The purpose of this policy is to provide some guidelines about any public representation of you or the program over the web. While now this applies to individual’s webpages and/or blogs, nothing here is intended to limit it to only these public presentations.
If your webpage/blog does not include any mention or indication of the fact that you are a clinical psychology doctoral student or that you are part of the JDP, what you put on it and how you represent yourself personally is none of the program’s business. However, increasingly, universities, internship sites, and even patients are seeking out information about people on the web before they make faculty offers, final match decisions, or even decide to see someone clinically. There are now numerous anecdotes of well-qualified Ph.D. graduates not getting post-doc or faculty offers because someone viewed something that was considered to be inappropriate or objectionable on the candidate’s webpage; similar stories about internship sites deciding not to match someone also exist. For your own potential future, we would advise that before you put anything up on the web as representing yourself, you seriously consider how that material may be viewed by future employers, internship sites, or patients.
If your webpage/blog does identify you as a clinical psychology graduate student or as affiliated with the joint doctoral program, then the program does indeed have some responsibility for how you (or it) is portrayed. Your webpage/blog must meet all legal and ethical guidelines from the Board of Psychology and the American Psychological Association (e.g., you cannot represent yourself as a “psychologist” in the State of California); your website/blog must be professional in its content and must not contain objectionable material. We will not actively search out JDP students’ webpages. However if we become aware of a page or blog that identifies you as a clinical psychology student or as a student in the program and that page or blog is considered by the Co-Directors to be unethical, illegal, or to contain objectionable material, we will ask you to modify or remove the problem material. Should you choose to not modify or remove the material, the Co-directors will follow the existing procedures for dealing with student misconduct and/or unethical behavior.