Philosophy
The primary mission of the program is to provide high-level training to prepare the interns for assuming a dynamic role in the rapidly changing real world of professional, psychological practice. Our model of training is best described as being the Practitioner Scholar Model. It is a model that emphasizes learning-by-doing in a mentoring environment that allows experience in working with psychotic, personality disordered, and culturally different patients. We focus on clinical practice and service delivery, moving the intern through a series of developmental stages from the apprentice mentee to colleague. Our ultimate goal is to train the intern to be ready for independent practice. Although we do not hew particularly closely to the Scientist-Practitioner Model, we have nonetheless come to expect that the interns be educated consumers of clinical research. We encourage the interns to think critically and to evaluate the findings of research-based knowledge within the context of their practical experience. Although we do indeed provide didactic training, our greatest emphasis is on fostering the intern's use of self, intuition, and creativity in becoming ready for independent practice.
Although there have been many changes in the field of clinical practice, it is still our belief that there are two core skills that clinical and counseling psychologists should have if they are to succeed. First, they must be expert diagnosticians who can rapidly assess psychopathology and formulate treatment strategies. Second, they must be expert psychotherapists who can quickly and efficiently treat patients with a variety of problems. The net effect of our training efforts is to help the intern become an effective independent practitioner in both diagnostic testing and in psychotherapy. Regardless of where the field of psychology may lead them in the future, our program will have given them these core skills that will forever be at the heart of their professional identities.
It should be understood that we are a "generalist" training program. We are not designed to help interns become specialists, as we believe that specialization should be pursued at the post doctoral level. As stated above, we emphasize psychotherapy of the insight-oriented sort and psychological testing of the traditional sort, while at the same time offering quality adjunctive/elective experiences in cognitive therapy, manualized treatments, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), health psychology, neuropsychology, chemical dependency, crisis management, and child and adolescent psychiatry/psychology. It has been our experience that students from a variety of programs, from the strictest behavioral to the strictest psychoanalytic, have found that our generalist atmosphere respects and nurtures previous training while at the same time adding quality, new inputs which foster growth.
