The program offers a one-year, full-time training experience. Interns are expected to:
- Engage in 750 hours of direct service during the internship year: This translates into approximately 15 hours of direct service delivery per week.
- Contribute to patient care; however, the intern's service provision is secondary to their training
This expectation is the result of the program's goal of providing sufficient exposure and experience to meet its competency expectations. It also allows adequate time for supervision, didactic learning, recordkeeping, research, and literature reviews within a 40-hour week.
Professional development supervision
When you begin the training year with the Psychology Internship Program, you are assigned a professional development supervisor who is responsible for:
- Integrating you into the program and refining your schedule to meet training goals and objectives
- Ongoing evaluation of the match between your training goals and objectives and your responsibilities within the program
- Guiding you through the identification of fellowship opportunities consistent with your career goals in collaboration with your graduate program as needed
- Providing approximately four hours of individual supervision per week
The program also designates up to four clinical supervisors to supervise psychotherapy and testing activities. All clinical supervisors are licensed psychologists.
Why we provide supervision
We want to help trainees become thoughtful and knowledgeable about the evolution of their own professional identity and to fully conceptualize their clinical decisions.
Supervision offers opportunities for socialization into the profession of psychology and may utilize a wide variety of teaching techniques such as process notes, review of written work, discussion, live or recorded observation, co-therapy, didactic exposure, and mentoring.
Supervisors are highly accessible and will provide you with sufficient training, mentoring, and encouragement to allow you to successfully complete the internship. Supervisors help interns to utilize empirical findings and relevant theoretical models as the basis for their thinking about clinical issues.
Evaluation process
We provide nearly continuous evaluation and feedback to interns, assessing them through ongoing weekly supervision and participation in didactic sessions. Performance is formally assessed every four months in October, February, and June.
Strengths and weaknesses in intern performance are identified, and any remedial plans are developed to address areas needing improvement. You will be expected to participate in program evaluations by completing didactic, supervisor, and program evaluations.
Didactics and seminars
Seminar series provide another critical component of the program's efforts to expose interns to the core skills of the psychology profession. These seminars are held weekly. The following seminars are offered:
- Department of Psychiatry Grand Rounds is held each Tuesday from September to June. Grand Rounds consists of a formal presentation by a visiting speaker or faculty member on a wide variety of topics in the field.
- The Clinical Practice Didactic is held weekly on Fridays. This didactic series is attended by the Adult Psychology and Child and Pediatric Psychology track interns throughout the year. This seminar provides in-depth information about a variety of topics and techniques, including methods of assessment and intervention, relevant to professional clinical application of psychological science. Topics are presented during individual didactic presentations in a seminar style by faculty from the Department of Psychiatry and other clinical departments as available.
- The Neuropsychology Seminar is held weekly on Fridays and is designed to further the Adult and Pediatric Neuropsychology trainees’ empirical knowledge base in human clinical neuroscience, build clinical skills, and facilitate progress towards board certification in clinical neuropsychology. This is achieved through didactic presentations, case presentations, and fact-finding sessions. This seminar is attended by the Adult Neuropsychology and Pediatric Neuropsychology track interns and fellows.
- The Professional Development Seminar is held on a semi-monthly basis on Fridays for the first six months of the training year. This seminar involves faculty presentations on topics in professional ethics, risk assessment, cultural diversity, career preparation and job attainment, developing and leading a private practice, evidence-based practice standards, and the conduct of clinical supervision, among other topics.
- The Business of Psychology Seminar provides training on the role of psychologists in the larger healthcare delivery landscape with an emphasis on sustainable business practices. This is specifically focused on service delivery in an academic health system context, though the information is applicable to a variety of professional service settings. This didactic is held on a semi-monthly basis on Fridays in the second six months of the training year.
- Additional didactic/observational experiences are available. All interns are invited to attend the psychiatry resident journal club, as well as the Psychiatry Research Works-In-Progress series. Adult interns attend a monthly psychotherapy case conference and psychology journal club as well as a weekly Hanover Psychiatry team meeting. Neuropsychology track interns have the opportunity to observe Wada administrations. They also attend the Epilepsy Case Conference on Fridays from 3:00 to 4:30 pm in the Radiology conference room at DHMC, and the Neurology Grand Rounds held on Fridays. Child and Pediatric Psychology interns attend additional didactics focused on interventions across the lifespan. See more Grand Rounds offerings.
In addition to the educational benefits of the didactic offerings, these series help to create cohesion in the intern class and consolidate the interns' identities as psychologists.