Who can blame them? After all, the prospect of spending one of those rare, beautiful summer afternoons calculating practicum hours and cataloguing each of your clients’ diversity characteristics is enough to send anyone screaming into the night. Or, at least, make your eyes glaze over completely.

And, the level of detail required in filling out the Application for Psychology Internship is enough to shut down even the most dedicated internship applicant. Never mind the daunting challenges behind writing the five essays. . . . (By the way, to download your copy of the AAPI, click here)

Would you include yourself in this group?  Are you one of the internship applicants who wonders how he or she could ever say enough about his or her qualifications and training goals to impress a selection committee . . . especially within a 500-word limit?  You might feel that you have just barely moved past learning the basics of becoming a clinician, much less found a way to distinguish yourself from your fellow applicants.

Sound familiar?  No wonder so many students agonize for days on end before finally putting some words on paper. Or, find themselves waiting almost until the last minute before pulling a few all-nighters in the days before their applications are due.  Fortunately, you no longer need to continue subjecting yourself to this level of suffering. Your rescue is waiting just around the corner. 

With a little shift in how you approach these demanding tasks, you can start making them more manageable right from the start and begin reclaiming your power over the entire application process.  One of the best strategies I know for accomplishing this goal comes from good old-fashioned cognitive/behavioral therapy. It consists of breaking down each larger task into smaller, more manageable steps and setting realistic goals for your productivity. Furthermore, you can wring even more results your efforts if you use the data from quantitative items to flesh out a more in-depth and comprehensive description of your training experiences.

As a result, rather than feeling trapped in resentment about having to compile and categorize so much information in the AAPI, you will free yourself to use it in ways that generate more substantial contents for your essays. In short, if you allow yourself some extra time and focus your attention carefully, you can streamline the entire process while also wringing the most from the energy you invest.

The following strategies outline how this approach can help you break through your procrastination and get a head-start on your fellow applicants:

1. Break the AAPI into discrete sections and pace yourself in completing each of them. First of all, print the application rather than trying to fill it in on your computer screen. You will reduce your chances of feeling overwhelmed by the length of the form and sharpen your focus in completing each section accurately. Even better: Write your answers to each question in a separate notebook or Internship Journal rather than directly on your copy of the application. This approach will free you to make changes or additions to your answers without making you feel cramped in the limited space provided in the form. It will also enable you to add or delete information without feeling pressured to be accurate the first time you write it.
2. Capture all of your thoughts and feelings as you respond to each item on the AAPI. Many students feel embarrassed about acknowledging the range of feelings that bubble up to the surface as they prepare to write their applications. Often, they try to "save face" or "keep a stiff upper lip" around their peers despite feeling very insecure about their qualifications or their chances of matching with a competitive site. Yet, your emotional reactions contain some very important information that you cannot afford to ignore. Thus, you owe it to yourself to create a section in your Internship Journal that provides room for you to keep track of all of these reactions. You never know how you might find these thoughts and feelings useful as you compose your applications and prepare for interviews. They often signal areas in which your training feels inadequate or insufficient. Thus, rather than becoming a source of shame or embarrassment, your clear awareness of these areas can help you describe your weaknesses (or, as I prefer to call them, "areas for professional growth". How, I wonder, can you label something a "weakness" when you have not yet had enough exposure or enough opportunities to learn it?) accurately and in detail. Furthermore, your emotional reactions will provide you with important information about the various components of prospective sites that you consider significant and influential in your decision-making.
3. Take ownership of each individual training experience and what you learned from it as you respond to each AAPI question. Rather than simply filling in the blanks about how many Asian, bisexual, or disabled clients you have seen, take some time to remember each of these clients individually. Jot down some notes in your journal about the referral question(s) you were trying to answer with your psychological testing, how you chose the tests you included in your battery, and how you considered clients’ individual differences in interpreting your results and making recommendations. Also, think about each therapy client: What were his/her presenting concerns? How did the therapy progress? What might you have done differently if you could start the treatment over? What did you learn from the experience about yourself and your skills as a therapist? As you take time to consider each piece of information in detail, you will gradually accumulate a stronger understanding of what you have learned from each training experience. Looking at each experience from these different angles will also help you to recognize what you have accomplished and build your confidence in your growing expertise.
4. Alternate between answering closed-ended and open-ended questions on the AAPI, and convert your quantitative answers back into their qualitative equivalents. With each "yes" or "no" question, take a few minutes to jot down the reasons for your answer in your Internship Journal. As suggested above, turn each numerical answer back into its more descriptive precursor. For example, as you total the numbers of adult, adolescent, and/or child clients you saw, take some time to write out descriptions of each of them, including their presenting concerns, socioeconomic status, racial/ethnic background, and sexual orientation or other diversity factors. Remember the issues that came up in supervision related to each of your cases and spell out what you learned from addressing each of them.
5. Match your tasks with your energy level and your environment. Make sure that you set aside plenty of time for compiling the information you need to answer the AAPI questions. To achieve maximum productivity, schedule your work times to coincide with your energy levels. Consider whether you are more of a "morning person" or a "night owl". Because working with quantitative data generally requires a great deal of concentration and focus, try to take advantage of the times when you are most rested to answer these questions. Whenever possible, avoid pushing yourself to tackle these questions at the end of a long day or immediately after a meal, unless you are one of those students who gets a "second wind " at these times. If you do not allow yourself the time and energy necessary to complete this task effectively, you might find that your attention wanders while your accuracy and concern with it decline without your notice.

In short, as you allow yourself the time you need for describing your training experiences in detail, you will gradually uncover the distinctive characteristics of your background that help you to stand out from other applicants. More importantly, as you begin to recognize and take credit for the particular knowledge and skills you gained in working with your specific clients, you will feel increasingly confident about what you have to offer a particular internship site

Your sense of your uniqueness as a developing professional will become increasingly clear. Your attention will gradually shift from what you have not learned to what you have learned. As a result, you will spend much less time and energy trying to fit into a preconceived notion of what you believe individual sites have defined as their "Ideal Applicant". Ultimately, you will devote less attention to competing directly with your peers and more trying to cultivate your particular gifts and talents. . . . because your experience will begin to speak for itself.

Ultimately, you will be able to free yourself from wondering "which sites might make me an offer" so that you can focus more of your energy on searching for a site that will provide what you need - and want - to learn.