Practicum & Internship

Our program has a strong presence in the Louisville community, and currently has affiliation training agreements with more than 50 community partners in a wide range of applied settings. You will be placed in practicum by the faculty, who carefully consider your training needs and professional developmental level.

Our practicum program provides four sequential levels of experience:

• Pre-assessment and Pre-Psychotherapy Practicum (summer of year one)
• Practicum A – Beginning assessment and psychotherapy (year two, all year)
• Practicum B – Intermediate Practicum with a focus on in depth case conceptualization (year three, all year)
• Practicum C – Advanced Practicum with a focus on integrative skills and clinical supervision (year four, all year)

Once you are enrolled in the doctoral program, you will complete the entire four-level sequence alongside your academic coursework. For students who choose an emphasis area in forensics, health, or neuropsychology, at least one practicum experience will be in that area. All four practica are intended to cultivate knowledge, skills and attitudes consistent with the professional competencies set forth by the National Council of the Schools of Professional Psychology (NCSPP) and informed by the American Psychological Association (APA).

There is no better mark of the quality of a clinical psychology doctoral program than its internship match rate. We are not affiliated with any internship program, meaning that when our students are matched at competitive sites all over the country, it is because those sites have chosen them over students from other programs strictly because of their training and experience.

Our match rate over the past 10 years has consistently been 100%, with at least 97% of those matches being to APA-accredited internships for each of the past six years (once every few years we have a student who, for personal or family reasons, chooses an APPIC accredited site but not an APA accredited site). Our students not only consistently match to APA-accredited sites, they routinely match to amazing, top tier APA-accredited sites, such as:

• Top pediatric sites like Kennedy-Krieger/Johns Hopkins, Yale University, and Nicklaus Children’s hospital
• Top medical centers like Indiana University School of Medicine, Kaiser Permanente, Loma Linda (CA) School of Medicine, and Jackson Health/University of Miami School of Medicine
• Top VA medical centers Including the Cleveland VA, the Buffalo VA, the Cincinnati VA, and the number one ranked Bay Pines VA
• Competitive college counseling centers like George Washington University, University of Denver, Vanderbilt, and Ohio State
• Correctional facilities including competitive Bureau of Prison sites like FCC Terre Haute, FCC Butner, FCI Terminal Island, and FMC Ft. Worth
• As well as Army, Navy and Air Force sites, and specialty sites like the Boston University Center for Multicultural Training

Doctoral training from Spalding University will open doors for you across the nation, or here locally if Kentucky is home. We have an exceptional relationship with the Louisville VA, the Lexington VA, the Jefferson County Internship Consortium, the University of Louisville School of Medicine (Bingham clinic), and the University of Kentucky counseling center. Whether you stay local or head to Hawaii (yes, we’ve matched three interns to Tripler Army base!), we promise you’ll be prepared.