Overview: Clinical Psychology PhD & PsyD
Customizable Curricula
The curricula for the Clinical Psychology PhD and PsyD programs feature four important areas of study:
- Foundations of psychology
- Clinical and professional theory and skills
- Applied clinical research
- Professional growth
Students can customize a curriculum to match their own interests and career goals by selecting specialized series of courses, research and field placements. Curricula are continually updated.
Browse through our course descriptions
Critical Competencies
Students in both clinical doctoral programs acquire mastery of knowledge-, research- and practice-based competencies in seven areas:
- interpersonal/relational
- assessment
- multimodal intervention
- research and evaluation
- consultation/teaching
- management/supervision/training
- quality assurance
Read about the competencies in detail in our course catalog.
Real-World Experience
All students benefit from extensive fieldwork throughout their program. Our training sites offer invaluable real-world experience in a variety of settings with a wide range of patient populations.
Outstanding Internships
The culminating clinical training component is the pre-doctoral internship. CSPP students are encouraged to pursue a full-time, APA-accredited internship in the last year, but also have the option of pursuing or two half-time internships in the last two years. Clinical internship requirements meet and in some programs exceed the 1,500 hours of pre-doctoral internship required by the California Board of Psychology for licensure as a psychologist.
Dissertation or Doctoral Project
Doctoral students complete either a dissertation or a doctoral research project. To see dissertation samples, visit the Alliant Library Catalog.