Work-Life Balance in Clinical/Counseling Psychology PhDs

[noncompliant94]

For those of you who are in clinical and counseling psychology PhD programs, what is the work-life balance like? How many hours do you devote to research, clinical work, and coursework each week?

[FacelessMage]

I'm in first year. My work-life balance is non-existent right now to be honest. Right now I'm mainly doing coursework, along with a research project and one day/week practicum placement. I probably spend around 30-50 hours doing coursework per week, depending on what's due in the next little while. I haven't done much with the research project yet beyond some lit review, but I imagine that it will add around another 10 hours a week. 

[noncompliant94]

On 2/7/2018 at 5:25 PM, FacelessMage said:

I'm in first year. My work-life balance is non-existent right now to be honest. Right now I'm mainly doing coursework, along with a research project and one day/week practicum placement. I probably spend around 30-50 hours doing coursework per week, depending on what's due in the next little while. I haven't done much with the research project yet beyond some lit review, but I imagine that it will add around another 10 hours a week. 

Okay thanks, this is helpful. Do you know if there's any way to stretch out the program to have more work-life balance during it?

[FacelessMage]

47 minutes ago, noncompliant94 said:

Okay thanks, this is helpful. Do you know if there's any way to stretch out the program to have more work-life balance during it?

In my program, we're required to take a set program of courses each semester determined for us by the DCT (e.g., first year is ethics, professional issues, stats, and assessment second year is therapy and more stats, etc). We don't get a choice of what courses to take. The only way to stretch it out would be to take forever n the later years in getting your research/clinical hours done, but I wouldn't recommend it 1) for funding reasons, and 2) you want to be done and get paid as soon as possible.

[MarineBluePsy]

I'm sure you'll get a variety of answers as each program is different.  I'm in my 2nd year and a typical week is something like....... research: 4-10 hours, practicum: 16-20 hours, TAing: 3 hours, classes/homework: 5-10hrs , and meetings/miscellaneous tasks: 0-2hrs.  I do a good job of lumping up my days so I do most things back to back rather than have several random gaps in my day.  Some weeks I choose to devote more time to a particular task so that might add an extra 4-5 hours, but its still manageable.