I am so exceedingly pleased to inform you that I passed the Examination for the Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP) this week. That means, once I've completed some pretty straightforward remaining paperwork, that I will finally, FINALLY be a licensed clinical psychologist.
In plainer language, that means I'm finally a real, live, full-blown professional psychologist.
Since I've made it through this most recent and possibly final gauntlet of training in clinical psychology, I am proud to make available to you, dear readers, the Psychocinematic Licensure Study System, or PLSS (as in PLSSsssssss let this be overrrrrrrrrrrrr). The system boasts a 100% success rate, based on my sample of one.
To pass EPPP according to my system, just follow the exceedingly torturous steps below!
- Ambivalently acquire study materials, maximizing the number of free things
- Read through the entire study guide you got from a colleague, underlining an absurdly high proportion of the text as if that's somehow going to help your retention
- Meet with said colleague for "study sessions," and by "study sessions" I mean "friend dates during which you eat good things, gossip, and half-heartedly answer 3-5 practice questions"
- Take first practice exam
- Fail utterly
- Feel like a fraud
- Question how you earned a doctorate while evidently learning so little
- Question everything
- PANIC
- Avoid studying for 4-6 weeks
- Feel justified in avoiding studying because the whole thing is bullshit anyway
- Toy with the idea of taking exam 3 months ahead of time
- Spring for $30 flashcard iPhone app during a brief pendulum-swing from righteous avoidance into overcompensating hysteria
- Attempt to use flashcards
- Get angry anew about how little you know after reading that ENTIRE GODDAMNED STUDY GUIDE
- RAGE ADDITIONALLY ABOUT I/O* BEING ON THE EXAM
- Return to flashcards
- Gripe endlessly to colleagues about:
- how stressful the test is
- how much it sucks that everyone finds the test so stressful
- how it's stupid that everyone finds the test so stressful, as we are all smart and you only have to get a 75!!
- how DO THE TEST MAKERS NOT UNDERSTAND THAT PROFESSIONALS HAVE ACCESS TO GOOGLE. I DON'T NEED TO KNOW WHAT THE KUDER-RICHARDSON FORMULA IS IN MY EVERYDAY LIFE.
- how if I'm going to be expected to know all this shit about psychiatric medications, does that mean I'll be paid commensurate with psychiatrists after I pass?? No?? Then fuck you.
- how aforementioned rageful oppositionality to the stupidity of the test makes studying emotionally impossible, and finally
- the agonizing realization that the myths that we will ever, EVER be done proving ourselves and that the endless hurdles of graduate training do in fact have an end, those myths are lies, LIES (sob!)
- Come to terms with maybe being a nanny or waitress since passing exam might be impossible
- Wonder if one could ever earn enough tips to pay off student loan debt
- Consider possibility of skipping town to be a waitress in a foreign land where debtors could never find you
- At recommendation of one griped-at colleague, begin system of reinforcement for short intervals of testing
- Invest in a high-quality sticker chart
- Be embarrassed at how motivated you, an adult, are by stickers
- Supplement sticker chart with additional reinforcers (e.g., white cheddar popcorn, Facebook time, and depressingly, paying bills)
- Rapidly devolve into a time spent in study:reinforcement ratio of 1:5
- Discover that you don't even know the names for therapies you *DO*, apparently
- Take second practice test
- Seemingly impossibly, do WORSE on second practice test than you did on the first one
- Lapse into brief period of inefficacy-induced malaise
- Get a studying-stress-induced cold that refuses to vacate your body for ~3 weeks
- Scuttle plans to take exam 3 months early, settle for taking it right on time
- Grudgingly begin sacrificing significant portions of weekends to studying, but still refuse to find time to study at work--except during exceedingly boring meetings
- Observe steady, predictable decline in self-care as studying inexorably takes over your life
- At least, continue to accumulate stickers on sticker chart?
- Become embarrassed anew at the sense of accomplishment you experience in counting the number of stickers you've accumulated
- Finally cease avoidance and sit down to "schedule" (translation: "pay $700 for") exam
- Discover that there are literally no testing appointments available for the next month in the entire major metropolitan area in which you live
- Don't even freak out because the freak out parts of your brain have died
- Do, however, discover that the rage parts of your brain are still quite alive and well when you learn that the company that runs the test prompts you to anxiety-purchase practice tests as you're waiting to schedule your exam?!?!
- Apply for extension of limited permit so it doesn't expire 10 days after your now-behind-schedule test date
- Start an at-work sticker chart
- WHAT EVEN IS MORITA THERAPY SERIOUSLY
- Finish going through all the iPhone app's flash card tests twice
- Create an iPhone app flash card deck of only the extra special hard flashcards--feel like a badass for pushing yourself so hard
- Contemplate what you have become
- Make reference to material you studied and learned a hot second ago in sessions as if you'd known that stuff all along
- Shift focus to again taking practice tests, considering this move both a) a logical next step in your study strategy and b) exposure to a deeply triggering stimulus
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| NO. |
- Become filled with feminist rage that questions regarding the cultural universality mens' preferred waist:hip ratio in women are in your study materials because WHAT RELEVANCE COULD THAT *POSSIBLY* HAVE TO THE PRACTICE OF CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY
- Suspect that the most assuredly male writers of the test include such questions for the sole purpose of subtly oppressing their female colleagues because the patriarchy reigns always, even where you least expect it
- For the first time ever, pass a practice test (by narrowest possible margin)
- Get ridiculously cocky
- Take more practice tests
- Continue to score within passing range on subsequent practice tests
- Become insufferable in your pridefulness
- Write the majority of this post in the days leading up to the exam as one final bid for more avoidance
- Arrive at day of exam
- Arrive at predictably anonymous-looking building to take exam
- Provide two forms of identification, multiple palm scans, a photograph, a blood sample, a hair sample, fingernail clippings, and a pinky promise that you will never ever break the precious secrets of the exam before being admitted to take the exam
- Struggle miserably, constantly fending off panic and despair, for four and a half hours
- Stagger out of the testing room feeling as if you've been struck by a large vehicle
- Get handed, alarmingly perfunctorily, a folded piece of paper with your results IMMEDIATELY after all that staggering--on just a NORMAL PIECE OF PAPER like it's NOTHING
- Numbly assess precisely how far away you would need to be from the waiting area to avoid disturbing people with your wails and moans should you have failed
- Decide the bathroom down the hall is good enough I guess
- Nervously check results
- SUCCESSFULLY PASS EXAM
- PROFIT!!(??)
To anyone with this terrible exam in their future, good luck and may God have mercy on your souls! To everyone else, just be grateful.
{Heart}
* = I/O is industrial/organizational psychology, for which one has to get an entirely different degree if one wants to be an industrial/organizational psychologist. You cannot be an industrial/organizational psychologist if you have only gotten training as a clinical psychologist. There is literally no reason I/O should be on the credentialing examination for CLINICAL psychologists.
