Learnings from preparing for the DClinPsych interview at Oxford University - how the world in 2022 may shape clinical psychology

I applied for the Doctor of Clinical Psychology for the first time in November 2021. As many of you will know, it's quite a stressful process, consisting of filling in a detailed online form asking about one's qualifications, relevant experience, publications, references, a 3,000-character personal statement and a couple of shorter statements. In October and November 2021, I spent many weekends in coffee shops with my laptop, feeling like a student again while trying to come up with the best possible narrative about myself and why I would be a good candidate for training.

Then, there were around four months of waiting and hoping. Months, in which I could focus my energy on other things and put my mind at rest. Kind of. I was wondering about how to plan my year, depending on whether I would move to a new city for training or not. I didn't make many plans for the weeks in March, April, and May, knowing that I might potentially have an interview around that time of year.

Then, I finally received the long-awaited email: Oxford had shortlisted me for an interview! I was of course very excited. This was the course that I really wanted to get onto: I already live in Oxford, fifteen walking minutes away from the training centre, and I have a particular passion for two specific components that the Oxford course can offer: research and systemic therapy. The course at Oxford places a great emphasis on high-quality research and has achieved a foundation level accreditation of the programme with the Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice (AFT). In fact, they are currently applying for Intermediate level accreditation with the AFT. This was something I felt particularly drawn to.

I started preparing for the interview. At the time of writing this article, I don't have the outcome yet. What I do know is that I learned a great deal in the process of preparing. I reflected a lot on current issues in clinical psychology, the NHS, and how societal events shape the way in which psychologists approach their work. In this context, the war between Russia and Ukraine was of course a particularly challenging topic to think about. What will this mean for the future of Europe, and how can we, in the field of psychology, be prepared?

I came across a helpful BPS guideline about working with refugees and asylum seekers in the UK. It outlines important topics to consider when working with adults, children, young people, and unaccompanied minors. It reminded me of work I had done years ago, when I worked for a refugee charity. I supported adolescents who had recently immigrated and provided some support in terms of understanding the language and the new culture. We wanted to make sure that they would be able to find their own personal intercultural identity: feeling integrated and connected in their new home without losing the attachment to the culture of the country they had left.

Adolescence can be a challenging time, no matter where we grow up. Even without immigration, it's hard to go through so many physical and hormonal changes in such a short time span, to be confronted with big questions about one's identity and to be interacting with peers who are going through the same struggles and might therefore neither understand themselves, nor each other. There is a lot of social comparison and there can be a lot of awkwardness. It can be hard to be a teen these days. Never mind being a teen in an entirely new environment.

I learned how important it is to take a step back and give people time. One person I worked with shared a story that I will never forget. When I asked him what age he was, he couldn't answer. In his culture, people's birthdays were not as important, and people didn't necessarily celebrate them or keep track of them. As a result, he roughly knew his age but didn't know his exact date of birth.

He then went on to tell me that according to his new passport, he was officially a couple of years younger than his supposed actual age. This made the visa- and asylum-seeking process a lot easier at the time, and his family didn't think of it as a big deal. But now he found himself in the dilemma of not knowing what to say if someone asked him about his age. He had realised that many things are based on people's date of birth in our culture: year groups in school, health records etc.

This created a bit of an identity crisis for him, which was unlike other types of crises that adolescents might more typically have to face. It taught me a great lesson: Never in a million years would I have been able to guess that this could be a struggle for someone who immigrates into a new culture. It made me humbly aware of all the things I didn't know about other cultures. There is a term for this: cultural humility. It is defined as 'having an interpersonal stance that is other-oriented rather than self-focused, characterised by respect and lack of superiority toward an individual's cultural background and experience', as outlined in a paper about measuring openness to culturally diverse clients in therapy.

Young people from immigrated families are in quite a special position: They often find easier access to a new culture. We know that the younger we are, the easier it may be to learn a language. This can lead to a level of 'parentification' when young people take on a sort of a caring role, translating and organising things for the entire family, as outlined in a recent article in the psychologist March 2022 edition.

I don't know if I will get to train as a clinical psychologist anytime soon. But I do know that it was immensely helpful for me to immerse myself into current issues within the field. Most of my work in the past couple of years involved working with families, children, and young people, and I'd like to think that I try to do the best I can to learn about the difficulties that different types of families are facing, including those who have immigrated or are displaced.

Natascha Niekamp is a Graduate Member of the BPS and a Research Assistant at the University of Oxford, working in the TOPIC research group. TOPIC is the Oxford Psychological Interventions for Children and Adolescent Research Group.