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The following is an excerpt from a letter to a student interested in careers in the clinical field.
I suggest a "backward planning" approach to plotting out what has to be done by way of your academic preparation. For a good general resource on backward planning, see Barbara Sher's Wishcraft -- a pop-psych sort of book, but good for all that.
Begin, if you can, by identifying graduate schools to which you hope to be accepted. One way to do that is to examine their list of faculty and use a search engine like PsycInfo to identify faculty members' areas of expertise and research, or their theoretical perspectives, if the school's catalog or other materials don't already tell you that. This is important because you'll be spending much of your time doing research (and/or supervised clinical practice, in your case) under the supervision of your major professor, and you want her/his values, assumptions, emphases, interests, and such like to be compatible with your own.
While you're at this, make sure you are clear about whether you want to be a psychiatrist (requires, of course, an M.D. degree) or a clinical psychologist (requires either a Ph.D. or a Psy.D., the latter degree usually being more practice- and less research-focused at least in terms of educational preparation). Among other things, this decision may be driven by your degree of interest in, or tolerance for, the "hard science" side - biology, anatomy/physiology, and so forth. In addition, some would say that psychiatrists are less likely than clinical psychologists to take a wholistic (whole-person) approach to treatment and may more emphasize the purely biomedical side. That's an overstatement but worth pondering.
Think through what school of thought in psychology best fits you - are you a behaviorist, a cognitivist, a humanist, a psychodynamicist - ? If you want to be a Marine, don't enlist in the Army.
Depending on where you want to eventually live, find out what that state's licensure/certification requirements are. Be sure that the program you choose will prepare you adequately for those, e.g., will include a supervised internship as part of the program.
Having done all that spadework, it's easy to determine what the entrance requirements are for a given graduate program. Do they require that you have a certain specified undergraduate major? A certain set of specified courses taken as part of that major?
Graduate programs are very competitive, so have a fallback plan in place in case you can't get into the school/program of your choosing.
Start now to develop a portfolio of experiences, both vocational and avocational, outside of school (or connected indirectly with school, such as internships or field experiences), that bolster your candidacy and show that you are a well-rounded individual. (I've been trying to get in shape for years, but the shape I finally settled on was a triangle.)
Letters of recommendation may be pivotal, so start now to cultivate a network of relationships that can put you in good stead in that regard.
Visit the Web site of the American Psychological Association (www.apa.org) and the American Psychiatric Association (www.psych.org).
Do some informational interviewing with clinicians in your area. Ask them how they think you should prepare and proceed, what they most like (and dislike) about their profession, what a typical day is like, what most surprised them about their work, and so on.
Best wishes, keep in touch, focus your questions and bug me some more.
Marlowe C. Embree, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychology, UWMC