Speaker 1: Welcome to Grad Life Grind. If you're new to this channel, thank you for checking it out and if you're already a subscriber, thanks for being back again. My name is Arielle and I'm a PhD student in clinical psychology and in this channel I talk about my life as a grad student and bring you information about the mental health. In this video I want to give a recap of my first summer as a PhD student in clinical psych. So what I didn't know back when I was applying to graduate programs is that PhD programs are all year long. There is no such thing as a summer break and I quickly learned that was the case once I was admitted into my program. I learned that not only was I gonna have classes the summer of my first year, I also was gonna start seeing clients during that time. So my program is a little unique compared to other clinical psychology programs but at my school in the first year all we are responsible for is coursework and I've done a bunch of recap videos about what that experience was like and what classes I took and so forth. At my program we don't really start clinical training or seeing clients until the second year and we continue to take classes and do research as we progress in the program. So that means that this summer I was taking some summer classes and also started seeing therapy clients for the first time, obviously under the supervision of a licensed psychologist, but my first clinical experience was just a few months ago and now it's August and I'm on break before the fall quarter starts and I'm also off from the clinic right now so I have some time off before I jump into the second year which is gonna be super intense. I don't know when you're watching this but I'm recording this in 2020 and I think that this year is gonna go down in history forever as the year of coronavirus and that means that I started seeing my clients during COVID-19 which means everything has been via telehealth or basically on Zoom and this is not at all what I expected my first clinical experience to be like and nobody could have predicted this. This is just how things are now, everything is remote, almost everything is online these days so I've gotten a really unique opportunity to become really well versed in telehealth or teletherapy and if you want me to record another video specifically about what it's like seeing clients as a PhD student I'm totally down to do that just let me know in the comments. But essentially my summer consisted of the two courses that I took which were psychometrics and professional standards, I'll talk about those in a second, and seeing my clients. I started off with two clients then I got a third then I got a fourth so right now I have four clients and like I said I'm under the supervision of a licensed psychologist because that's how psychologists are trained and I see my clients once a week, I have supervision twice a week with my supervisor, and then I have my classes. I was definitely not as busy this summer as I was during the regular school year but definitely busier than I expected because I'm used to having my summers generally off and while I did work in the past every summer I definitely wasn't seeing clients for therapy and that was a whole new scary and overwhelming experience that I was doing for the first time this past summer. So this summer is probably one that I'm gonna remember forever because there was just this huge first of seeing my first clients but also this really odd twist of doing everything online so it does feel a little bit weird that I've never been face-to-face with my clients I've only been screen-to-screen with my clients so that's something that I've just had to work with and of course as we've done for the past few months now all my classes were also online. So the classes I took like I said were professional standards and psychometrics. Professional standards is something that you might have heard me mention in one of my previous videos because it's a class that's offered for every single year in the program. I took it as a first year and now I took it again as a second year or rising second year because it's designed specifically for where you are in the program or in the timeline of your program. So in my first year the professional standards course basically was an overview of what I can expect for each year and that seems kind of silly but it was pretty useful at the time. Now as a rising second year professional standards was all about applying to practicum and I'll do another video about practicum but it's usually a training opportunity that you get outside of your institution to advance your clinical training. So in my program we have our first practicum is within our university and then the third and fourth year practicums are outside of our university at a hospital, at another mental health clinic, or wherever we find and then the fifth year is usually internship which is a national match. But for now professional standards was all about how we're gonna apply to practicum once we're done with this internal year at the university. That was actually a super duper useful course. We did cover letters, CV writing, and just a lot of like I said professional development things. We talked about LinkedIn, we talked about professionalism, and I found it super useful and I really appreciate that my program has something like this. It's really important to get that guidance as you advance in your program and there are different expectations of grad students depending on what year they are. I found it really helpful to know what's expected of me now that I'm gonna be a second year, what practicum sites and internship sites are expecting of me once I'm a third and fourth year student, and it also helped me to start exploring where do I want to do practicum based on my interest, what kind of clinic do I want to go to, do I want to be in the hospital setting. It was actually really fun to look toward the future of what do I want my training to look like for the next three years. How can I be better prepared for internship? How can I make sure that I'm a well-rounded internship applicant? So looking ahead I think it was really nice because this summer was culminating my first year and this course let me see what comes next and it was a sort of full circle moment for me because when I started the graduate program obviously I was terrified, I had no idea what to expect, and now I can't even believe how fast my first year went. There have been highs and lows but I just feel super psyched and grateful to finally be done with the first year. On one hand it felt like forever and on the other hand it flew by. So the professional standards course brought everything together for me and wrapped it up really nicely. The other course I took was psychometrics and basically psychometrics is the math behind psychological testing. So in research and clinical work there's a lot of psychological testing and there's tons of different types of tests but some common ones are the Beck Depression Inventory which is an assessment of depressive symptoms, BAI which is Beck Anxiety Inventory. So when you create a questionnaire to assess for anything apparently there's a ton that goes behind that and psychometrics is all the statistics and basically the science of making good tests and making sure that they're reliable and valid and can actually be used to test what you're hoping to test. That is a mouthful and I think that's pretty representative of how the course was. I found the information to be relevant but I still had a hard time and I think it's because psychometrics is really abstract so normally when you're learning statistics you're looking at data and with psychometrics it's kind of like you're looking at data about getting data because you're looking at the tests that you're using or the instruments that you're using to collect the data and like I said I found it relevant because when you are choosing to do a research study and you're trying to figure out which measures you want to use, which instruments you want to use to assess for different things, you have to look at the psychometric data. How good is this test? So if I'm doing a study on the effect of sleep on depression I'm gonna probably want to measure sleep and sleep quality, how much sleep someone's getting, and also their depressive symptoms. So I'm gonna need to look for measures for both of those things and I need to look at the literature to see which of the ten sleep quality tests out there are actually the best or the most useful ones. And that's where psychometrics comes in. So it is actually something pretty important. I didn't know what to expect from the class at all. Now I can see why it's an important course to take and an important thing to understand. On the other hand, not everyone wants to do research and not everyone is interested in creating their own instruments or tests. The other thing that made this course really hard was that it was all online and we were doing some coding on this program called M+. That was also a surprise to me. If you didn't know that in grad school you learn how to code, you're welcome. I'm letting you know. I had absolutely no idea that I was gonna have to learn how to code in my PhD program. I had no idea I was gonna have to do math, but a few quarters ago I learned how to code in R, which is a statistical program we use, and then this summer I had to learn to use M+. And I don't know what you guys think, but it's really hard to have Zoom open and a coding platform open and your notes or PowerPoint open, all this stuff on different windows, and I just found it really overwhelming. And it's also really hard to learn something as specific as coding without the professor or TAs there, because if you mess up even a tiny comma in coding, the whole thing is wrong. And if you're getting an error, you can't just be like, professor, look at what's going on. You have to share your screen, and it's like a whole thing. So I think that made the course pretty hard on me. I heard that psychometrics was one of the harder statistics classes that we have to take, and I'm done. I survived. So that was basically what consumed my summer. I had professional standards, which was an easier-going but really useful course. I had psychometrics, which was very intense. Did I mention that it was a five-hour class? I had to be on Zoom for five hours straight. So psychometrics, and also my clients. And along with clients comes a lot of other things, including supervision, note writing, treatment plans, and I also had no idea that I was going to be doing so much writing as a student therapist. And I can talk all about that in another video, but all these things kept me pretty busy this summer. So even though I was pretty busy this summer, I think I was generally more relaxed than I am during the regular academic year, because there was just less on my plate than usual. So I could take my time studying for my psychometrics exams, or I could take my time doing my homework, or I can take my time perusing different practicum sites for professional standards. I definitely took my time doing my clinical writing. Another thing I was working on this summer was starting my research work, and I did a video before about what lab I got into and what my research interests are, but essentially I am going to be collecting data about intimate partner violence in the Latinx community, and so I had to look at the literature and psychometric data to pick out which measures I want to add to the existing study that my supervisor is working on. So that was a really nice experience. I'm really excited to be collecting data, and hopefully that study will contribute to what will become my dissertation. And in addition to all that, I also had the research comp. So in grad school there are these things called competencies or comp exams. Different programs call them different things, but they're essentially benchmarks that programs have for you throughout the program, kind of things that you have to make sure you can do by a certain point in order to move forward. So one of the competencies that my program has is the research competency exam, and it is basically a mega final exam after you've taken the entire statistics sequence. So I took stats one, two, and three in the first three quarters of my first year, and then I took psychometrics in the summer, which is technically the fourth quarter, and the research comp is an exam on those first three stats classes. And even though we already passed those three stats classes, we still have to take this stats exam. So that was something that was pretty anxiety-provoking for me because stats is not something that I am super confident in, even though I've gotten really good grades in the stats classes that I've taken. But I was nervous that I wasn't going to remember everything that I learned from the beginning of the year, and I told myself that I was going to study a little bit every single week for the entire summer. That did not happen at all because I was super busy with my classes and clients, and I ended up studying a little bit basically the week or so before. And the exam is pass-fail, which is nice. You do get multiple tries for taking it, and this is totally just specific to my program. I have no idea how other programs do it, but I ended up kind of cramming for the research comp and passing it. So that's something awesome that I don't have to worry about anymore. And that competency exam was right after the final for psychometrics. So classes ended, and then I had the research comp, and then the break started. Now that I'm on break, I officially feel like I'm done with my first year. Even though at the beginning of the summer I felt like I was done because typically summer classes aren't a thing for students, I feel way more done now that the summer is over and I'm on an actual break. And it feels even more amazing than it did in June when I covered my year one recap. Like I said in that video, I feel amazing to be done with my first year, and I am super excited for what the second year is going to bring. So during this break I've just been focusing really on self-care, relaxing, getting myself organized so that I can be ready to do amazing things in the next academic year. And it's felt really good to have time off because I really haven't had time off for a long time. I can't even remember the last time. And when I started graduate school is actually when I started recording these videos, sharing what my experience as a grad student is like. So that means that it's been almost a year that I've been sharing this stuff with you, and if you're new here I hope you'll check out some of my previous videos. I really love sharing my journey on here, and I'm always open to more suggestions because I want this to be a space that is really helpful to you. So let me know what you want to see in the future. Let me know what I can cover as a second-year student. And again, my name is Arielle. My goal is to inform you, to inspire you, to spark an interest in you, and hopefully also entertain you. So I hope you'll be back soon. Thanks for checking out Grad Life Grind.