By Bridget Murray
Monitor staff

As the process of applying for and securing internships has grown increasingly competitive, many students are approaching their internship applications with dread. Adding to their woes is the fear of bungling some part of the complex application process.

Many students who have sought an internship say they wish they?d started the process knowing the lessons they ended up learning along the way. One of them, Sheri Kirshenbaum, a doctoral candidate at St. John?s University, wishes she?d known how to handle interviews better. She says her anxiety in interviews may have made her demean-or overly formal and hindered her true personality from showing through. She believes internship directors may have perceived her as aloof and she ended up with fewer offers than she?d expected on selection day.

Kirshenbaum did land an in-ternship, but she thinks she would have impressed more internship directors had she been relaxed enough to talk freely about her hopes, strengths and experiences during the interviews.

To help other students approach the process with more knowledge and confidence, Kirshenbaum banded with Shulie Rubin, Tanya Stockhammer and Terrence Hannigan, other students from the New York State Psychological Association?s graduate student chapter, the Organization of Future Psychologists (NOFP). They developed a daylong workshop: ?The inside scoop on getting an internship,? held in October at the Teachers College at Columbia University. The workshop was open to all New York State doctoral psychology students applying for internships.

The 15 students who attended represented clinical, counseling and school psychology. Nine students who?ve been accepted by internships shared stories of their own struggles to secure internships, warned against the pitfalls they fell into?setting their sights on one site, for example?and offered strategies for dealing with anxiety-provoking applications and interviews.

They encouraged applicants to speak frankly about their concerns, says Shulie Rubin, a doctoral candidate at Long Island University and the workshop?s coordinator.

?The main theme of the day was how disempowering and mystifying the internship process can be,? Rubin says. ?The workshop sought to demystify the process and empower students by covering the mundane to the sublime, from mailing transcripts to articulating career goals.?

First steps

The workshop kicked off with panelists preparing students to use the standardized internship application forms available from the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers (APPIC), accessible through APPIC?s web site, http://www.appic.org.

They warned students that although many sites have adopt-ed the standardized internship application, many still request additional information or still use their own applications. Panelists urged students to consider only sites that match their interests.

Panelists noted that the written personal statement accompanying the application should describe a balance of personal and professional information. This includes your hands-on experience working with patients, your career goals and specialty area, the type of patients you wish to treat and the hospital or private practice setting you envision for yourself.

That sort of professional information may seem straightforward, but it?s harder to decide how much personal information to include?how much you should write about what drew you to psy-chology, for example, says Kirshenbaum, who was one of the panelists. You want to demonstrate that you know yourself well, an important quality in a therapist, without ?spilling? excessively intimate details, says Rubin.

?On the one hand, sites want you want to reveal some personal things such as your family and cultural background because they?ll be chatting with you at the water cooler next year,? says Rubin. ?On the other hand you don?t want to overstep the line of what?s professionally appropriate.?

Another useful aspect of the workshop were the practical ?how-tos? panelists offered on recommendation letters, says participant Kenneth Levy. Among their main tips for applicants:

? Start asking professors for letters in mid-September so they have plenty of time to get them to you by application due dates, which range from early November to mid-January.

? Try to ask people who taught you in a range of settings so they can play up your academic and clinical expertise.

? Ask more than three people for letters so that if one or more of them is ?lukewarm,? you can use a ?rave? letter instead.

? Talk directly with the people you ask, rather than by e-mail or telephone, to ensure that they?ll write you a good letter and get it to you on time.

? Check on the protocol for sending the letters; some sites want the envelopes signed by the professor and sent separately from the application.

Also check on the procedure for sending transcripts because some sites want them sent directly from your graduate program and others want them included with the application, advised panelists.

Interviewing

For many students, interviewing is the most intimidating aspect of the internship search, Levy says. Panelists allayed students? fears by sharing the usual questions interviewers asked them and the tough, unexpected questions as well. (See sidebar for the top 15 questions internship training directors ask.) In mock interviews with students, one of the panelists, Tanya Stockhammer, shared ways to handle some of the tricky questions she was asked. For example, when an interview-er asked her how her parents felt about her decision to become a psychologist, Stockhammer avoided going into overly personal detail and just said her parents ?were thrilled.?

When another interviewer asked Stockhammer the number of internship sites she had applied to, she answered evasively. Stockhammer had applied to 19 other sites and she feared that disclosing such a high number would make the internship director think she?d get plenty of offers, and therefore not offer her a position. To prevent that from happening, Stockhammer merely said she?d applied to ?quite a number of sites? and named a few of them.

Students who attended the workshop say they?re now ready for questions about issues such as treatment modalities, bizarre inquiries about their own families and mental stability or even highly specific questions about the Rorschach test protocol.

Kirshenbaum advised students to prepare for the interview.

End game

At a final panel, presenters discussed strategies for ranking internship sites and coping with the wait on selection day. To make it through that grueling day, they advised applicants to:

? Rank the internship sites you want ahead of time so that when the phone rings and you get an offer, you can quickly accept, hold or decline it.

? Establish a support system that will get you through the day, whether it?s having a buddy there to cheer or commiserate with or having family members call in regularly.

? If you don?t get an offer, don?t despair?there are a range of options, such as soliciting help from your graduate program director, re-applying next year, taking a non-APA-accredited internship (although be sure to consider the pros and cons) or trying the APPIC Clearinghouse, which matches students with remaining internships.

Presenters called attention to new APPIC rules that prohibit internship directors from soliciting or using information from students regarding the ranking of their internship choices before selection day. This is a big change from past years when students sent ?first choice? letters to their favored sites. The rules also re-quest that students not accept or ?hold? more than one internship offer at a time on selection day.

As long as people abide by the rules, the selection process will be smoother and more efficient, says Rubin. She was shocked to hear that both students and internships bend the rules blatantly or with ?winks and nudges,? and she hopes that will change.

NOFP aims to make the workshops an institution in New York and hopes other state student groups try running them as well. Applying for internships will be easier if students help one another, Rubin says.