Finding additional practicum placements - International?

[Anais-In]

Hello,

I have asked a couple questions over the last couple days, so a mod can let me know if I'm over-using the site, but I was so happy to discover this and have many questions for y'all!

Hours are an issue in my program, and while we do have a summer practicum, it is only for May and June, so we have all of July and August for research purposes, but are not accruing any clinical hours.

As I am on track with my research, I have permission from the DCT to seek out an extra practicum during July and August.

Has anyone done any international practica, and how would these look for internship applications? I came across one in Ecuador, it costs almost 4000$ to participate, and I can't tell if it would look good on an application or if it is a total scam.

Otherwise, should I just approach organizations in my area and see if they'd be willing to take me on? The program is unwilling to organize this for me and I'm not sure how to go about it.

Thanks very very much.

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[psychRA]

Is your program unwilling to organize it for you, or are they actually opposed to the idea of an international or outside practicum placement?

All of the hours that you report on your internship applications must be approved by your grad program, and must be supervised. Programs may have slightly different requirements for sanctioned practica. For us, the bare minimum was that we had to be supervised by a licensed psychologist, but our DCT also wanted to know how many therapy and assessment hours we expected to get, what types of case we'd be most likely to take on, etc. In any case, before you move forward with any placement, I'd recommend having a meeting with your DCT to make sure that you have your program's approval. You don't want to put time (and money) into hours that your program won't approve for internship applications.

https://portal.appicas.org/applicants2012/instruction/ins_exp_intervention.htm

 

[AcronymAllergy]

Is your program unwilling to organize it for you, or are they actually opposed to the idea of an international or outside practicum placement?

All of the hours that you report on your internship applications must be approved by your grad program, and must be supervised. Programs may have slightly different requirements for sanctioned practica. For us, the bare minimum was that we had to be supervised by a licensed psychologist, but our DCT also wanted to know how many therapy and assessment hours we expected to get, what types of case we'd be most likely to take on, etc. In any case, before you move forward with any placement, I'd recommend having a meeting with your DCT to make sure that you have your program's approval. You don't want to put time (and money) into hours that your program won't approve for internship applications.

https://portal.appicas.org/applicants2012/instruction/ins_exp_intervention.htm

This. Honestly, I'd be pretty wary of anything where I had to pay that much to participate, although I can understand the costs if it's something like studying abroad. However, the tricky part is that when it comes to internship and the like, you'll likely need to be supervised by a licensed psychologist to be able to count the hours you obtain (in addition to them being approved by your DCT, like psychRA said)...which could be tricky when training internationally.

Honestly, rather than pay $4000, I'd probably just focus on doing additional research and trying to pump out another publication or two. That'll likely end up helping you more than would the extra hours you'd get over 2 months.

 

[Anais-In]

Thanks. My supervisor at my current practicum site just said yesterday that she'd be willing to take me back in July and August to just do a bunch of cognitive assessments, so if I can convince my DCT and the hospital to let me do that then I'll be able to stick around here and do research at the same time.

My DCT was the one who told me about the Ecuador opportunity, but just by forwarding along an email she had received and telling me to let her know what I found out. I couldn't tell if the thing seemed legit or if internship sites would look at it and scoff.