Psychology Predoctoral Internship Program : Program Overview

Training Opportunities

The Dartmouth Psychology Internship Program involves sites situated in a rural area bordered by the Connecticut River which divides New Hampshire and Vermont. Surrounded by scenic New England villages, the location offers easy traveling to Boston and Montreal, as well as some of the finest skiing and hiking in New England. Affiliation with Dartmouth College provides interns with access to libraries, computer and research facilities, a gymnasium, and year round concerts, theater, lectures and galleries.

The Dartmouth Medical School of Dartmouth College was founded in 1797 and is the nation's fourth oldest medical school. The Dartmouth Psychology Internship Program is sponsored by the Dartmouth Medical School's Department of Psychiatry and has been involved in the training of pre-doctoral psychology interns since 1981. The program has been accredited by the American Psychological Association (APA) since 1983. The Dartmouth Psychology Internship Program offers training opportunities in a variety of settings belonging to or affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry:

Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) is located in Lebanon, New Hampshire. DHMC is the regional academic medical center where faculty and trainees of Dartmouth Medical School provide direct care to patients from throughout New England. DHMC is located on an expansive campus in the heart of New Hampshire's Upper Connecticut River Valley. The Department of Psychiatry at DHMC maintains an outpatient practice in child and adult services and manages the hospital's psychiatric inpatient, partial hospitalization, and emergency service units. The Department of Psychiatry also runs a sleep lab, a neuropsychology service, and a behavioral medicine service.

West Central Behavioral Health - Dartmouth Hitchcock
West Central Behavioral Health (WCBH) is the region's non-profit community mental health center. WCBH offers child and family services, recovery services to the seriously mentally ill, emergency services, and outpatient adult counseling services. WCBH-DH has offices in Lebanon, Claremont, and Newport, New Hampshire. WCBH is a training site for psychology interns, psychiatry residents, and child fellows from the Department of Psychiatry.

New Hampshire Hospital
New Hampshire Hospital (NHH) is located in Concord, New Hampshire. NHH, part of Dartmouth Medical School's Department of Psychiatry, is the State psychiatric facility providing acute stay services, neuropsychiatry services, and transitional housing services to children, youth, adult, and geriatric populations.

National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders
The National Center is located in White River Junction, Vermont. The National Center is a collaborative program between the U.S. Department of Veteran's Affairs and the Dartmouth Medical School's Department of Psychiatry. The Center carries out a broad range of multidisciplinary activities in research, education, and training. These initiatives support efforts to understand, diagnose, and treat PTSD.

The New Hampshire-Dartmouth Psychiatric Research Center
The Psychiatric Research Center (PRC) has offices in Lebanon and Concord, New Hampshire and is a mental health services research group. This nationally recognized group of investigators conducts and disseminates research on evidence-based practices for the treatment of mental illness and addiction. The PRC is a collaborative effort of the Dartmouth Medical School's Department of Psychiatry and the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services, Division of Behavioral Health.

The opportunity to place interns at this wide variety of affiliated sites provides excellent resources to the Dartmouth Psychology Internship Program and helps the program to provide inters with sufficient experiential exposure to meet the program's training goals.

Training Experiences

The program offers a one year, full-time training experience. Interns are expected to engage in 750 hours of direct service during internship. This translates into approximately 15 or 16 hours of direct service delivery per week. This expectation is the result of the program's goal of providing sufficient exposure and experience to meet the program's competency expectations while also allowing adequate time for supervision, seminars, record keeping, and literature reviews within a 40 to 45 hour week. While interns are expected to contribute to patient care, it is understood by faculty and staff that the intern's service provision is secondary to the training received by the intern.

Supervision
When interns begin the training year with the Dartmouth Psychology Internship Program, each intern is assigned an administrative supervisor who is responsible for integrating the intern into the program and refining the intern's schedule so that training goals and objectives can be met. The administrative supervisor is located at the intern's training site and is a constant throughout the year. Administrative supervisors are responsible for the on-going evaluation of the match between the intern's training goals and objectives and their responsibilities within the program.

The program also designates four or five clinical supervisors for the supervision of the psychotherapy and testing activities. At least one clinical supervisor is located at the intern's professional delivery site and that supervisor has primary responsibility for the intern's service delivery at that location. At least two of the clinical supervisors will be licensed psychologists.

Interns attend approximately four hours of individual supervision per week. There is additional weekly supervision provided in team and group formats. Intensive supervision is the backbone of the internship experience at Dartmouth. These supervisor sessions expose interns to a variety of clinical approaches and help the interns to develop and understand a particular treatment philosophy and style of their own. While the program espouses no single right way to be a psychologist, it does demand that all trainees become thoughtful and knowledgeable about the evolution of their own professional identity and that interns are able to fully conceptualize their own clinical decisions. Supervision offers opportunities for socialization into the profession of psychology and may utilize a wide variety of teaching techniques such as process notes, review of written work, discussion, live or recorded observation, co-therapy, didactic exposure, and mentoring.

observation, co-therapy, didactic exposure, and mentoring. Supervisors are highly accessible to the interns and seek to provide the interns with sufficient training, mentoring, and encouragement to allow them to successfully complete the internship. Supervisors help interns to utilize both relevant theoretical models and empirical findings as the bases for their thinking about clinical issues.

Seminars
Another critical component of the program's efforts to expose interns to the core skills of the profession of psychology is the day-long seminar series that interns participate in on a weekly basis. Interns are at their sites four days a week. Each Tuesday, they spend the entire day in didactic seminars. The following seminars are offered:

In addition to the educational benefits of the seminars, the seminar series helps to create cohesion in the intern class, and it serves to consolidate the interns' identities as psychologists.

Program Goals
As with most academic medical centers, the Dartmouth Medical School strives to fulfill the integrated missions of quality patient care, research, and the teaching of future health care professionals. The Department of Psychiatry's Dartmouth Psychology Internship Program seeks to provide high quality clinical training and research exposure to doctoral level psychologists, and this goal is very much in accord with the tripartite institutional mission of the Medical School.

The Dartmouth Psychology Internship Program, consistent with the scientist-practitioner model, is designed to help early-career professionals develop solid skills in both clinical practice and research. The internship experience at Dartmouth is primarily geared toward enhancing interns' clinical knowledge and skill, but, throughout the year, the internship program exposes its trainees to the conduct and use of research in the field and emphasizes the importance of research in clinical decision making. The Dartmouth Medical School's Department of Psychiatry is a research rich environment in which interns are able to work with professionals with international reputations in research areas such as neuroscience, post-traumatic stress disorder, and serious and persistent mental illness.

The Dartmouth Psychology Internship Program is designed to involve interns in a specified range of core professional experiences. We strive to equip all of our pre-doctoral psychology interns with basic knowledge and skills in treatment models and interventions, assessment, sensitivity to and understanding of cultural differences, ethics and professional conduct, and research skills. Interns are expected to be able to draw from the research literature to support their clinical actions, and they are expected to see ways in which service delivery issues may identify empirical questions.

An additional goal of the Dartmouth Psychology Internship Program is to provide focused training in a domain or "track" which the intern specifies as his/her future area of professional specialization. At this time, the program provides focused training in out-patient child and family work; out-patient adult work; and neuropsychology.

Intern Evaluation Process
The Dartmouth Psychology Internship Program provides nearly continuous evaluation and feedback to the interns. Specific competencies in treatment interventions, assessment, sensitivity and understanding of cultural differences, ethics and professional conduct, and how science and practice interrelate are assessed through on-going weekly supervision and seminar participation. Intern performance is formally assessed every four months in October, February, and June. Strengths and weaknesses in intern performance are identified and any remedial plans are developed to address areas needing improvement. Interns are expected to participate in evaluations of the program by completing seminar, supervisor, and program evaluations.

Stipend
Interns receive a stipend of $22,772. The benefits package includes health insurance, two weeks of vacation, and professional leave time. Interns typically do not work on weekends or holidays. Interns typically have their own offices and a computer in that office. The computer services at Dartmouth are excellent and allow interns to connect from their desktop computer to programs (e.g., statistical packages) on the mainframe, email, and the internet. Interns have access to various libraries at the College, Medical School, and Medical Center. Affiliation with Dartmouth College provides interns with access to libraries, computer and research facilities, a gymnasium, and year round concerts, theater, lectures and galleries.