I am a current undergraduate student (senior) who is planning to apply to Clinical Psychology PhD and PsyD programs in the near future. I am more interested in practice than in research, so I have decided to apply to both PsyD programs and practice-oriented PhD programs.
However, I am not so sure what “practice-oriented” truly means. If research is not my primary interest, should I stay away from PhD programs altogether? Are “practice-oriented” PhD programs going to be torture for someone who is not research-minded?
Some of the practice-oriented PhD programs that I am looking into: American University, Boston University, George Washington University, Penn State, Teachers College (Columbia University), etc. If anyone is a Clinical Psych PhD student in one of these programs, I would really appreciate some insight! What has your experience been like? Is the majority of your time spent doing research?
Well, it depends entirely on the program and on how much you dislike research.
Most clinical psych PhD programs are scientist-practitioner programs. The philosophy is that a good practitioner needs to understand the science of the mind and of mental health therapy, so that you can apply evidence-based methods in your treatment. So these programs are designed to help you understand how research in psychology is conducted so you can be a good consumer of that research as a therapist. How much emphasis an individual program has on research vs. practice depends entirely on the program; some scientist-practitioner programs are more heavy on the science part and expect 50% or more of their graduates to become faculty members or researchers at other institutions. Other programs are more heavy on the practice part and expect most or all of their graduates to become therapists in private practice.
What you should do is talk to some faculty members and some current students in those programs. Current students are pretty easy to reach; if they have profiles on the website you can contact them directly, but otherwise emailing the departmental secretary and asking if there are some current students that would be willing to have a short chat with you about the program could be fruitful. Ask those students about their perspective on the balance in the program and where their more advanced colleagues have gone after they graduated. Current faculty you can ask similar questions: where do their students go when they graduate, and how is training balanced in the program?
One really important note - Penn State is NOT a practice-oriented program. They are one of the founding members of the Academy of Psychological Clinical Science, which is devoted to the science and research of clinical psychology. It’s going to have a heavy science/research focus and expect most of its graduates to become professors of clinical psychology somewhere (or maybe researchers at government or nonprofit agencies). You will get the appropriate training to become a licensed psychologist, of course, but the emphasis will be on research. (I did my postdoc at Penn State, and although I wasn’t in the psych department, I knew faculty members who were.)
American and George Washington are both scientist-practitioner programs, though, and GWU explicitly says they expect most of their graduates to become therapists.