Practicum Hours Needed For Internship

[amyfarrah]

I will be applying for internship in 2 years (fall 2016; in a PhD program) and want to do as much now as I can to maximize my chances of a successful match! In talking with faculty and other students in my program, I've gotten wildly different estimates on the number of practicum hours needed to successfully match. Some have said meeting the minimum face to face hours listed on the APPIC site is sufficient, with others saying that you should have 200+ hours over the minimums to be competitive. I've had 1.5 years of practicum experience so far, and was planning to shift my time commitments towards more research and teaching next year, but I'm not sure if I should also continue seeking out more clinical hours.

For those of you that have matched recently, or who are in charge of training programs, what has been your experience with regards to number of face-to-face hours needed to be competitive?

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[Ollie123]

Varies too widely by site, other credentials, etc. for there to be one answer.

Personally, I wouldn't have felt comfortable applying with less than 500 F2F hours. I aimed for 500 intervention/200 assessment and ended up having about 850 total by the time I applied. People matched with far less than that. People with far more than that didn't match. Some sites say 1000+ f2f hours is a minimum...but they were generally not sites I wanted to be at anyways so it was no loss to me not to meet that. I was also approaching it as a research-heavy person applying to research-heavy sites. The 850 hours was the least impressive part of my CV and I was applying to sites that cared a lot less about that anyways.

I think more important than the number is being well-rounded. 500 hours across a range of populations, settings, diagnoses, etc. will get you much further than 1000 hours of outpatient therapy for depressed college students at the vast majority of sites.

 

[AcronymAllergy]

I second everything Ollie has said. The quality and diversity of the practicum hours (and how they potentially inherently sell your "match" with the internship site) will matter much more than the raw number of them. And sites have huge variations in their minimum required hours counts, but I think the 500/200 split (unless you're going into an assessment-heavy specialty such as neuropsych) that Ollie mentioned is a good bar for which to aim. I can say that after reviewing applications at a couple sites (so I can of course only speak to those sites' preferences), there wasn't much weight placed on hours other than that the person met whatever minimum was needed.

The main situation in which a low number of hours was seen negatively would be if the person also had little research productivity (e.g., not even a poster). With those applications, we often wondered aloud, "so what exactly has this person been doing for the past 4-5 years...?"

As with many other things in life, balance is key. You want to come across as a well-rounded applicant: solid research training and experience, solid coursework, and solid clinical training in a variety of settings and with a variety of patient populations. If you've got that along with a decently-clear idea of (and reasonable ability to articulate) what you'd ultimately like to do professionally, you'll likely be fine when it comes time for internship apps.

 

[Fan_of_Meehl]

I was training director for an APA accredited internship at a developmental center (we did mostly behavior analytic work including treatment/training plans for intellectually disabled clients) for several years. The main criterion that I/we had was ensuring that applicants had enough 'hands-on' experience to have developed an understanding of the process of taking classroom/book/article information and trying to apply it successfully in clinical practice and had begun to learn such lessons that the process inevitably teaches such as: 1) the most important thing is a solid understanding of the theory (and science behind the theory) regarding why a certain approach to treatment works (e.g., the role of habituation in exposure therapy); (2) the clients you encounter (and their problems) rarely present as 'pure' cases of a particular problem/diagnosis as outlined in the literature; (3) therefore, 'flexibility within fidelity' is an oft-utilized maxim in the implementation of empirically-supported treatment protocols, (4) etc., etc. [I'm sure others can expand on these...there are so many lessons in the struggle to apply what's in the books to what's in the clinic.

As long as your totals for hours are not below a threshold that would reasonably allow you to learn such lessons by experience, I would be far more interested/influenced by the particular lessons you have learned and how your practice (however extensive) has influenced you over time and helped you to develop into a clinician who: a) has a sufficient level of competence to plug into our program right away and start seeing clients without too much performance anxiety and, b) has sufficient intellectual humility and openness to experience/learning to benefit from the experiences we have to offer and go on to get licensed and practice professional psychology. So, if your hours are at or above a program's published minimums, I would make sure that the points raised above were worked into your application materials and also that you go into any interview prepared to discuss how your practicum experiences have contributed to your professional development.

 

[amyfarrah]

Thank you all very much for your input. I'm really confident I'll be able to pass the 500/200 mark by the end of this year (if clients keep showing up at the same rate!) so that makes me feel better.

As far as multiple settings-- at my program everyone can see clients at our department clinic from 2nd year until you leave, and then has 1-2 years of external practicum placements. However, frequently if we get 2 years of practicum placement, it tends to be at the same large site that many of our students go to (ex. one site takes about 75% of our practicum students and then there are 3 or 4 other sites that take 1 or 2 students a piece.) I'm not sure I'll be able to get a practicum site that's different than the current one I'm at next year (our DCT uses a "match" system for practicum sites, so it's really out of our control, past submitting our rankings). Will that be a hindrance come internship application time?

Again, I appreciate all of you input!

 

[bostongal109]

Sorry for the naivety here, but I'm not in a doctoral program (yet!) and I'm curious about when these hours begin counting. I have my masters, do any of those hours count? Could I do less hours and be competitive still due to my many post-masters years of clinical hours? And if my masters took a year off my PhD program, could that ultimately harm me in terms of hours for matching? Should I receive more than one offer, my first priority is whatever program gives me the most time off for my masters, but maybe that isn't the best thing to look at....

Thanks and sorry if this has been covered before, if it has and you don't want to repeat, could you post the link? Thanks!!

 

[bcliff]

Sorry for the naivety here, but I'm not in a doctoral program (yet!) and I'm curious about when these hours begin counting. I have my masters, do any of those hours count? Could I do less hours and be competitive still due to my many post-masters years of clinical hours? And if my masters took a year off my PhD program, could that ultimately harm me in terms of hours for matching? Should I receive more than one offer, my first priority is whatever program gives me the most time off for my masters, but maybe that isn't the best thing to look at....

Thanks and sorry if this has been covered before, if it has and you don't want to repeat, could you post the link? Thanks!!

I'm not 100% sure, but I think APPIC hours need to be completed while you're in your doctoral program.

 

[researchgirl]

Bostongal - while you can list hours for your master's program somewhere on the application, they don't count. The hours refer only to hours you get as practica during your doctoral program.

Everything said above about quality of hours is accurate in my opinion, and I felt fortunate to be at a program that had a wide range of great placements. I had 450 intervention, 100 assessment, so I was perhaps on the low-ish side in terms of quantity, but did meet the minimum everywhere I applied (albeit not by much, as many sites had a suggested minimum of 500). I don't think my number of hours mattered whatsoever, although I did look for sites who valued research and I would guess that means their minimums could be lower than other sites.

I've also heard that child-focused sites have higher minimums for hours, although I don't know for sure.

 

[PhDToBe]

Sorry for the naivety here, but I'm not in a doctoral program (yet!) and I'm curious about when these hours begin counting. I have my masters, do any of those hours count? Could I do less hours and be competitive still due to my many post-masters years of clinical hours? And if my masters took a year off my PhD program, could that ultimately harm me in terms of hours for matching? Should I receive more than one offer, my first priority is whatever program gives me the most time off for my masters, but maybe that isn't the best thing to look at....

Thanks and sorry if this has been covered before, if it has and you don't want to repeat, could you post the link? Thanks!!

I have heard and seen otherwise. In my program, I believe the students with masters degrees count those hours toward internship; however, they do have to specify that they are masters not doctoral hours. It didn't affect me so I don't know the details, but I am positive they counted the hours.