UNPAID INTERNSHIP?! PSYCH STUDENTS LISTEN UP! 🤯

hey zesties…

i’m here to share with you the WORST internship experience i’ve had, from it being fully UNPAID (with no allowance), 9 MONTHS of slaving away, 0 proper guidance and learning, and completely unqualified supervisors… if you’re a psychology student in singapore, don’t make the same mistakes i did because i was desperate for an internship…

i’m not going to name the clinic in public but iykyk, they’re quite infamous in the psych community in sg. but if you’re worrying about applying to private psych clinics for internship and want to check if it’s this one, feel free to pm me!

🫧 lack of opportunity

if you’re a psych student, you know how scarce the opportunities are for you to cinch a clinical internship in singapore as an undergrad or poly student… because of that, a lot of private clinics take advantage of the desperation of students and can get away with offering unpaid internships and write it off as “learning experience”. and if you request money/ask about allowances for food, they’ll say you’re “in it for the wrong reason” (which is SO bs. don’t allow them to guilt trip you like this 🙄🙄🙄)

🫧 9 months of nothing

i started the internship excited to learn and make a difference and get to see my learning in action. boy was i shocked when i realized the entire clinic was run by ~10 interns and only 2 FT staff. in the entire 9 months, i learned almost absolutely nothing about psychology in action, only doing admin, front-desk work, and designing on canva 🤡 at this point i might as well just be a marketing intern or smth…

🫧 lack of proper supervision

my supervisors were severely incompetent. one being a recent grad who was still IN UNI and an intern like me when i first started my internship, and an honors student. suffice it to say, we had zero guidance and learned almost nothing about how to conduct certain therapy sessions or what goes into planning a session.

as the months went by, i became more and more jaded at my internship, being promised certain things that i never got in the end due to BS reasons and mistakes of past interns. it hurt me a lot and made me feel so insecure about my own abilities and capabilities (to which they assured me was NOT the problem, just to make it clear. i was fully capable. but it was their own inability to get past the mistakes and actions of previous interns that now allowed them to hinder MY learning). 🤡

🫧 SLANDEROUS feedback

what’s more ridiculous is, as this was a graded internship under my university, employers had to submit a feedback form to them at the completion of my internship. i found out (through a complete accident) that my incompetent supervisors crafted the form and sent it in to my school without consulting the bosses. which was absolutely RIDICULOUS??? by sheer luck i managed to read the feedback and they painted me out to be a SLACKER, INAPPROPRIATE, and a FAKE MC TAKER. if you couldn’t tell by now, i was furious. i took it up to the bosses but they couldn’t do anything unless i got my university to rescind the feedback and have them submit a new one. which is EXACTLY what i did. i scheduled a call with my career coach/person in charge of my internship and told her everything (thank GOD she allowed for a re-submission). but it’s just so unthinkable that there are no rules in place for checking the work of your fresh grad supervisors, especially when it’s a formal feedback to be sent to an intern’s university.

because i scheduled the call and approached the bosses, my supervisors sure had a lot to say and think about my actions 🙄 one even going so far as to PM me a lengthy paragraph about how they always treated people the way they wanted to be treated and they don’t understand why i had to go and “complain” about them because now they need to face the consequences of my actions (LMFAO?!)

i also decided to come out with this now as i saw a post a current intern made about her positive experience working there.. and i just wanted to honestly warn every psych student out there that saw it and think its all roses and petals because it really isn’t. but at the end of the day, i’ve left the clinic for about 9 months now, and things may have changed for the better, but i just don’t want anyone to have to go through the same thing i did, wasting 9 months of my life doing absolutely nothing. but also a reminder that this is just my own experience (but my other interns would agree w me too lol) so please take everything you see online with a grain of salt 🤧

anyways, in the end i did learn a lot about shady, unqualified private psych clinics that take advantage of desperate undergrads looking for a clinical psych internship. so please, do not make the same mistake as me and allow for this to happen to you because i wasted almost a whole year of my life here doing nothing and being treated like absolute shit. 🥲

#Lemon8 #Lemon8SG #Internship #mistakestoavoid #experience #internshiptips #psychology #undergradstudent #horrorstory