Congratulations to those of you who have been invited to interviews, after what we know has been a long wait. As excited as you are, we are happy to announce that we are holding a webinar on March 20th to put our minds together and answer your inquiries.
We understand that there is still a month between now and the webinar, if you haven’t already done the following, here is what we suggest you can do to start preparing for the interviews,
Keep calm and organise your thoughts. Managing anxiety is part of a clinical psychologist’s job and a constant challenge, balancing your life and mental well-being is an important skill. We understand that you might be directing a lot of your time towards preparing for these interviews and balance this with looking after your mental and physical well-being.
Revisit your personal, clinical and research experiences. Reflect on/ think about what you have learnt from them, how they have helped you to become a trainee clinical psychologist candidate. If you need more guidance, we recommend you read the following posts by the minorities group, a subcommittee group from the BPS Division of Clinical Psychology, and other platforms that have gathered example interview questions and vignettes:
Do some readings about the psychological theories and formulation, familiarise yourself with them and relate them to your clinical or research experience with these theories. However, if you haven’t had any experience with formulation, don’t worry too much - think of formulation like a story or a flow diagram that helps us make sense of what a client brings to us in a room. Within therapy, it forms a roadmap to therapy.
Try to read around mental health services within the NHS and recent policies. We understand that as international applicants, you will have had a diverse range of experiences prior to training, not all of which will have been done in the UK. If you are not familiar with the NHS and how mental health services are structured in the UK, it might be helpful to refer to relevant resources - we have included a list of some below. However, it’s important to reiterate that not all international trainees have had the experience of working in the NHS so please do not consider this to be a barrier to being successful in your interviews.
Treat yourself to something nice for being one step closer to DClinPsych. We cannot stress enough the importance of self-care and self-preservation in this process, they are key elements to build your confidence and staying level-headed for the interviews.
Congratulations to those who have been invited for the interviews. If you are keen to know more about how the current international trainees prepared for their interviews, the upcoming webinar is designed for you. For more details about the webinar, please go to the Event page and RSVP. We look forward to seeing you at the webinar on March 20th.