<p>Hi all,</p>
<p>I’m a current UG junior and a double major in social work and psychology. As of now, I’m pretty set on applying to grad schools next year, both to Clinical Psych PhD programs (my main research interest narrows the programs down pretty quickly) and to clinical social work (MSW) programs. I want to do clinical work, ultimately, and work with a specific population in specific area. However, I know that plans can change for a variety of reasons, and so I’m wondering if it would be best to prepare for both graduate school and the job market?</p>
<p>I’m looking to apply for graduate school straight out for a few reasons. One is simply that the type of work I want to do really requires a graduate degree as an entry level credential. The other is that I need a job that is really, really lacking in physical requirements–I couldn’t, physically, take job that required, for example, home visits. From looking at job postings, this would be much less a problem at the masters or doctoral level (not to mention that the jobs sound more interesting!).</p>
<p>My question, then, is how to best prepare myself in the coming year and summer. I have a good amount of research experience, having worked in two psychology labs, a biomedical lab working with psychotropic medications, and will work in a couple of additional labs in the coming semester. I also just started a paid psychology research position at my university (5 hrs/week) and am currently doing my honors thesis as well. As for other experience, I have TA’ed introductionary psychology and an intro to college course for honors students. I also have a two year, part-time, (megerly) paid job teaching/facilitating a seminar for undergraduate psych internship students. Other paid experience includes an internship with the federal government last summer (did very well, according to my supervisor). I also started a very clinical, unpaid substance abuse-related internship this past semester, working alongside graduate students and am hoping to continue that both next semester and possibly into senior year. I’ll also be doing an unpaid 450-hour practicum next year as part of my social work degree. </p>
<p>I’m have trouble deciding how to most strategically spend my summer. On one hand, clinical psych programs value research above all else, and fortunately, I love research! However, MSW programs really value field experience (internships/jobs), and I love that, too, not to mention it might help more if I don’t go to grad school straight off the bat for some reason…?</p>
<p>I have a tentative offer for an unpaid research position this summer (though I’m not counting any eggs) with a professor who does research in my area of interest as well as another possibility up in the air and the additional possibility of perhaps staying at my school and continuing on with my research here over the summer. I am also planning on reapplying to gov’t internships for this coming summer. The thing is, I would really like to do both field work (paid would be nice!) AND research, but that seems unlikely due to transportation problems. I guess I’ll look into if any of the psycchology professors at the university and college would let me work in their labs over the summer so that I could do that and get field experience at the same time, but I’m not counting on that necessarily working out and none of the professors do research that really dovetails particularly well with my background/interests, though a couple do do interesting work, one in a secondary research interest of mine.</p>
<p>Ultimately, would it be better to do research or an internship this summer, in your opinion?</p>
<p>Thanks for reading this huge post and any advice would be much appreciated!</p>