爆料公社

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I’m Lihua Edstrom. I’m the director of the PsyD program, the doctoral program in Counseling Psychology here at 爆料公社 in Kirkland, Washington, and we are so pleased that you’re here.

Joining me is Daniella Steinkamp, our Director of Student Services, and Professor Kimberly D’Angelo, who is an affiliated faculty member in our program and a huge support to us. Thank you again for joining us.

I’m going to go ahead and launch into our presentation. Before I do that, I’ll just tell you a little bit more about myself. I have taught primarily psychological assessment and research methods in the program. My background—I know one of you joining us has a Master of Education, and I do too, actually. I trained as a school psychologist, so my specialty is school psychology and educational psychology. Then I continued on and received my doctorate and received training in research, and so those are two of my specialty areas.

I’ve been really excited to share my love of assessment and research with students in the program. Another area that I participate in in the program is supporting students in their dissertation research. That’s a real love of mine—helping students contribute to the field, to the knowledge base.

I’m going to go ahead and share my screen now and take you through an orientation here of the program.

Here is our faculty. Dr. Kim Lanson, I think, has the longest tenure besides our dean. Dr. Kim Lanson has the longest tenure in the program, and she is a long-time faculty member and teaches many of our applied clinical courses. She was also, previous to our current structure, director of clinical training. She really helped us get the program started as the director. Right now, she is not only our faculty member, but she is also the director of our New Hope Community Counseling Center, which is a wonderful resource to our community and offers low-cost, affordable counseling. It is also a training site for many of our doctoral students.

Dr. Nikki Johnson is also one of our faculty, and she teaches many of our applied classes. She has also taught classes such as theories of counseling, group counseling, and multicultural issues. She is the chair of our multicultural committee as well as our dissertation coordinator, so we call her affectionately the chair of chairs.

Dr. Matt Nelson is our beloved dean, and he has been at the university for about 20 years, as I understand, and he’s taught many of our classes at many different levels—undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral. He’s just a real core part of our college.

Dr. Robert Campbell has taught many classes in the PsyD program. This year he is taking more leadership in the master’s program, but he is still affiliated with our program and still is the dissertation chair for many students.

Dr. Catherine Weinen joined our program this year. She has taught in both our master’s program as well as our doctoral program, and she is our co-director of clinical training. She brings wonderful expertise as a chief psychologist for the federal prison system and has just an array of specialties, including assessment, therapy, suicide prevention, and assessment.

Dr. Elizabeth Irwin has taught in our program, I think, for about five years as an adjunct faculty member. Prior to that, she actually spent many years as a psychologist at the Monroe Complex, which is a state prison. She brings many areas of expertise as well and has a private practice. She teaches many different classes in the doctoral program, including ethics and other applied classes.

So those are some of our faculty. We have other faculty who teach as well, but these are our core faculty.

Here is the staff that help support our program: Daniella, who oversees our selection and enrollment processes, and Rachel Smolsky, who has been here for many years as a coordinator and director of our academic programs. We also have a program coordinator who will be starting the week after next, so I will introduce you to her later. She hasn’t officially started yet, but that person in that role will be really helpful to you as you go through the program and just be the front face of our program on a daily basis.

Let me describe just a little bit about 爆料公社. It started out as a Bible institute, and my father-in-law actually came here and studied to become a minister back in the 1960s. Since then, it’s grown. It’s affiliated with the Assemblies of God, and it has grown in its offerings and also the kinds of programs that are offered.

The master’s in Counseling Psychology was established back in 2001, and then our College of Social and Behavioral Sciences was established several years later. Then the doctoral program came around 2009–2010, and since that time we have been busy continuing to refine the program, to get APA accreditation, which occurred in 2018, and to continue to make it a program that helps people get established in their areas and focus on multicultural issues and social justice issues.

In the last six months, since there’s been so much awareness-raising after George Floyd’s death, we have really taken a look at how we can further address social justice in our program. How can we continue to train our students to really understand the issues, to be well versed, to understand what psychological science can offer the world in creating social change, and also how can we better train our students in advocacy and social justice? So that continues to be a focus, and I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a minute.

Here’s our 爆料公社 mission: We, the people of 爆料公社, carry the call of God by continually building a learning community dedicated to spiritual vitality, academic excellence, and empowered engagement with human need.

In particular, that last part really resonates with us in psychology and in our program. Some of the ways that I think our program really helps our university fulfill this part of the mission is our value of compassion—meeting human needs and bringing all of our psychological skills and science to do that, using everything that we know from best practices and from research to promote healthy development and healthy relationships, and also bringing our expertise to cultivating empathy, respect, and reconciliation, which in particular I think is an area that we can contribute to in what’s going on with our racial justice movement.

As I mentioned, we were awarded APA accreditation just two years ago, and we’re already getting ready for another site visit, which will happen in about two years. We’re also regionally accredited by the 爆料公社 Commission and endorsed as part of the Alliance of the Assemblies of God Higher Education.

These are the areas in which we specifically train our students. These are the main aims and objectives of the program. We are training people to be professional psychologists, or health service psychologists, and training them in the attitudes, the skills, and the knowledge of psychological science—not only the science and the research foundations, but also the theoretical foundations that drive our practice.

We have 33 competencies, and they range from areas of professionalism and professional practice, as well as ethics, psychological knowledge, assessment, counseling, research, cultural awareness, cultural competence, sensitivity, advocacy, and also personal maturity, because that’s a critical aspect of our practice. We need it. None of us are perfect, but we’re all people who are growing constantly and learning. To become an effective health service psychologist, it does require a level of personal maturity and self-awareness and self-monitoring.

That’s actually part of our ethical code—being self-aware and knowing how to do self-care so that we can help others out of a place of well-being ourselves. That’s another important part of our training and benchmarks of competency, the professional standards of our field, and our ethical code that comes out of the American Psychological Association.

Our training model, then, we call the practitioner-scholar model. We are training you to be practitioners, but we understand that to do that well, we have to train scholars as well—to be good consumers, good thoughtful critical consumers of research, as well as scholars who can use theoretical knowledge and evidence-based skills in their practice. That’s the lens that we use in our training. We’re training practitioner-scholars.

The ethos of our program has always been psychology’s intersection with culture and social justice. Early on in the program, we hired a consultant to take a look at our program and give us some feedback, and she was very impressed with our offerings in coursework in these areas. Her feedback to us was that we didn’t just give this lip service—we actually had specific coursework about these issues.

So the first year of the program involves coursework in multicultural issues and a specific course in social justice. These are some of our most popular courses because they deal with really relevant issues and they help set the stage for thinking about these issues and how they are so critical to our practice and how they help our students think about how to approach working with people from that lens—a lens of culture and social justice.

That starts right at the beginning of the program.

There are many different angles that we use to provide mentoring and support. Our program is not just about coursework. It’s not just about clinical training. It also includes mentoring and support, because becoming a psychologist is a journey and a process. Our learning community is a really critical component of that.

When I do exit interviews with our students, actually the most common answer when I ask them what they appreciated most about the program, they will say their cohort. As Daniella probably has explained, students go through the program with a group of people together. We call them a cohort, and that’s one of the most memorable parts of the program, students tell me. Their cohort becomes a family.

Like families, they aren’t perfect. There are bumps along the road, and they learn how to resolve problems with each other, but they are also a huge support to each other and they’re like family, even from the very first semester of the program.

There’s not only the cohort that you’re going through the program with, but there are all the cohorts ahead of you in this five-year program. Together, you’re a learning community. We facilitate some activities through the program. We used to get to have dinner together, and someday I hope to do that, but we can’t do that right now because many of our students are still joining remotely. We’re doing a high-flex instructional model.

Someday we hope to all be back together again on campus and do activities like we used to do before, like break bread together and have dinners once a semester. In lieu of that, we are doing other things that are online, and we help facilitate some relationships not only among cohorts but also cross-cohorts.

We have something called RAD Team, which stands for Research, Advising, and Dissertation. It’s a group that involves people from different cohorts in the program so that you get to know other people who are a year or two or three ahead of you in the program. Those people can be supports. They can be peer mentors for you and give you some tips on how to survive the program and how to maximize your time.

That RAD Team also provides support for meeting with your advisor, for getting questions answered, and it also provides a structure of accountability, particularly when working on your dissertation, which is hard because it’s more of an independent kind of project. It is really helpful to have people around you that you have to report back to, and also share how that process is going and provide consultation to each other. The RAD Team is a really important part of our mentoring and support within the program.

We see students’ journey throughout the program as a joint effort. We don’t see you as just doing this alone. We understand that you need your faculty, you need your advisor to support you, and you need the support of your professional learning community.

What we have moved to over the years is assigning an advisor early on in the program so that students have that advising relationship. That advisor usually is the same person who is your dissertation chair. We’ve tried to pair people up in a way that there are some common interests there, so you can do research in an area that’s interesting and that you’re passionate about, but it’s also an area that your dissertation chair has expertise in.

We’ve moved more towards faculty-guided research so that we can make sure that you’re well supported, as well as provide you the best support that we can out of our own expertise.

Now, licensure requirements differ from state to state, and ultimately the students bear the responsibility to make sure that they understand what the requirements are. However, there was a federal law passed last year that put more of the onus on programs to make sure that they are helping students with that.

Actually, Professor D’Angelo put together a table, a matrix, that’s on our website that you can take a look at. It goes through the requirements of every state and actual U.S. territory as well and gives you an idea of how well our program helps you meet those licensure requirements in every state.

It is a pretty complicated process to do that, and Professor D’Angelo spent a lot of time on that, so I think that will be very helpful to you. Yet we just want to emphasize that you will want to make sure that you understand that. Please reach out to us if we can help you. If you think that you’re going to go back home or move to another state afterward and you want to practice there, please let us know if you have questions. But you will also want to use those contacts that you’ll find at each state agency website that provides that information, just to make sure that you understand what is required.

We do have a lot of information on our website that will help you understand that.

Also, I will mention—and Professor D’Angelo, please feel free to jump in here too—as I understand, because our program is APA accredited, that will go a long way. That will provide the degree requirements that you’ll need.

Professor D’Angelo, is there anything else that you’d like to add?

Yeah. So, because we’re coming from an APA-accredited program, the degree from 爆料公社 that you’re obtaining is directly licensable within Washington State. However, what’s really unique about Washington State compared to other states in the nation—and this is something really important because it saves you time and money, which are two important factors in getting your degree—is that all of your internship credits that you do within the program, your 3,000 hours, those all count toward your licensure.

Washington State does not require you to do a post-doctorate. What that means by a post-doctorate is hours after your degree is already completed. I think we’re one of two states in the nation that does not require post-doctoral hours. Many other states require that on top of your 3,000 hours that you do in your program, you also must complete anywhere from 1,500 to 4,000 more hours after you’ve graduated.

Some of you may be doing internships in other states, and we put this list together, one, because it’s required by law, but two, I added an extra information section in that list with links to the states because when you do an internship in another state, you might be thinking, “Well, I might want to stay in that state.” So it’s really good to have that information—to know what is required for the state that you might be going to, or the state you’re coming from, or where you might want to move to, what else is required as far as post-doctoral hours go.

Like I said, Washington State changed this a few years back because they really were trying not to marginalize individuals or cost them more money and time when they’ve already spent so much money on their degree. It’s just a unique situation that we have in Washington State where if you want to get licensed here, once you’re done with your program, you’re set to go except for taking the tests—the ethics test and the national EPPP test that’s required by every state.

Thank you, Professor D’Angelo.

Here are just some highlights of the program across the five years.

The first year, you will want to fulfill the individual therapy requirement of 10 hours. This isn’t necessarily required across all programs, as I understand, but historically it was required in psychology training. In fact, early on it was psychoanalysis that was required, and actually was done by your professor. Somewhere along the way, the field realized that that was a little unethical, because your professor was also your therapist. So of course we don’t do that.

But we realize the real value of not only using therapy as a way to reflect on your own growth and maybe things that you want to work on in yourself, but also to get an idea of what it’s like to be in that chair as a client and to observe a psychologist in action.

So the 10 hours of individual therapy is required during the first year, and I’ve heard from students how much they appreciate that. It is not covered by our program, so that’s a cost that the student will bear. Please let me know if you have questions about it, but it is a valuable requirement, students have told me.

The first year also focuses on the theoretical and scientific foundations—some of our core science classes like biological bases of behavior and cognitive-affective bases of behavior. Those are good ways to start off your training, to have that foundation to start with.

At the end of the first year—we’ve done it in the spring, but we’ve moved this—the cultural immersion trip to the end of the first year, so you’ll get a chance to get to know your cohort before you go on a long trip with them. That is one of the highlights, students have told me, of the program.

It’s a chance to really get to study a culture, to understand some of the historical influences, some of the current social issues, and to understand what psychology looks like within that culture and to experience it for yourself.

In the past, we have gone international, and it’s just been an amazing experience. There were trips to India, to China, to El Salvador, and Israel. There’s really nothing like it. We don’t know of any other program that does a trip quite like this, or any trip. We’ve heard of a few programs doing some trips, but nothing of this distance or depth of immersion.

We also give you an annual assessment. We do that for all of our students, actually, but you will get some feedback from your advisor about how you’re doing in the program.

During year two, you’ll start more of your applied classes.