Internship Admissions, Support, and Initial Placement Data

This description must be consistent with the program’s policies on intern selection and practicum and academic preparation requirements:

Our goal is to train entry-level generalist psychologists that have been exposed to various clinical contexts in which professional psychologists work. In addition to developing core competencies in the general areas of clinical psychology, each intern will gain experience in a particular area of concentration. Further, we emphasize direct experience with patients at various stages of development, with a wide breadth of presentations and demographic characteristics, in varied contexts and service delivery systems (i.e., outpatient mental health, psychiatric inpatient, medical setting), and employing a variety of modalities of approaches, which we believe prepares interns to enter comfortably into a range of professional roles and settings. We believe this approach to training helps interns articulate a strong professional identity, and fosters a commitment to "whole-person care," namely, a bio-psycho-social-spiritual perspective in clinical care. All interns develop core competencies in psychological assessment and diagnosis, psychological intervention, supervision, professional consultation, and program evaluation/development. Each intern  completes a specialty mental health rotation and a health psychology rotation. Specialty mental health rotations experience is obtained in a psychiatric inpatient/partial hospitalization/intensive outpatient setting, with adults, adolescents, or children. Examples include geriatric inpatient (which includes a neuropsychology component), child and adolescent partial hospitalization setting, eating disorders, and adult partial hospitalization/intensive outpatient. The health psychology experience is obtained in a medical outpatient setting, serving patients with chronic illness such as diabetes, heart disease, chronic pain, obesity. Together, these rotations are designed to provide interns with exposure to a wide range of populations with various needs, including those with co-morbid medical and psychiatric diagnoses in a medical care setting. In keeping with LLU's mission statement (www.llu.edu/medicine/mission.page), applicants who show interest and commitment for the integration of religion and spirituality within the practice of psychology are strongly encouraged to apply.

While a certain minimum of direct service or practicum hours is not necessary, the quantity of these hours is taken into consideration when evaluating the strength of the applicant’s preparation. Additionally, the quality and diversity of prior practicum training, the number and range of client populations with whom applicants have had prior experience (typically, interns who have worked with some range of client populations, preferably including adult, child and family in outpatient, inpatient and medical settings), and the number of integrated testing reports completed are all taken into consideration. Our program requires applicants to have experience administering projective, personality and intelligence tests. In some cases, exceptions will be made for applicants whose letters of recommendation suggest strong assessment and report skills, and who are committed to ensuring they seek out additional training opportunities prior to the beginning of the internship year.