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 bring you information about the mental health field and talk about my journey as a PhD student. Thanks for checking out this video. Today I'm going to be talking all about practicum. So, as someone who's training to be a clinical psychologist in the future, I obviously have to apply the skills that I learn in class in the real world. And that's basically what practicum is all about. Practicum is your opportunity to get hands-on experience as a clinician in training under the supervision of a licensed psychologist. I've said in a couple of my videos that I'm currently seeing clients for therapy as a practicum student, and that means that I'm supervised under someone who's already licensed. And they give me a lot of guidance on how to deal with my cases and grow as a clinician. So, practicum is basically the word for that entire process. Now, it's important to note that when I share my experience on here, it's really specific to the field of clinical psychology. So, that means that practicum may look a little bit different for people who are pursuing counseling psychology, school psychology, or other branches of psych. The other thing to know is that every program handles practicum differently. Every program has a different curriculum. So, there's some overlap by how programs deal with their curriculum, but there's also a little bit of variability. So, if you're watching this, just know that my experience comes specifically from a clinical psychologist. And that that experience is going to be based on how my program does things. Now, for those of you who are currently applying to psychology programs, I have a ton of resources for you on all my platforms. But it's important now, as you're considering what programs you're trying to apply to, to know how these programs handle practicum. So, if you're currently applying to clinical psychology programs or other psychology programs where clinical practice is a part of the training, you might want to ask the program, what does practicum look like? For students at this school. And that'll help you get insight as to what this will look like for you. For me, the way that my program does things is that it's a five to seven year program. It's designed to be completed in five. So, God willing, I'll be done pretty soon. But in the first year, we're just taking coursework and we don't do any clinical training. This is different than other programs because there are some PhD programs where you start seeing patients right away. And obviously, you're supervised and so forth. But the way that my program does it is first year, no clinical work. Second year, we work within the university's clinic. And again, we're supervised by licensed psychologists. We have a pretty small caseload. And that's where we're getting our feet wet before we go to external practicum. So, the second year of the program is internal practicum, meaning within the university. And then in the third and fourth year of the program, we do external practicum, meaning outside of the university. So, that can be at a hospital, at a college campus, at a shelter, different types of community organizations where there are mental health services offered. Those are places where you can do practicum, potentially. So, practicum is kind of like a mini-internship. But the reason why we don't call it internship is because usually the final year of the doctoral program is our major full-time internship. And that's governed by APIC, which I will tell you what that stands for right now. APIC is the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers. So, in the fifth year of my program, after I've done an internal practicum to external practicum, then I can finally apply to internship, and that's a national match. Once I go through that process, I will share more about it. But for now, I've only undergone the process of applying for external practicum. So, if you want to hear more about what it was like to apply to the site I'm going to be going to soon, let me know in the comments and I'll cover that whole process. I had to do a lot of interviews and a lot of writing in order to get the placement that I'll be starting soon. But anyhow, practicum is where you actually see clients for therapy. You may also do assessments, depending on the type of site where you end up. And assessments just mean questionnaires, whether they are diagnostic, personality questionnaires, etc. And that's part of the training as a clinical psychologist. We learn how to do therapy, but we also learn how to administer assessments. And that's what sets us apart from master's level and other types of therapists. So, practicum is also known as externship sometimes because, like I said, you're going outside of the university, but you're not yet going on the final year of internship. So, you may hear practicum and externship used interchangeably. When I was an undergrad and I worked in a lab with students who were in grad school, a lot of times they would say that they were on externship, applying for externship. And I was like, what is that? But I really learned more about the process once I was actually in graduate school. So, hopefully this video is explaining it to you before you get to that point so you're not surprised by it once you get into a program. And like I said, if you're currently applying to clinical psychology programs or any grad program, I have tons of free resources for you in the description for this video. So, a few other things to know about practicum is it is the opportunity for you to start kind of honing your skills and interests. So, students can choose, usually, at least in my program, what kind of site we want to go to. If we want to work with children, then you apply to sites where they serve that population. If you want to work with trauma, you apply to sites where people work with that population. And so, it's a time to sort of get specific in what you're interested in so that you can apply to an internship site that's really specific to what you want to do in the future. That's one approach. Another approach is that students dabble during their practicum and they'll do something different each year to figure out what they like and what they don't like. And it also helps them become well-rounded so that by the time they're going to apply to internship, they're competitive and they've been in a lot of different settings. For example, one year they were in a hospital, another year they were with children, and another year they were in an inpatient unit. That shows kind of a well-rounded clinician. And there are different strategies depending on what you're going for in the long term. The graduate program that you attend should help you, should guide you in this process so that you can be a competitive internship applicant. That's another thing to inquire about if you're currently in the application process. The other thing I'll know about practicum is that they may vary in length. And again, this depends by the program. For me, most of the practicum that I have seen are one year. But I did see some while I was applying that were actually two-year rotations. And it's a pretty cool opportunity for you to make relationships with people outside of your institution, outside of your university. And it could be that the same place where you do your practicum might be a place where you go back for internship. Or it might be a place where you go back and do your postdoctoral fellowship. So it's also a nice opportunity for students to do external networking. And that's something that I'm really excited to do. As I leave my university clinic and go to somewhere new. If you want to hear more again about the process that I went through in applying for my external practicum site, let me know in the comments. Also, I'm wrapping up my first year as a student therapist. And so I'll be finishing my practicum year in a couple of weeks. And that means I've been working with clients for just under a year. It was my first experience. If you want a video about that whole process, let me know in the comments. And I'll cover that too. It's been super transformational. I've learned so much in the past year. And if you have been following me for a while, then you've seen my videos from my first year when I was super nervous and excited to start working as a student therapist. So that's pretty much it on practicum. It's your opportunity to get hands-on experience. Usually as you advance in a doctoral program, you start doing more and more practicum hours and less and less classes. So now that I'm entering into my third year, I'm only going to be taking one or two classes per quarter. And I'm going to be spending much more time doing practicum and doing research. Whereas in my first year, it was all classes and no practicum, no research. So that's something that's common in programs. As you go forward, you're doing more applied work and less classroom work, which is great. And I'm excited for that. So my question for you is what questions do you have about practicum? What do you want to know? What is it like? If you want to hear about the application process, questions that you might want to ask prospective programs about their practicum curriculum, let me know in the comments how I can help you in this process. If you're currently a student who is at practicum, let me know where you're working, what it's been like for you. I would love to hear from you. Finally, I hope that you'll stay connected with me on my other platforms, whether it be Instagram, TikTok, and so forth. I look forward to seeing your comments and hearing from you. Thank you so much for watching. My goal is to inform you, to inspire you, to spark an interest in you, and also entertain you. Thanks for watching.