First Year Orientation to Clinical Work—Getting Your Feet Wet. As part of orienting new graduate students to clinical work, all First Year Clinical Psychology graduate students in our program take our “Introduction to Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy” course during their first Fall and Spring semesters. As part of this course, First Year graduate students begin observing and participating in one of the treatment teams available through our program. Often, this treatment team is linked to the clinical services being offered by the graduate students’ major professor. Some graduate students participate on other Clinical Psychology Ph.D. faculty member’s treatment teams as well.
Practica in the UCF Psychology Clinic. Graduate students enroll for Clinical Practica during their Second and Third Years in our program which take place in our Psychology Clinic under the direct supervision and support of UCF Clinical Psychology faculty. These Clinical Practica incrementally expose graduate students to clientele of diverse background, ages, and presenting issues through both assessment and intervention services. The Psychology Clinic operates year-round, with the exception of academic breaks and holidays, and serves the community surrounding the University of Central Florida. The Psychology Clinic has multiple assessment and intervention rooms, a waiting room, a receptionist office, and a work room for graduate student clinicians. Each assessment and intervention room is equipped with digital recording equipment so that session can be recorded for supervision purposes.
Externship Placements. Generally in the Fourth Year (following the completion of the Master’s Thesis), graduate students can be placed in one of several clinical externship placements that are available in the community. Clinical externship placement experiences are supervised by on-site doctoral-level staff members at the agency where the graduate student is placed. Externship placements generally are made to meet graduate students’ individual training needs and to help insure exposure to clientele and work environments common to clinical practice after graduation.
Clinical externship placements include sites such as:
- Alcohol and Other Drugs
- Florida Hospital
- Maitland Psychology PA
- Nemour’s Children’s Hospital
- Orlando Health
- Orlando Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center
Predoctoral Clinical Internship. Given that we are an APA-accredited program, a one-year full-time predoctoral internship in Clinical Psychology is required and is typically taken in the Fifth Year. Internships usually require graduate students to move to a distant location for one year of intensely supervised clinical experience. As a result, graduate students are required to propose their Dissertation before they are approved to apply for internship. Further, graduate students are expected to have completed or made substantial progress toward completing their Dissertation before they leave for their internship experience.
Our graduate students have been highly successful in obtaining APA-accredited predoctoral internship placements. Some of our graduate students’ recent predoctoral internships have included:
- Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX
- Charleston Consortium-MUSC, Charleston, SC
- Children’s National Medical Center, Washington, DC
- Harvard School of Medicine-Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, MA
- Mailman Center for Child Development, Miami, FL
- Tulane School of Medicine, New Orleans, LA
- Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT
- Clinical Psychology Residency Training Consortium, University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson, MS