News from the Match
APPIC leaders discuss the imbalance in internships and the students who need them.
According to the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship
Centers (APPIC) Match statistics, 2,588 applicants—75 percent—were successfully
matched to internship positions.
The good news? Nearly half of those successful applicants received
their top-ranked choice of internship sites.
The bad news? An imbalance between the number of internship
positions and applicants left 842 applicants unmatched. gradPSYCH talked with APPIC Match and
Clearinghouse Coordinator Greg Keilin, PhD, and APPIC Board Chair Steve McCutcheon, PhD, about
the APPIC Match results, trends and what's being done to address the imbalance.
Q: How did the Match go?
McCutcheon: We were able to organize a huge number of people and programs
and help them find each other. It's a complex system that, year after year, goes off very well.
The fact that 45 percent of applicants landed in their No. 1 spot is remarkable. More than 1,000
people got the site they most wanted.
Q. What trends do you see?
Keilin: The supply and demand imbalance is getting consistently worse and got much worse this
year.
Q: What's behind the imbalance?
Keilin: A number of graduate programs have opened in the past half-dozen years that are admitting
a large number of students and sending them out on the internship trail. We simply don't have the
internships to handle them. Another problem is that we now have an increasing backlog: Not only
do we have more students coming into the system, we also have students who don't match reapplying
the following year.
Q: What's APPIC doing to fix the problem?
McCutcheon: On the supply side, APPIC has an aggressive mentoring program in which we help new
graduate programs initiate internship positions and become APPIC members and help established
programs improve and expand their positions. We've seen growth in the past five years. There has
been a 5-percent increase in the number of internship positions despite an economy that has not
been very favorable.
However, during that same five years, there has been a 20-percent increase in the number of applicants.
As a result, APPIC and other organizations have continued to ask graduate programs to take a serious
look at restraining the growth in class sizes.
Keilin: There was a significant increase of 105 positions this year. That helped offset the
increase in the number of students.
Q: Is APA helping?
McCutcheon: APA has been particularly helpful. APA has agreed to fund and carry out a very costly
work force analysis, for example. APA has established an office of work force analysis to, for the
first time, get hard data on the number of psychologists we're producing and the number of psychologists
society needs and can support. The outcome of that analysis is a ways off, but it's an essential component
of understanding how many students we should have.
In addition, APA's Education Directorate has been very aggressive in advocating for increased
funding in Congress directed at enhancing internship training. Two programs in particular that
provide funds directly to internship training programs—the Graduate Psychology Education
Program and the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act—were funded largely due to the directorate's
efforts.
Q: What if students didn't find a position?
McCutcheon: They should take a hard look at their preparation and applications, get feedback
from advisers and faculty and decide whether they have weaknesses that can be corrected with another
year of training. It could be that students have inadequate practicum experience...it could be
that they have inadequate research experience. They need to make a plan to strengthen any weaknesses
in order to go back to the Match.
Some students may not have matched because they erred in their strategy. The single biggest
reason for students not matching is that they restricted themselves geographically and only applied
to a few programs. They should think hard about whether they could do it differently next year and
thereby increase their chances.
Q: Nine of the 20 couples who applied together had a partner unmatched. How can couples improve
their chances?
Keilin: Couples did much poorer this year than in other years. Part of that is just the luck of
the draw. But we also saw more couples ranking fewer pairings. Couples could have hundreds of combinations
of the sites that each of them applied to. If they don't submit all the possible combinations, they
lower their chances of being matched.
By Rebecca A. Clay
Rebecca A. Clay is a writer in Washington, D.C.
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