PMHNP1844

A good number of psych prespecialty students studied psychology during undergrad, but that’s certainly not the case for everyone. Some of them have relevant experience (case manager at psych hospital, marriage/family therapist, etc) and others like me do not. As far as GPA goes, I have no clue what the distribution is... I had a 3.6 overall during undergrad, but my degree was probably more challenging than most students’ and I had all As in the prerequisites. Admissions definitely doesn’t see you as just your stats.

I don’t recall ever signing a contract. Technically we aren’t supposed to work, but plenty of people do. There was even a presentation during class by a group that wanted to hire nursing students part time.

When they admit people who turn down the offer and attend another school, they roll the spot down to a waitlisted student. There were a total of 158 spots in our cohort, so that means there were 275 admitted students that declined spots. In some cases, there were students who dropped their spot right before school started, so they had to keep rolling admission down the waitlist until they found someone who hadn’t committed to another school and was willing to show up for orientation on a week’s notice.

Technically you can try, but it is very hard to do and is not looked upon favorably at all. The program is designed for students who can blaze through two degrees in two years because they know exactly what they want to do.

Obviously could have changed this year, but last year when I was applying they conducted interviews for psych because it was so competitive. (Apparently 150 people applied for prespecialty psych, and there are 25 of us in the program now.) I’m not aware of any other specialties that conducted interviews, though.

There really is no typical student profile in the prespecialty cohort. There are a good number of students who came straight out of undergrad, some who have been working for 10+ years in another field, and some who have master’s degrees in completely unrelated disciplines. People have degrees and experience in just about every subject imaginable, and with that comes a huge variation in GPA as well as past clinical experience (a lot of students had never walked into a patient room prior to our first clinical).

No that just means you need to complete it before starting the program! A lot of prespecialty students are admitted before they graduate from undergrad and many of us finished our prerequisites in the last semester.

I am a current prespecialty student and my start date for orientation was August 14!