50 $65

The cost of applying goes up after the first 15 applications, which is meant to discourage you to applying to more sites than may be helpful (see Q. 12) in securing a match. For the average applicant, there will be natural limit on how many applications you can realistically personalize and how many interviews you can realistically attend. Our first tip, then, is to consider reducing the number of applications with your Director of Clinical Training’s help.

What should know before you find yourself in this scene?

What should know before you find yourself in this scene? (Source: “packing” by Brit, on Flickr. Some rights reserved.)

Here are some additional tips to help you prepare for the costs of getting an internship:

Budgeting

  • Make small changes to your budget to save money over the next few months. Here’s an example: If you pack your lunch instead of buy lunch on campus, you could save $5/lunch or more. If you do that every weekday for a month, you could save as much as $100. Reducing a Starbucks habit could save you the same amount. Adjusting your cell phone plan to be consistent with your usage might also save you a lot over the long haul.
  • Include internship application costs in your expenses for the year. In other words, anticipate these costs by budgeting them into how you allocate your savings, loans and/or stipend.
  • Save on the interview suit. Everyone has their suit for interviews, typically navy blue or black, but there’s no reason to spend a bundle on it. Get one when prices drop, not at the last minute. If you’ve outgrown a suit, consider having a tailor resize your suit. Or borrow one from someone who already went through the gauntlet. Or better yet, do as Macklemore and get to a thiftshop!

Hospitality

  • Consider your social network. When you interview, crashing at a friend’s place (or at a friend of a friend’s place) could save you as much as $150 per night. Some applicants have turned to Facebook for help in identifying viable couches to surf, or they’ve turned to sites like airbnb.com.
  • Start saving your frequent flyer miles. Ask your loved ones to donate miles to help you get a ticket. If you’re a hair short of a free ticket, it may be cheaper to purchase the miles than a whole ticket.

Travel deals

  • Look for discounts. APA offers discounts on rental cars and at least one hotel chain for APAGS members. Your credit cards may have discounts on plane tickets. Sites like kayak.com, priceline.com, and hotwire.com will comparison-shop flights, hotels, and cars so you don’t have to. Bundling these costs together may save you even more.
  • Think creatively about travel. Create alerts for your home airport and cities that you might travel for interviews. If your school is in a more rural, expensive place to fly out of, consider spending the month of January in a place that is cheaper to travel from, or more central to your interviews. Book multi-city travel on one ticket, or compare the pros/cons of flying out of an airport that is less expensive.
  • Consider driving if it’s not that far away.
  • Know that renting a car could be cheaper than getting cabs in some destinations.

    Is it more cost beneficial to rent a car instead of taking taxis? (

    Is it more cost beneficial to rent a car instead of taking taxis? (Source: “Car Rental” by yum9me on Flicker. Some rights reserved.)

For general budgeting tools and videos, we suggest you check out this “Get Money Savvy” resource for graduate students. If you have other ideas, leave them in the comments!

This blog was co-written with Nabil El-Ghoroury.

Tips for Interviewing for Internship by Dr. Mitch Prinstein

If you’re applying for internship this year, you’ve probably submitted most of your applications for internship by now and are anxiously awaiting emails and phone calls from internship training directors inviting you for an interview.

While you’re waiting for those emails, here are some great tips by Dr. Mitch Prinstein, co-author of the APAGS internship workbook Internships in Psychology.  This is a PowerPoint slideshow with Dr. Prinstein speaking over the slides.

If you want more information on interviewing, the workbook has more details.