The Feedback Window for Psychology Graduate Students

Adam Jones:

So why don’t we get any better? After just 50 hours of clinical services, we have a pretty good sense of how effective graduate students are going to be, but graduate students are tired. They’re managing maybe coursework on top of their clinical work. They’re just getting used to people hurling their problems at them, managing some of the self of the therapists factors that come up in their work.

So there’s a lot going on for a graduate therapist, but I think this is a really crucial time to be able to understand what the experience of a graduate therapist is because if you think about it, this is the only time, most likely the only time when a therapist will be getting very direct feedback on their work. So some of the ways that I’ve transitioned my teaching of the masters and doctoral students I work with is to focus on helping give them a trajectory of success that will carry them through their career, helping them recognize what their work is, how effective they are, and ways that they can continue to build a system for improving those outcomes throughout their career. And that’s one of the things that I really look for as I’m working with graduate students, to see if they have a way of evaluating their own success and finding ways to get better.