Expand Your Horizons
Work alongside CAPS staff in a fast-paced, vibrant university setting.
About the CAPS Doctoral Internship Program
The CAPS Doctoral Internship Program (CDIP) prepares the next generation of health service psychologists to serve as ethical and skilled clinicians in a variety of settings with high degrees of multicultural competence. Psychology interns completing their capstone training experiences work as generalists in a university counseling center that serves a large public university in the borderlands of the American Southwest. Training at CAPS, which is housed within U of A’s nationally ranked Campus Health, comes with ample and consistent opportunities to collaborate with staff across medical, health promotion, and mental health services within a large integrated health center.
CDIP is an APPIC Member Program. We welcomed our first cohort of two interns in the summer of 2024. We are excited to have gained funding for a third intern for the 2025-2026 cohort!
The CDIP Training Committee has submitted its self-study for accreditation with the American Psychological Association and has been granted a site visit in the Spring of 2025.
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About the Intern Role
At CAPS, we are proud of the rich variety of training experiences that we offer our interns. CDIP interns work on the front lines alongside CAPS staff providing a variety of intervention modalities in a fast-paced, vibrant atmosphere. They are trained in and/or exposed to theoretically-driven and evidence-based interventions. Training staff value the development and integration of interns’ theoretical approaches as a centerpiece of training. Through direct clinical experience, didactics, and supervision, interns are exposed to different theoretical approaches that include psychodynamic psychotherapy, ACT, DBT, and more.
Training Activities include:
- clinical supervision
- 2 hours per week of didactic seminars
- supervision of counseling externs (part-time trainees from MA or PhD programs)
- case consultation
- conference attendance
Emphasis Sites
There are many student populations at the University of Arizona that our CDIP interns may elect to work with on their emphasis site. Interns may join our site-based counseling team or other campus partners serving various student groups one day per week. The growing list of possible emphasis area sites include CAPS site-based locations, the SALT Center, UA Colleges, Athletics, the CAPS Assessment Team, and others
Our Values at CAPS
CDIP and the entire CAPS team is driven by the foundational value to provide high-quality mental health care to all students. At CAPS, we believe that mental health support comes in all forms and that everyone deserves options for individualized care. Relatedly, CAPS aims to reduce barriers to care, and interns are directly involved with our efforts to provide a vast of services to meet the wide range of student needs at UA.
CAPS deeply values all trainees as critical parts of our team, and we strive to recruit trainees from a wide range of academic and professional backgrounds who could offer their unique and valuable perspective. We also want to provide as rich of a training experience as possible. We firmly believe that there is reciprocal benefit between the training we provide and the interns who join us. As a training program, we are tasked with keeping up to date with research, best practice, and our own development as supervisors to facilitate excellent training experiences. Interns (and other trainees) bring fresh perspectives, different experiences, and new skill sets that broaden CAPS’ capacity to serve our students well.
The CAPS Team
As a team, CAPS staff consists of psychologists, licensed professional counselors, associate-level counselors, licensed clinical social workers, administrative staff, clinical care coordinators, evaluation specialists, psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, doctoral interns, master’s level externs, doctoral psychology externs from the UA Clinical Psychology program, and graduate assistants. We are a large, dynamic, and fun team that is committed to serving the needs of our
community as best as we can. All of us are committed to making training an integral component of that aim and our doctoral internship is the centerpiece of our training program.
Contact Us
Please send any questions about the CDIP to the CAPS Training Director: Joel Gaffney, PhD (joelgaffney@arizona.edu).
Thank you for your interest in CDIP!
CDIP is not currently accredited by the APA. Questions related to the program’s accredited status should be directed to the Commission on Accreditation:
Office of Program Consultation and Accreditation
American Psychological Association
750 1st Street, NE, Washington, DC 20002
Phone: (202) 336-5979 / E-mail: apaaccred@apa.org
Training Model
The CDIP model, and CAPS Training Program more broadly, adhere to a Developmental Practitioner Model. As such, we believe that training is a developmental model and it is our responsibility, to some degree, to meet trainees where they are developmentally to provide the best training. As an internship, CDIP is the capstone training experience for emerging psychologists who match with us. As advanced trainees with substantial training already behind them, interns do most of their learning and training through engaging in professional activities alongside a dedicated staff and with sufficient supervisory support. Experiential learning is the primary training mechanism through which interns learn. CDIP balances sufficient support with challenging interns in developing necessary skills and insights as they transition into their professional lives. Interns can expect to develop their professional identities and theoretical approaches as they prepare to launch into their careers.
CAPS clinicians practice from a variety of different approaches, and interns engage in didactics and supervision that offers exposure to many different theories (e.g., ACT, CBT, solution-focused, relational-cultural, feminist approaches, Internal Family Systems, and more) and topics. As a priority, CDIP aims to facilitate interns’ development of their existing theoretic approaches throughout their internship year.
CDIP views training, and university mental health more broadly, as community efforts. While we are proud of our center and centralized team in our capacity to meet students’ needs who walk through our door at CAPS, we also work hard to establish connections with our campus partners to meaningfully reach students where they are more efficiently. CAPS site-based services are growing every year as we aim to reach more of our campus community. CDIP is part of our efforts to provide resources to campus partners in our community.
Typical Intern Schedule
- Counseling and consultation (initial client contacts): 3.0 hrs/week
- Ongoing individual therapy: 10.0 hrs/week
- Emphasis area: 5.0 hrs/week
- Clinician on Duty (consultation and crisis response): 4.0 hrs/week
- Psychoeducational workshops: 1.0 hr/week
- Group therapy: 1.5 hrs/week
- Supervision of group: 0.5 hrs/week
- Administrative time: 8.0 hrs/week
- Individual supervision with primary supervisor: 2.0 hrs/week
- Supervision of extern: 1.0 hr/week
- Supervision of supervision: 1.0 hr every other week
- Group supervision: 1.0 hr every other week
- Journal Club didactic: 1.0 hr every other week
- Rotating seminar didactic: 1.0 hr every other week
- Humility, Ethics, and the Self seminar didactic: 1.0 hr/week
How to Apply
The University of Arizona CAPS Doctoral Internship is recruiting for 3 full-time internship positions for the 2025-2026 internship year. Students interested in applying for the internship program should submit an online application through the APPIC website (www.appic.org) using the APPIC Application for Psychology Internships (AAPI). As an APPIC-accredited site, we participate in “the match” through the National Matching Services for intern selection. Prospective interns must use our program code (#2594) when applying. The following materials must be submitted:
Required Application Materials
- A completed online AAPI
- Cover letter (as part of AAPI)
- A current Curriculum Vitae (as part of AAPI)
- Three Standard Reference Forms, two of which must be from persons who have directly supervised your clinical work (as part of AAPI). Please submit no more than three SRFs.
- Official transcripts of all graduate coursework
All applications will be reviewed by the CAPS Training Committee. Candidates whose applications are viewed favorably will be invited to participate in Zoom interviews. Consistent with guidelines set forth by APPIC and NMS, the CAPS Training Committee will finalize rankings of interviewed candidates after all interviews have been completed. All application materials must be received by the date noted in the current APPIC directory listing in order to be considered.
Any and all questions about application procedures can be directed to the UArizona CAPS Training Director, Dr. Joel Gaffney (email: joelgaffney@arizona.edu; phone: 520 621 3334).
*** All interns who match to the UArizona CAPS Doctoral Internship must provide proof of citizenship or legal residency and must successfully pass a fingerprint-based background check before beginning employment. Interns also must provide results from a tuberculosis (TB) screening test from the previous 12-months. Instructions for providing this information or completing the background check and TB screening will be sent out to all who match after the match process is complete.