Pre-doctoral internships announced

Four graduate students at the University of Georgia College of Education have received pre-doctoral internships at top sites across the country, representing a range of clinical, community and school-based settings.

Tori Foster, Christina Simmons, Ashley Dubin and Brittany Whipple will complete their graduate internships in Nebraska, Pennsylvania and Texas, giving them specialized expertise before moving on to post-doctoral work. All of the students are working in child and adolescent psychological specialties as part of the school psychology training program.

Foster and Simmons will be at the Munroe-Meyer Institute at the University of Nebraska in two different areas. Foster will be at a training and research center that specializes in behavioral, emotional, physical, cognitive, genetic and developmental disabilities. She will learn outpatient behavioral assessment and treatment techniques for common developmental and behavioral disorders in children (tantrums, ADHD, disruptive school behavior, anxiety and habit disorders, among others). Simmons, meanwhile, will be at the Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders, one of the leading institutions that applies the principles of applied behavior analysis to treat a range of behavioral challenges. She also will participate in evaluations for autism spectrum disorder and train under some of the leading clinicians in the field.

Dubin will go to the Devereux Center for Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Services, which serves about 250 children and adolescents with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities in campus- and community-based residential treatment facilities, treatment foster care homes and approved private school educational placements. At Devereux, Dubin will work as part of a team of interdisciplinary professionals to provide specialized assessments and interventions that build on client strengths, and help with remediating client needs.

And in Texas, Whipple will work with the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District outside Houston. This school-based program provides psychological services for K-12 students, and interns also provide family therapy service at a family counseling clinic and take part in multi-year research projects.

The range and quality of these internships represents the depth of the College of Education's School Psychology Program, said Scott Ardoin, professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and director of the School Psychology Clinic at UGA.

"Our students gain a wide range of exceptional practicum experiences through both our on-campus school psychology clinic and through external practicum experiences in local school districts and clinical settings," he said. "As a result, they are qualified to apply for internships at sites that are considered competitive for both school psychology and clinical psychology students."