I have been accepted to a funded, top-50 clinical psych PhD program. The article "a" is used purposefully there. It's just the one.
While some are telling me to accept the offer as the obvious decision, the offer came from a secondary POI that doesn't quite match up with my primary interests (i.e., work is within the same overall lab and has similar approach/leanings, but, relative to my interests, the POI focuses on completely different presenting problems within a population).
With that, I am desperate for more feedback. I had partially considered my application process this year as a dry run from the get-go since I felt that my application would be stronger with an additional year of research (my GRE scores are high and prime and ready to go). With that, I limited my apps to a handful of programs just to see what happened while being fully prepared to take another year to focus on building my experience before reapplying again next year. If I had been accepted by my primary POI at this school, I'd be good to go, but I am concerned about heading there with the offer as it stands now.
Am I crazy to think it's a better move to build more experience and go through the application process again next year with a renewed focus on my specifically targeted interests? Or should I just accept the offer if the match seems "close enough" and just get to getting on with the program so that I can knock this degree out?
I know there's no way for anyone to answer this for me, but I'm all for anonymous internet input at this point - anything to give me more thinking points.