By taking forever to graduate
I know I keep making that point, but I think its an important consideration. I know almost no one applying in their 4th year with 1000+ hours and the ones I do actually generally had lousy CVs (i.e. no research).
I've known from the start I was research-heavy so have "gamed the system" to some extent to make sure that my practicums were ones that provided a good hours-to-work ratio. Groups are good for that as you generally don't need to worry about no-shows (at least a few people are bound to make it!). I'm not planning on following a neuropsych track (I'm more "neuroscience" than "neuropsychology" if that makes sense), but have found similar payoff from assessments. These are generally longer so I'm getting 2-3 hours per appointment and its much easier for me to chunk my days that way. I'd MUCH prefer do one 4 hour testing session than try and fit in 4 separate one-hour therapy sessions sporadically throughout the week. Plus, integrated reports look good.
For better or worse, I've deliberately avoided places with lots of support hours/didactics. The one I did do was a counseling center and I found it a terrible experience. Full day a week for 2 full semesters for 60 measly F2F hours....oh the things I could have done with that time. More than half my time was spent in poor-quality supervision, meetings that "gave us space to share our thoughts" (i.e. the person in charge didn't plan anything but we still had to sit there and talk about nothing), "diversity" meetings where we basically played games and pretended it made us more effective therapists, etc. It helped diversify my experiences so I'm happy to have it on paper, but I found the slow-paced inefficiency absolutely infuriating (which I'm sure if they knew they would ask me to spend an extra 4 hours/week "analyzing" to determine why I find it frustrating to sit around gabbing about nothing when I have stuff to do). In case you can't tell, I'm more at home in a hospital setting
The final thing I'll mention is that many people get those hours through research. About 200(ish) of mine have come through research. Some of it isn't exactly great experience (100+ SCIDs), some of it I was decent but I think I can spin it as better than it is (supervising other students in our assessments), and some of it was quite good (primary study therapist that got me the only individual therapy hours I'm likely to get in my area of interest). Since I was so heavily involved in one study, I'm taking first authorship of the primary analyses off an R01 we're going to submit to J Abn (though who knows if it will get accepted), will be on 5-10 other pubs once we get all these out (though we're realllly slow at getting things out the door), and have basically been given free reign over several other large datasets. Admittedly if I was "just" doing the clinical aspect this wouldn't happen, but since I'm quite obviously a researcher too my advisor and other faculty here have been happy to let me combine research and clinical experience. So sometimes clinical work can help build the research CV too!
I will finally add, our practicums here clearly work different than many others. I can't imagine anyone here taking an unpaid practicum for 20 hours/week. The norm is probably 8, and the only time people do 20 hours a week is through their own labs that do applied research or the relatively small number of paid clinical placements (that provide stipend/waiver). A 20 hour/week practicum would eat up far too much time from things that are likely more important for my career, but I imagine it would make getting those hours up MUCH easier.
