Coming from a child-focused program with a lot of adult-focused publications?

[futureapppsy2]

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I'm in a school psych PhD program, so pretty much all our clinical work is with children/adolescents (occasionally, we might work with the "transition age" group of ~18-21 year olds in terms of late graduation or LD/ADHD evals, but it's predominantly child/adolescent focused, obviously). Before coming to grad school, all my research was with adults, and I've continued to work with my old PI and her/our collaborators as a long distance "consultant" since leaving for grad school. I love the people and the research, and we're pretty productive in terms of publishing and presenting. I hope to work with them as long as I can (right now, it's looking like at least another year or maybe two on a current project, and then maybe on some others down the line if the funding comes through ) and should hopefully be getting at least a few more publications from our work within the next 1-3 years.

I'll have child-focused research and publications from work here as well, but I'm wondering if internship sites and post-docs will view it as really strange for someone coming from a child-focused/school psych program to have an ongoing record of publications/research with adults. There are definite links between the two bodies of work in terms of content/population, but not in terms of age.

Thanks!

 

[Ollie123]

Not yet at a point in my career where I can say this with any authority, but my suspicion is that as long as you have a coherent "story" this will likely be a strength, if anything. I'd always heard its more important for child psych folks to be able to work with adults (i.e. "treat the parents") than vice versa so having hard evidence you can work with adults could help with that.

 

[docma]

I agree that you simply need to have a narrative that shows the connections and why you have kept active with both populations. These tandem activities actually give you some "life-span" range that would seem valuable to settings where you work across populations (eg: community mental health, primary care) and it is certainly true that most "children" come with "adults" in their lives, so that expertise will be valuable. Being able to talk about your general research interests/topics from a life-span perspective is definitely useful and a site that looks down on that would be taking a pretty narrow-minded approach I think...so you wouldn't want that one anyway....