Our Story
We are a group of Trainee Clinical Psychologists from the University of Lancaster. We have put together this resource as part of our second-year project. For this project around service development, we chose to look at the resources available to applicants of the DClinPsy courses. We recognised that there was so much information out there, and that can at times feel overwhelming and difficult to navigate.
We have each experienced our own journey with the application process and came to this project for different reasons, for example having experiences of feeling unable to access resources due to their costs, or feeling like we didn’t know what support was available to us as applicants or even where to begin searching for them and experiencing barriers when accessing the training from an unconventional route. Within our many different reasons and experiences, we quickly learnt that we had a shared value: we believe that the application process should be more accessible, and our vision is to see all aspiring psychologists having equal, fair, and free access to support and resources as part of their application journey.
Our values are ones that reflect openness, transparency, and respect. We hope that we can be accessible to all applicants with the overall wish that the profession will become more diverse and more accessible. We recognise that our resource is not creating systemic change, but we hope we have created and captured the information needed to allow you to understand a bit more about the profession and have the skills and opportunities to reflect and consider yourself as a future psychologist.
We spent time thinking about how to best offer you support and information. We wanted to come up with a resource that would help facilitate the journey you’re going on, and that each of us have experienced, in the hopes of being your ally through this. We wanted to capture your voices in our work. What we learnt from other people is that there is a minefield of information and resources available but that it is so difficult to know what is right and what is helpful. We didn’t want to add another resource to the ever-growing minefield, but instead we wanted to offer you something that would help you decide what resource suited your needs, as well as provide transparent and clear information to support you. We were mindful that not only are there many inaccessible resources, but a lot of them are also filled with psychology words, so we wanted to give you something that was easy to understand and helpful on your professional journey.
Throughout this website we will introduce each resource we have created, and hope that we have put together a central place for you to begin your journey. We want to support you in making those choices and reflecting on your experiences. We hope that what we have put together will demystify the profession and take it out of its ivory tower and empower you to do this!
We wish you the best of luck on your journey and can’t wait to be your colleagues!