Dr. Sharp: Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Testing Psychologist podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Jeremy Sharp, licensed psychologist, group practice owner, and private practice coach.
Many of y’all know that I have been using TherapyNotes as our practice EHR for over 10 years now. I’ve looked at others, and I just keep coming back to TherapyNotes because they do it all. If you’re interested in an EHR for your practice, you can get two free months of TherapyNotes by going to thetestingpsychologist.com/therapynotes and enter the code “testing.”
This podcast is brought to you by PAR.
The Neuropsychological Assessment Battery offers the combined strengths of a flexible and fixed neuropsychological battery. Now you can score any of the NAB’s six modules on PARiConnect, PAR’s online assessment platform. Visit parinc.com\nab.
Hey, folks. Welcome back to The Testing Psychologist podcast. Good to be here with you. The topic today is a timely one. I’m talking about doctoral internship applications.
As many of you know, I have APA-approved or APPIC-accredited internship program here at the practice. We have a consortium which helped set everything up. We’ve been doing this application review thing for the past 8 years, and I don’t think I’ve ever done an episode on application review and thoughts on applications. So here we are.
I’ve wrapped up another year of reviewing doctoral internship applications and I am struck by the quality of the applicants. There are some truly incredible graduate students out there who are going to be fantastic psychologists. So today I’m sharing some personal thoughts on what makes an application stand out in a sea of often great applicants.
If you’re a practice owner and you’d like some support in running your practice, I would be happy to work with you. I have a few strategy sessions open where we just jump in for an hour and tackle some difficult questions or things that you’re struggling with. The hope is that you walk away with some pretty clear ideas of what to do next and how to move forward. If that sounds interesting, you can go to thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting and book a strategy session there.
All right, let’s chat about doctoral internship applications.
All right, everybody. We are back and talking about doctoral internship applications. So, lots of thoughts on internship applications. I’m sure there are lots of schools of thought and I guess I’m just giving a lot of disclaimers.
I acknowledge that this is going to be different depending on each site, but what I’m doing today is just offering some thoughts on what stood out in doctoral internship applications for me at our site. Our site is a private practice outpatient that specializes in comprehensive neurodevelopmental evaluations.
So we attract students from a variety of places. We attract school psychologists, clinical psychologists, counseling psychologists, and students who aspire to become board-certified in neuropsychology. So we’re pulling from a lot of different places.
I totally recognize that this is personal. And as we go through the thoughts here, I’m guessing you might disagree with some things. That is totally okay. This is just my impression of the application process, and talking about what helps an application stand out for me, for our practice.
So first off, students these days are awesome. We had such a hard time deciding who to interview because the quality of applicants was incredibly high. I kept thinking if I applied to internship these days, I don’t think I’d get an interview anywhere, honestly. So a ton of gratitude for the vast amount of talent out there this year.
Some general thoughts before diving into specifics on what stood out among the applications. Some of this might be obvious, but maybe bears repeating. If you are an intern or a potential intern applying for internship, you should just assume that everyone is going to be good.
To me, it’s like trying out for a Division 1 sport. By the time you get to this level, nearly everyone is going to be decent, if not good at writing. They’ll have plenty of hours, and they’ll have good, if not great, letters of recommendation. So, to stand out, I think you need a little bit more, and you have to be somewhat unique to make your application pop against the background of all the others.
Another thing to keep in mind is that reviewers are looking at tens, if not hundreds of applications. We do not read every single word. I think most sites probably focus their attention on specific parts of the application while completely ignoring other parts, which is maybe a little demoralizing. I know we put so much time, as graduate students, into these applications, and I hate to even say this out loud, but maybe this is relatively widespread and known that we just don’t read every word of the application.
So here at our practice, we are focusing on a few things. We focus on briefly touching on the accreditation status of the graduate program. We pay a lot of attention to letters of recommendation, assessment experience and hours, including the measures that you’ve administered and the settings that you’ve worked in, your report sample, cover letter, and your biographical essay.
This is site-specific, of course, but those are the components that are most important to us. I and no one at my practice personally, we don’t read the theoretical orientation essay or the research essay, for example, and we honestly skip many other parts of the application.
Okay, with that said, here are some things that I saw this year that really stood out in the applications. Letters of recommendation that speak to personality as well as skill. So, a great letter of recommendation, for me, and this is directed just as much at letter writers as applicants, is a letter of recommendation that directly talks about the applicant’s interpersonal style, how they get along with others, how they handle stress, time management.
So I want a story or an example, even if it’s a short one, this goes so much further than just a dry letter that runs through the competencies. For example, one of the applicants this year, or one of the applications rather, one of the letters this year mentioned that the applicant, “Gets along with everyone and maintains an active social life yet also manages to get all their work done on time.”
That simple, short example tells me a lot about that person, and it covers two things that I care a lot about:
1. Personality and social skills.
2. Time management.
So, whatever you do, if you are writing letters for people, please do not write the letter that just says how you know the person, how long you’ve known them, in what context, and then dryly describe their competency in each area.
I know that we’re also on the flip side, writing a lot of letters. It takes time to put personal things into the letters, especially those of you, training directors, and so forth. I know it’s a ton of work. I’m sure you’re using templates. That’s totally okay. I think if you want to do your students a favor and help them stand out, put some kind of personal example in there.
Before we totally leave letters of recommendation, just know that if you check any box other than the enthusiastically recommend without reservations, it’s going to raise a red flag for me. So we essentially only interviewed folks this year where all three letters of recommendation said enthusiastically recommend without reservations.
Let’s take a break to hear from a featured partner.
Y’all know that I love TherapyNotes, but I am not the only one. They have a 4.9 out of 5-star rating on trustpilot.com and Google, which makes them the number one rated Electronic Health Record system available for mental health folks today. They make billing, scheduling, note-takin,g and telehealth all incredibly easy. They also offer custom forms that you can send through the portal. For all the prescribers out there, TherapyNotes is proudly offering ePrescribe as well. And maybe the most important thing for me is that they have live telephone support seven days a wee,k so you can actually talk to a real person in a timely manner.
If you’re trying to switch from another EHR, the transition is incredibly easy. They’ll import your demographic data free of charge so you can get going right away. So if you’re curious or you want to switch or you need a new EHR, try TherapyNotes for two months absolutely free. You can go to thetestingpsychologist.com/therapynotes and enter the code “testing”. Again, totally free. No strings attached. Check it out and see why everyone is switching to TherapyNotes.
The Neuropsychological Assessment Battery or NAB, is a comprehensive instrument offering the combined strengths of a flexible and fixed neuropsychological battery. It lets you administer the full battery, any of its six modules, or individual tests. Now the NAB modules are available for scoring on PARiConnect, PAR’s online assessment platform. Learn more at parinc.com\nab.
Let’s get back to the podcast.
I’ve written a ton of letters as well, so I know what it’s like being in that seat. If you can’t check that box, for example, if you can only say, highly recommend or would recommend, I’m going to need some kind of explanation from you in that letter why you checked that box because essentially I see that and I think, oh, there is something going on with this person. I need to be careful if they’re not enthusiastically recommended without reservations.
Okay. So that’s the letter of our recommendation. The next thing that I looked at, we look at reports. There’s two sides to this with reports. I wrestle with this, one side is that reports are largely driven by the site that someone works at and the supervisor that they’re working with. So I try not to penalize folks for the format of reports.
It is shocking, to me, how many 20, 30, 40-page reports are still floating around out there in spite of the research that shows that those reports are largely ignored and unread by our audience. But here we are. So there are a ton of those reports still floating around out there, and I try not to penalize people for that.
What I am looking at is primarily writing style and little bit of conceptualization. Honestly, I’m assuming that any report that gets submitted with an APPIC application has been heavily edited. It’s the best of the best. The supervisor has probably had a heavy hand in shaping the content of that report.
So I don’t know that I put a lot of stock in the conceptualization necessarily. I look for egregious errors or misinterpreting scores and things like that, but I’m actually more looking at writing ability. So, can this individual write a coherent sentence? Are they a good writer? Do they have grammar skills? Are they expressive? Are they dry?
So I’m looking more at writing style than anything else, but I will say, I’m going to talk out of both sides of my mouth here, that if I run across a report that takes the less is more approach, or the inverted pyramid approach, or my gosh, even a report that heaven forbid doesn’t discuss results of the tests, those jump out.
So I hope you all know, by this point, that I definitely subscribed to the less is more approach to report writing. I will say this, out of nearly 100 applications that we got this year, there were two that stood out because they look like our practice’s reports. They use the inverted pyramid model without a bunch of text describing the test results. They were short. They were to the point. And they are pretty well written.
So if you are submitting report samples, at least to our site, it’s not an immediate disqualification by any means to have a long report. I know that that’s what happens at a lot of sites, but at least make sure that it’s well written. There are no grammatical errors. You didn’t miss any pronouns, name substitutions, or anything like that.
Moving on to covered letters. So, a cover letter to me is such an incredible place to shine for a student. I’m not going to li,e y’all. I would say at least 80% of cover letters start with the sentence, “I am a 4th-year doctoral student at insert university. It is with great enthusiasm that I submit my application to your internship site.”
And then most of them go on to be a prose description of that person’s CV, which is fine and helpful. We have your CV in a different part of the application, and so sometimes it feels redundant, but for me, this is a big opportunity to do something a little bit different and show that you did some research about our site or the area and have some investment in showcasing your personality a little bit.
Hit me with something like, I’m so excited to be going on an internship. I’d love to join the CCA team because blank, or something like, I’ve always wanted to live in Colorado for a year. The site gives me the opportunity to do that so I can ski, run or whatever. Literally anything that shows some personality.
As you can see, this is a clear theme with me. I want to know who I’m going to be working with for the next year, who I’m going to be supervising, and how that person’s going to integrate into our staff. So anything that shows some personality and a clear desire to work at our site, rather than a generic letter.
I know this is more work. I know you’re putting together 1,000,000 applications. I know it’s overwhelming. It’s hard to personalize each letter, and this is an incredibly stressful time, but if you could take 5 minutes to personalize that cover letter to the site, it would go a long way.
And if you want to go way overboard, just as a tip for anybody maybe applying next year to our site, look on our website, mention our practice’s values in your cover letter. You would basically be guaranteed an interview at that point if you mentioned our practice’s values. It shows that you looked at our website and did some homework.
So cover letter, a great opportunity to showcase your personality, let us know who you are. I understand there’s all sorts of apprehension about being too informal and so forth, but I like to hear a little more about someone and what they’re about.
So, transitioning to the last component that I pay a lot of attention to, and that is the biographical essay. This is so tough. I look back at my essays from internship and even graduate school applications, I’ll be honest, they were absolutely terrible. So here I am, 20+ years down the road with some perspective.
What I’m looking for in a biographical essay is an essay that sounds like it was written by a real person. What do I mean by that? There were a few applications this year with essays that felt like the applicant was telling me a story about their lives. There was some personal information. There was maybe some humor. There was real vocabulary, not just jargon and sterile academic language.
I will say, this is a fine line, and it can be hard to know what comes across in writing and how it’s interpreted. So I will say this, be personal, tell me a story about your life. I will say, don’t stretch it, and try to create a meaningful metaphor. There are some essays that do that, comparing Chutes and Ladders to your journey as a psychologist.
Some of those feel like a little bit of a stretch, but yeah, some personal information. Tell me about your personality. Why do you like to do this? Why do you want to specialize in testing? Maybe talk about a failure or two, or a time that you struggled and how you overcame that.
I like the personal stuff, but that said, you never know how it’s going to come across. So I think more than anything, this is why it is crucial to have people outside our field, like friends, family, or anybody who you can trust to be honest with you, read your essays and give you some good feedback before you submit them. I wish I had had that when I was applying to graduate school and to internship, more so on graduate school. I had a lot of folks read my essays before internship, but I still think they could be a lot better.
So, all that said, I have so much admiration for graduate students as time goes on. I guess I probably would not even get an interview anywhere these days with how competitive and amazing the field is. And if any of you out there listening applied to our site, especially anyone that I personally interviewed, thank you so much for considering us. And to all of you applying and interviewing, congratulations on getting to the stage of training, and best of luck through the Match process.
All right, y’all. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode. Always grateful to have you here. I hope that you take away some information that you can implement in your practice and in your life. Any resources that we mentioned during the episode will be listed in the show notes, so make sure to check those out.
If you like what you hear on the podcast, I would be so grateful if you left a review on iTunes or Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
And if you’re a practice owner or aspiring practice owner, I’d invite you to check out The Testing Psychologist mastermind groups. I have mastermind groups at every stage of practice development: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. We have homework, we have accountability, we have support, we have resources. These groups are amazing. We do a lot of work and a lot of connecting. If that sounds interesting to you, you can check out the details at thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting. You can sign up for a pre-group phone call, and we will chat and figure out if a group could be a good fit for you. Thanks so much.
The information contained in this podcast and on The Testing Psychologist website is intended for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast or on the website is intended to be a substitute for professional, psychological, psychiatric, or medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
Please note that no doctor-patient relationship is formed here, and similarly, no supervisory or consultative relationship is formed between the host or guests of this podcast and listeners of this podcast. If you need the qualified advice of any mental health practitioner or medical provider, please seek one in your area. Similarly, if you need supervision on clinical matters, please find a supervisor with expertise that fits your needs.
Click here to listen instead!