Personal and practical consideration in selecting a psychology internship.

Abstract

Although the internship literature contains many contributions regarding ways to approach the internship application, interview, and selection processes to satisfy professional goals, few contributions address personal and practical considerations of applicants. This article addresses personal and practical issues, such as benefits, financial costs of relocating and living, family responsibilities, partner relocation, and training and personal responsibilities outside of internship. For all issues discussed, concrete recommendations are provided for helping applicants evaluate internships according to their concerns. A paired-comparison ranking technique for comparing sites along multiple criteria is proposed. The need for updated professional developmental models that incorporate personal and practical variables is also discussed. Most existing guides for selecting an internship emphasize pursuing the best-fitting internship in terms of professional goals and objectives (e.g., medical-university settings, rotations offered, supervisory styles, didactics, and available career paths after internship), and they offer suggestions for evaluating sites along these dimensions (BelarO Jacob, 1987;Megargee, 1992). Such guides focus less on the subjective, emotional, and practical aspects of the application and decisionmaking processes, such as benefits, relocation and living expenses, desired location, partner relocation, training and personal responsibilities outside of the internship, and interpersonal environment of the setting. To date, the way these variables ultimately can contribute to one's experience of the internship, one's emotional adjustment to it, and one's overall quality of life has not been examined. We believe a focus on personal and practical aspects of the internship is warranted because the length of time between beginning the internship and receiving psychology licensure appears to be increasing as a result of the additional practical experience required by state laws (Kaslow, McCarthy, Rogers, & Summerville, 1992; Stewart, 1994). One-year and sometimes 2-year postdoctoral and postinternship supervised work requirements have been written into many state licensure laws