The UCPS offers a full-time comprehensive twelve-month APA Accredited Doctoral Internship in Health Service Psychology for students working toward their doctoral degrees in counseling or clinical psychology. We emphasize the core elements of counseling center work in our program; however the skill set developed is highly transferable to other clinical settings in professional psychology. Three interns are now being admitted to the internship program per academic year, and the UCPS offers a competitive stipend ($35,960) and compensation package. The internship for the 2023-2024 school year will begin on Tuesday, August 1, 2023, runs for one full calendar year, and requires 2000 total hours for completion. All interns are introduced to the counseling center and greater university community during an initial orientation period. During orientation, interns also begin to define specific training goals for the internship year and familiarize themselves with the UCPS staff and LU Student Affairs community. While there are core components of the internship program, our aim is to provide as individualized a training experience as possible with the goal of effectively meeting the unique needs and interests of each intern. Our doctoral internship program is APA Accredited and is approved as a full member of the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers (APPIC).
The UCPS internship program desires to further the growth and development of professional psychologists capable of working as generalists with a specific skill-set applicable to work in a university setting. Within this context, the training program most closely identifies with the practitioner-scholar model of psychological training (Ellis, 1992) as we emphasize the integration of experience, research, theory, and shared intellectual inquiry to inform the services we provide to the university community. The primary goal of the center is to provide appropriate psychological services via therapy, consultation, outreach and teaching to members of the university community. In conjunction with goals of the UCPS and our larger institution, the UCPS training program’s primary aim, as an integral component of the UCPS mission, is to offer comprehensive, supportive, and developmentally appropriate care and training opportunities to doctoral student interns during their final year of graduate school training.
The purpose of our internship program is to provide comprehensive training that emphasizes the integration of professional and personal development of our interns. Our goal is to train highly competent generalists with the specialized skills, and within particular areas of desired expertise needed to function as practicing psychologists. At the same time, we want clinicians graduating from our program to be compassionate, engaged professionals who feel passion for and are committed to the work they do. We hope to create an environment whereby interns are able to laugh with one another, are curious together, and can work through issues collaboratively and respectfully, especially where they understand differences exist. We promote and encourage ethical conduct and multidisciplinary coordination with others so that interns are sought out by their colleagues and others on campus as wise, critically thinking, and aware individuals who recognize the challenges and benefits of living in a global community, existing within the framework of an academic university setting.