I am trying to determine the best strategy for applying to Clinical Psych PhD Programs. My goal is to study at one of the more competitive grad school programs (UNC, Minnesota, Missouri, UCLA, Pittsburgh, Wisconsin, Yale, U Washington, Duke, Emory, Northwestern, Michigan, Vanderbilt, Oregon, Maryland - are programs of interest). I am wondering 1) what the likelihood of being accepted into one of these programs immediately after undergrad is, 2) how many programs should I apply to (and what range of caliber should I target), 3) would it be advantageous to wait a year or two to apply after undergrad and build my resume with research?
Here is a little about me to inform your answers:
I am currently an undergraduate student at Saint Louis University studying neuroscience. By the time I am applying to grad schools (fall of senior year), I will have worked in a research lab for 3.5 academic years, completed 21-24 credit hours of psych course work including a research sequence, conducted my own research project according to APA standards, spent 2 summers as a camp counselor (1 summer with kids with physical, behavior, and/or developmental exceptionalities and 1 summer with gifted children), 1 summer in a research internship, and 1 summer at a youth residential treatment center. I currently have a 3.86 GPA and anticipate being able to maintain this. I have yet to take the GRE, but I have been scoring an average of 168 verbal and 166 quant on my practice tests.
In general, not great. For you, better, because you’ve got a lot of research experience and a lot of clinical/treatment volunteering experience.
Most clinical psychology hopefuls apply to about 8-15 programs give or take, depending on their strengths and their interests. I think the number of programs you currently list is on the upper end.
Sure, it’s always advantageous to do that. If you will really will have about the amount of stuff in the paragraph you listed above, though, it wouldn’t hurt to try in your senior year of college - you’d be a pretty competitive applicant. (But you should take more psychology courses than that - really, you’d be most competitive as a psychology major, which at most colleges is somewhere between 30 and 40 hours of coursework.)
It’s unclear to me from the post above what year you currently are in, though; it’s difficult to predict exactly what kinds of experiences you’ll have if you’re early in college.
What are the requirements for each application? it depends. I would recommend compartmentalizing this question to one college because a lot of grad schools are different.
For best results it’s helpful to remember that you’re not applying to a school, but to individuals in a department. For undergrad there’s an admissions office that chooses the students, more or less. For grad school ph.d programs you’re applying to professors who will evaluate you against what their lab is doing or against their research program in some other way. They will become your mentor for several years. I would cast your net not at programs or schools, but at specific professors. The best way to do that is to look at each professor’s webpage, download and read their research papers, and in that way focus your research interests. Usually for clinical your essay will be less of “my family life made me X way and that’s why I want to be a clinician” and also less of “I was diagnosed with X and that’s why I want to help other people with X” and more of “in recent MRI studies of the hypothalamus under the conditions of ABC, it’s become clear that X is true while Y is also the case. Developing this idea further, I hope to study MNLOP.”
In other words essays about how you were injured as a child, or someone close to you has suffered, and so want to help injured people are not advised. They are a dime a dozen and have little to do with Ph.D. level research. Essays and research interests that have to do with how the brain functions and other scientific studies into how we perceive things and why humans act the way they do under certain circumstances, this is more interesting to Ph.D. research programs.