Internship looking for a few good scientist-practitionersby Dick PetersonPublic Relations Please don't come. Don't even give a psychology internship here a second thought, if you’re not interested in a program that integrates clinical practice and research. That's the message program director Dean Kilpatrick, Ph.D., has for qualified Ph.D. candidates from around the country and Canada considering the Charleston Consortium Psychology Internship Training Program at MUSC and the VA Medical Center. “A one-year internship is required for a Ph.D. in clinical psychology,” Kilpatrick said, “and ours is competitive nationally, attracts a high number of quality applicants, and it’s a pretty good deal for South Carolina because it attracts some excellent psychologists to our state.” But what sets it apart is its strong philosophical commitment to the scientist practitioner model for training. The internship is structured to provide training experiences that maximize integration of clinical practice and research, Kilpatrick said. The program began as an MUSC-VA Medical Center collaborative effort in 1972 when separate but similar programs combined to form the Charleston Consortium. The year-long, full-time internship training experience for Ph.D. students is accredited by the American Psychological Association and has trained more than 300 psychology interns, many of whom are now pursuing careers in universities, medical schools, VA medical centers, teaching hospitals and other settings. As an example of what a “...pretty good deal for South Carolina” it is, Kilpatrick name-drops a few alums of the program who stayed: MUSC's Connie L. Best, Ph.D., Patrick M. O’Neil, Ph.D., and Darlene L. Shaw, Ph.D.—all long-time members of the Department of Psychiatry faculty. “And, the program is cost-effective because the most expensive part of graduate education occurs at the intern’s home university—not during internship. This means that our internship attracts them here after someone else has paid for the most expensive part of their education,” Kilpatrick said. The objective of the program—and the reason qualified students should self-select by career goals—is to train interns to approach their clinical work with an investigatory and empirical attitude, to evaluate the efficacy of their clinical work, to use the research literature to select the most appropriate treatment procedures for given problems, and to conduct clinical research investigations. And there’s the opportunity to develop specialized expertise in areas that include anxiety disorders, the treatment of victims of violent crime, substance abuse, behavioral medicine, assessment/neuropsychology, and child/adolescent psychology. For more information about the internship, visit its Web site at <http://www.musc.edu/cvc/intern1.html> The match is in for next year's Psychology Internship Training Program. The 2001-2002 internship class includes 15 interns from 12 different universities and is consistent with the type of students expected to participate in a scientist-practitioner orientated internship. For example, 14 of the 15 interns have published, and the mean number of publications is 3.1. Each intern has presented at a national meeting. They are:
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