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Credit: Nick Romanenko
Stanley Messer, dean of Rutgers’
Graduate School of Applied and
Professional Psychology (GSAPP), and the
director and staff of GSAPP’s
Psychological Clinic meet regularly to
assign psychotherapy cases to the
doctoral student therapists of the
program. Left to right, Don Morgan,
clinic director; Zena Ruby, clinic
coordinator; Messer, dean of GSAPP;
Sarah Kowal, clinic coordinator. For 30
years, GSAPP has been inspiring men and
women seeking doctoral degrees in
professional psychology. GSAPP marked
that milestone this year, along with the
Psychological Clinic’s 75th anniversary.
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Luciene Sant’Anna-Takagi has long had a dream to provide mental health services to immigrants of her native Brazil. “I would love to help the community I grew up in,” she says. So when she enrolled in the clinical psychology program at Rutgers’ Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology in 1999, she knew she had found the right place to realize her ambitions.
GSAPP is a school, she says, that “values people’s experience, ethnicity, special interests, goals and aspirations. That inspires me.”
For 30 years now, GSAPP has been inspiring men and women seeking doctoral degrees in professional psychology. GSAPP marked that milestone, along with the Psychological Clinic’s 75th anniversary last year, with a celebration Oct. 2.
Dean Stanley Messer, who has been at Rutgers since 1968 – seven years before GSAPP was established – says external reviewers have called GSAPP the “gold standard” for professional psychology schools. For the class entering this fall, “we had 550 applications for 30 slots. So we end up with wonderful students,” Messer says.
GSAPP enrolled its first students in 1974 in two doctoral programs: clinical psychology and school psychology, which was part of the Graduate School of Education. In 1988, a third program in organizational psychology was added to GSAPP. The school’s primary focus is to train psychology practitioners who will work in either private or public settings. Graduates leave the school with a Psy.D. in either clinical, school or organizational psychology. A separate Ph.D. program, administered within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences-New Brunswick, is also available for people who want to concentrate on research careers.
Graduates go on to a variety of careers, Messer says. For instance, a school psychologist may serve as a school consultant or evaluate educational programs. Organizational psychologists often work for corporations or nonprofit groups, or provide executive coaching. Clinical psychologists tend to provide treatment at hospitals or clinics.
In the past three decades, the psychology field has seen a growing demand for services in underserved and ethnic populations, and GSAPP is doing its best to keep up with those needs, Messer says. “We offer courses on multiculturalism and diversity because we’re training our students to go out into a diverse world and diverse state,” he notes. GSAPP has one of the highest proportions – 25 percent – of minority students among all doctoral programs at Rutgers. The school enrolls many international students, including those from Turkey, China, Iceland, Nigeria, Argentina and India, among others.
GSAPP’s faculty and students are encouraged to reach out to underserved populations, particularly the youngest and the oldest in our communities. That is accomplished not only through research and public service with these groups but also through the Psychological Clinic, which provides outpatient services to the Rutgers community and surrounding communities. Under supervision of GSAPP faculty, graduate students provide assessment, counseling and therapy.
Faculty also bring their expertise to the school’s public service mission. For example, for more than a decade, professors Brenna Bry and Nancy Boyd-Franklin have run the Rutgers/Somerset Counseling Project, which works with guidance counselors at Sampson G. Smith School, the middle school in Franklin Township. “Our purpose is to identify low-income students who may not graduate or who are at risk of getting in trouble with the law,” Bry says.
GSAPP students in the program provide the middle-school students with both individual and group counseling and teach them problem-solving skills. They also partner with the students’ parents to help them support their children. Evaluations of the program have shown reduced drop-out rates, increased school attendance and fewer “critical” incidents, such as fights, during the school year. The school is so pleased with the program that it dedicated a room there just for counseling, Bry says.
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