CHAPTER 4

Expectations

Mentors

The most important person in your graduate career is your academic and research advisor or advisors. It is critically important that you maintain close contact with your advisor(s) throughout your graduate career. Graduate education is based on mentorship. If for any reason you are not comfortable with your advisor or if you would like to change your research focus and work with another advisor, you should take steps to connect with a new advisor of your choice. Nothing gets students in academic jeopardy more quickly than becoming isolated from the faculty and a faculty advisor.

The Faculty

The relationship between you and the clinical faculty is critical. You are encouraged to not only work closely with your mentor, but also to utilize the other faculty resources of the area. You will likely have courses from most of the faculty in the area. Courses at a graduate level are much more active than at an undergraduate level. Talking with faculty, discussing ideas, raising questions, are all a part of a graduate training. Bouncing ideas off of two or three different faculty members often gives you additional perspectives on a problem and sharpens your own thinking. The faculty are committed to graduate education or they would not be here. You will find most faculty are easily approachable and willing to talk with you.

Professional Responsibility

From the day you start graduate school it is important to realize that you are now a professional. As a professional, much more is expected of you. Your mentorship relationship with your academic advisor involves a commitment to be an active part of his or her research laboratory. Your graduate classes and seminars are very important. The expectation is that you will attend all of your classes unless illness or an unavoidable professional conflict interferes with attendance. Deadlines are a constant fact of life for professionals, and they must be dealt with effectively. Waiting until the deadline is nearly here before beginning a project never works at a graduate level, where much more is expected than probably has ever been expected of you before. Your work with clients carries a number of responsibilities that are unlike any that you likely faced before. In an emergency, the welfare of your client comes first and foremost. That may mean speaking with your client at 2:00 a.m. if they are suicidal, and of course, contacting your supervisors (yes, calling them at 2:00 a.m. as well) to keep them informed of your actions. Appointments with clients should be considered sacred. You should arrive on time and prepared for every session. The professional responsibilities that you have to your client can be complex and at times may even conflict with one another. Using your supervisors as resources when dealing with difficult cases is valuable. You will have other responsibilities as well. As part of your graduate training, we require all students to have experience teaching. You will also be called on to help with the general functioning of the department (e.g., all students are expected to proctor exams on occasions). Although, there is very little learning involved in proctoring, your willingness to shoulder your fair share of the responsibility will definitely be noticed by the faculty.

Professional Image

As mentioned above, from the day you start graduate school you are considered a professional. As such, you need to behave as a professional. That does not mean that you will become a "stuffed shirt," who never smiles, much less laughs. What it does mean is that you will be aware that your behavior is under scrutiny in a hundred different situations in which it has never been under scrutiny before. The way you talk and present yourself in classrooms when you are the teaching assistant, the way you behave when at the University around other faculty or students, and the way you conduct yourself in a variety of public situations outside of the University will all affect the way you are viewed as a clinical psychologist and a professional. The norms of expected behavior will be different depending upon the nature of the work that you might be doing (e.g., your dress is typically more formal when seeing clients than it might be for attending a class). But other aspects of your demeanor should be reasonably fixed across all kinds of situations. It is no accident that the ethical principles specifically address this issue in broad terms and that most licensing laws have provisions for evaluating the conduct of professionals on dimensions other than their professional competence. For example, a criminal conviction in most cases will result in the almost certain revocation of your license to practice as a professional. Short of that, however, the way you conduct yourself in the community influences how you are viewed professionally and how the discipline of psychology is viewed more broadly.

Professional Contacts

One of the most valuable things that you can do as a professional is to develop the contacts that will be resources to your professional career in the future. Some of these contacts, for example, may be made at the clinic staff meetings, where the speakers from the community come in to talk about their work. Another excellent way of meeting people in the discipline is to attend conventions and/or outside training activities. There are regular conventions held by most psychological organizations, many of which are within driving distance of Buffalo. When you attend such programs or conventions, it is valuable to introduce yourself to people and talk with them about their work and yours. This is often a difficult thing to do, but a valuable aide to your career.

Vacations

The clinical training program is a twelve month a year commitment. Summers are usually a busy time in which students plan, complete, and write up research projects. Clinical responsibilities are also year round commitments. The academic calendar may affect your courses, but the rest of your training goes on regardless of the calendar. A good rule of thumb is that you should take no more than three weeks of total vacation over the course of a year.

Being a Part of the Program

Last, but certainly not least, the saying "out of sight, out of mind" is very relevant to a professional and really should be remembered during your graduate career. We recognize that your office may not always be the best place to get work done. Spending time working at home or working in the library may be more efficient. However, it is advisable that you spend a good deal of time in the department close to your faculty mentors and graduate student colleagues. The close contact with faculty and graduate students is an important part of the socialization process that transforms the student into a professional. Learning difficult concepts is often more effective when graduate students challenge one another by discussing the concepts, even challenging their relevance, and integrating the concepts into the many aspects of your professional life. Graduate school is also a stressful environment. We believe we have gone as far as one can in reducing the stress of graduate school while still maintaining high professional standards for our students. The support of faculty and graduate students represents a significant buffer against the stress. In a department that is constantly cramped for space, the faculty has committed itself to setting aside space for graduate student offices. We have done so because we believe that your professional development depends on physical contact with the program.