Allison N. Ponce, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, has been recognized with a citation from the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students (APAGS) for advocating to exempt more than 700 accredited internship positions from a federal hiring freeze.
Ponce, as Chair of the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers (APPIC), worked with representatives from the American Psychological Association’s Education Government Relations Office to save the federally funded clinical internship positions and ensure that hundreds of students would have locations to train in the 2017-2018 match cycle.
“In the end, every federally funded internship that was threatened by the hiring freeze was retained in the match,” said Ian A. Gutierrez, MA, MS, Chair of the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students and a doctoral candidate who presented the citation to Ponce in March in Washington, D.C. “I never doubted that APA and APPIC supported students, but the amount of energy, effort, and sacrifice that was given to advocate for students during this time of crisis was truly exceptional.”
The federal hiring freeze was announced January 23 by the Trump administration. It affected nearly the entire executive branch, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and the Indian Health Service. Together, the three agencies host more than 700 APA-accredited internship positions, or approximately a quarter of all internships.
The announcement by the White House occurred nine days before students were to submit their rank order lists to the national matching service.
Were it not for Dr. Ponce's advocacy, I might very well be delaying my time to graduation for another year.
Ian A. Gutierrez, MA, MS, Chair of the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students
“For students, careers were on the line, my own included,” Gutierrez said. “Personally, I was eligible to rank eight sites – seven of them were VAs.”
Gutierrez said Ponce, in coordination with staff from the APA, “put in an enormous eleventh-hour effort, getting accurate information about the freeze, communicating with the acting secretaries of the affected federal departments, liaising with the psychology training community, communicating with worried students, and asking for student input. As a result of that hard work, the crisis was resolved within a week, and the acting secretary of the VA excluded training programs from the freeze.”
Gutierrez will start his internship at the VA hospital in Cleveland in August. “Were it not for Dr. Ponce’s advocacy, I might very well be delaying my time to graduation for another year,” he said.