WAMC Clinical Psychology PhD

[fellwynd]

Please let me know if this is not an appropriate place to post this! I'm just trying to gauge my competitiveness and could really use y'all's advice.

I'm applying to clinical psychology PhD programs this fall for admission in Fall 2022 with the hope of becoming a clinical neuropsychologist and researcher. I'll also be applying to masters programs to be safe, and I'm posting this to determine if I need to be applying more to masters or to PhD. Also I'd like to know if I should quit my current job as an ophthalmic medical assistant to find something more relevant, even though I really like it. My PI from undergraduate research has also offered to email programs with people he knows for me.

Education:
BS Psychology with an emphasis in neuroscience and a minor in biology. I took premedical prerequisites because I was on the fence about doing PhD or MD, so my GPA is a bit lower.

Stats:
GPA 3.54
GRE: 319 V- 162 Q- 157

Research Experience:
Worked as a research assistant in a clinical neuroscience lab for 3 years. Presented at 3 undergraduate conferences. Presented original research at the Organization for Human Brain Mapping. I also have had experience doing research with an industrial organizational psychology lab that works with NASA and with personality assessment. Also I will hopefully have 2 papers in the process of publication by the time that I apply, one of which as a first author, but I'm uncertain. Additionally, I attended the Baylor College of Medicine and Emory University online research lecture series in Summer 2020, and I've worked on some other projects that were cancelled due to Covid.

Work/Clinical Experience:
I have worked all through college, working first as a biology lab assistant, then as a security guard, and now lastly as an Ophthalmic Medical Assistant. Obviously working as a Medical Assistant I've gotten a lot of clinical experience, including working with patients one on one to discuss their medical issues. This does occasionally include discussing mental health, as many of our patients have anxiety or dementia that we have to account for while seeing them. Also I've been an intern at my state's department of revenue HR department. One weakness of my application is I have little to no clinical psychology experience, with 16 hours of shadowing 2 different clinical psychologists, some minor volunteering, and some neuropsychological assessment experience from research. I do have experience working in mental health organizations on campus though, wherein I used my knowledge to help fellow students. I'm also certified in Mental Health First Aid.

Other potentially significant things:
I organized a fundraiser for Parkinson's twice, I started a club that is the only one of its kind in the US, and I made an unofficial minecraft graduation for my school which was featured in the wall street journal.

I'm currently planning on applying to the following programs in addition to others that I've yet to determine:

PhD:

-University of Alabama Birmingham

-Penn state

-Vanderbilt

-University of Texas at Austin

-Georgia State

-Virginia Tech

-UC Boulder

East Carolina University

MS in Clinical Psychology:
-Georgia Southern
-Augusta University

MS in Neuroscience:
-Wake Forest