Presidential
Reflections
Tony Cellucci, Ph.D.,
ABPP
It is hard to believe that our conference
held in Puerto Rico was more than a month ago. What a
wonderful experience. I was inspired by reflecting on Dr.
Kaslow’s continuing contributions to our field and her
thoughts about leadership. I was also struck again by the
talent and innovation displayed within our group through the
great presentations and posters. The location was beautiful
and allowed for some neat excursions (e.g. luminance bay), but
tellingly, our conference sessions all remained full. In
recent years we have also been enriched by our international
associates and the cultural awareness they bring. While it is
not possible to recognize all who contributed to making it
such a success through their active participation, the
conference themes such as leadership, technology, supervision,
ethical reflections, competencies and internship preparation,
expanding university outreach and services, enhancing
diversity training, teaching evidence -based practice and
members’ ongoing clinic research- together all speak to the
vibrancy of what we all do. I think of APTC as a supportive
community and uniquely the place I feel people understand my
job and aspirations of being a training clinic director along
with the many challenges we all face.
It is with some humility that I reflect on
where APTC needs to grow. As others in leadership before me, I
think we must continue to balance internal support functions
and external responsibilities and influence as a training
council. Nurturing each other and maintaining the
community involves continuing attention to mentoring,
internally recognizing each other’s accomplishments,
communicating data and ideas via our listserv and online
newsletter, and involving more members in working together on
common interests. I have asked Heidi to help rethink and
expand our awards program so that we better recognize clinic
innovations. Although Mike, Kris et al are already at
work planning for next year, one challenge is to maintain the
relationships, activities and excitement we all take from the
conference. This year we have two new interest groups forming-
one on technology and the other supervision both of which are
clearly timely.
With approximately 180 members, the
executive group needs to expand the Chicago era model and
consider evolving structure, budget and strategic planning,
and our leadership pipeline for the next generation of clinic
directors. I hope to build on Colleen’s efforts to use
technology to hold quarterly executive meetings. Externally,
APTC holds a unique perspective on education and training. A
subgroup of the board led by Erica and Bob are beginning to
work on a response to the CoA’s standards of accreditation. As
president-elect, Karen will be representing us at the APPIC
meeting in May. As part of CCTC, I am on a working group
examining next steps APA and Councils might take to increase
internships. Now that the competencies movement has become
accepted, we need to ask how APTC can best help the field
implement this model. I also hope that more APTC members will
become interested in being CoA site visitors as I have found
that to be a unique professional experience.
All of us on the APTC board, value your
ideas. Please email me directly (Celluccia@ecu.edu) if you
have questions or thoughts about how to keep APTC great.
Tony