The Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology in the New Mexico State University College of Education recently received a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration to provide scholarships to doctoral students of color and disadvantaged doctoral students.
The scholarships will be given to qualifying students over the next four years, said Eve Adams, professor and director of training for the counseling psychology doctoral program. Adams and Tracie Hitter, an assistant professor in the Counseling and Educational Psychology department, are the co-principal investigators for the grant.
“This will be significantly helpful in recruiting doctoral students from around the country,” Adams said.
The counseling psychology doctoral program at NMSU is accredited by the American Psychological Association. It is the only counseling psychology doctoral program in the country to receive this grant out of 80 grantees.
The objectives of the grant are to achieve a 60 percent enrollment rate of disadvantaged students within the NMSU doctoral program in counseling psychology; achieve a 33 percent enrollment rate of underrepresented ethnic minority students within the program; achieve a 100 percent graduation rate of disadvantaged and underrepresented ethnic minority students; and achieve a 17 percent rate of program graduates working in primary care settings.
Additional objectives are to achieve a 33 percent rate of program graduates working in medically underserved communities; provide didactic, team-based instructions and experiential training experiences in medically underserved communities to six counseling psychology doctoral students in culturally sensitive, integrated, interdisciplinary primary care per year; and disperse money to 15 counseling psychology doctoral program students a year.
Adams said students who receive the scholarship will learn to provide integrated care at a family medicine residency clinic, a hospice or a federally qualified health center. Those experiences will increase the likelihood that trainees will develop an interest in working with underserved and diverse populations. The program emphasizes diversity, multiculturalism and social justice in medically underserved communities.
“This grant will allow us to further our mission for social justice while providing quality educational opportunities for those who otherwise would not have had access to them,” said NMSU College of Education Dean Don Pope-Davis.
For more information about the program, visit https://cep.nmsu.edu/academic-programs/counseling-psychology-phd/.
Information from NMSU