I don't know about anyone else, but this is not comforting to me. This kind of large reorganization of the program screams "instability" to me, even if it is in service of getting accreditation. It tells me that the initial organization and structure of the program was not well-designed and needed massive overhaul or that there are issues within the overall university, e.g. disagreement over who will be administering or funding the program.
Hi again, forgive me if I don't use the quoting system properly here. Totally agree with you here, there has definitely been some instability. The original director of the program went an unconventional route and started a PhD program with no existing masters program in psychology, which is apparently rare and difficult to pull off. From what I have heard from the original cohort, when someone with experience accrediting a program took over as director, the decision to switch to Psy.D. and move to Atlanta was made. Mainly to speed the timeline to accreditation and to open up opportunities for practicum sites and new professors. Macon is really too small of a town to support those needs IMO.
Talk about burying the lede. I know that it's a bit of a catch-22 for new programs seeking accreditation, but unaccredited internships should never be unacceptable and the internship match rate should likely be used as proxy for the program's quality and its chances for accreditation.
With APPIC now requiring programs to be accredited before even letting them into the Match, I think the fact that any students got matched to accredited sites is good? I asked around and most of our last group of interns went to accredited sites and some to ones awaiting site visit in the next year. If we were accredited already, I would totally agree about unaccredited internships. But I mean, even if it's not ideal, somebody has to go to unaccredited sites, otherwise they won't get accredited, sounds like a place for students from unaccredited programs!
The problem with this reasoning is that many, many doctoral program in clinical/counseling psychology are fully funded, providing stipends, full tuition remission, and often heath insurance to their students. Furthermore, a student should not be responsible for obtaining their own basic funding (grants for research are a different matter) by obtaining outside employment. I know that many students get outside work or extra work at their practica to pick up some extra money, but not doing so isn't impacting their basic full funding.
I think the key difference here is that this is a PsyD program now. Seems like we're pretty comparable for PsyD programs. As far as I know too, most other PsyDs aren't funded? The PhD/PsyD debate is a whole different story. Then breaking it down to subspecialties changes things too since this is a clinical health program (fundamentally, despite the "medical" name) . I was looking at the costs section from this page:
Frequently Asked Questions About Graduate School
Except that med school grads, depending on the specialty, make many times more than clinical/counseling doctoral program grads do, so it's not really intellectually honest to directly compare program costs and debt in this manner.
I was honestly trying to frame the school cost alone. If you want to talk about sunk cost vs earning potential I agree with you, with consideration to variance in psych specialty too. I'd like to say again, I'm just trying to help provide info, I'm not trying to trick or convince anyone to join our program in particular.
I don't think you need to be "on the inside" to make a fairly good assessment of the program and the risk level involved in choosing it. Attending an unaccredited and sparsely funded program should be really be out of the question.
I totally respect your opinion but to some extent will have to disagree here. On one level, if you're looking for an accredited and funded research/PhD program, you're sort of on the wrong thread anyway (though by the time some read this we may be accredited). There are loads of programs out there that already fit that description, so there's not much point in quibbling about the details of our particular program below that. We just don't meet that standard. For those interested in exploring the options outside of that, taking a calculated risk (and it is ultimately a risk), I'm trying to help provide some more information to gauge it. I saw the risk when I applied and felt it was worth taking in order to be a part of creating something new and being on the cutting edge of a subspecialty.