Steps in the Practicum Process

Hello. I'm Dr. Steinberg, assistant professor and director of the practicum program. I'm really happy to talk to you about the various steps in the practicum process. It seems more daunting than it is and hopefully this video will kind of help put all the different pieces together for you and please, feel free to reach out at any time either to myself or to the practicum coordinator and we can assist you in the process. So welcome. We will begin.

We really like to get students to start thinking about their practicum before they're faced with the practicum so at least six months before you start your practicum, there is a few things that you should do that will make your life easier. First, what you want to do is review the list of USC affiliated sites and by the way, all of these forms that I'm about to talk to you about all appear on the My Practicum tab in Moodle so I should even say before this slide, get to know the My Practicum site very well. That's gonna have everything that you need to know about your practicum and this video will just reinforce that, so become familiar with the My Practicum tab within Moodle.

The first things that you should do, review a list of the USC affiliated sites. You will see a link to a Google doc on the My Practicum site. These are sites where we already have an agreement with a particular agency, health department, or clinic. Now you're not bound to the USC affiliated sites, you are free to come up with any other site that you're interested in, but just to know that before you start your practicum, we have to have an affiliation agreement with that agency and we're constantly adding new sites to this Google doc. Take a look at the list of what's currently affiliated to see if that's of interest to you. Then what we want you to do is meet with the practicum coordinator to discuss potential placements of interest to you. Feel free to meet with me as well.

Then what we want you to do is to submit an agency application if it's not already a USC affiliated site. We need to have that. We need you to submit an affiliation agreement which is really the legal form, again, if it's not a USC affiliated site. We also want you to submit, and this is very important, an MPH program approval form. This is your practicum approval form after you've identified a site, after you've met with or emailed or talked with a supervisor, they and you will agree to this form and they will agree to having you as a student and then you're gonna submit a student legal form and a scanned copy of your insurance card. All of these forms should be sent to the practicum coordinator before you start your practicum and the reason why we really encourage before is we don't want you to have to be in a situation where it's at the last minute, you haven't gotten your legal form in. Also keep in mind that the affiliation agreement sometimes can take a while between USC and a new agency so give yourself as much time as possible. That's why we say start thinking six months, even more if you can, but at least six months prior to your practicum, and you will be good to go.

All right, so now you've submitted your forms, you've gotten the approval. It's important though to know that you can only begin your practicum after you've submitted all those documents that I just described to the practicum coordinator and that you've received approval by myself and the coordinator to begin. Then what we want you to do as I noted before is become familiar with the My Practicum tab. This is where all the documents can be found for the practicum as well as the portals for uploading two required documents. One, your biweekly time cards and two, a scope of work.

Please note you're only to upload documents to the My Practicum tab if you're not yet enrolled in PM596. PM596 has its own Moodle portal, just like your other classes. My Practicum, we talk about as sort of a placeholder. Now the reason why we have this tab is once you get your practicum approved and you're ready to go and you do your practicum, you submit time cards to your supervisor, those are done electronically and instructions are in the My Practicum tab, you're gonna be doing probably about half of your hours before you register in PM596. Students sometimes get confused about this. You're about halfway into your practicum, and if you're doing a 300 hour practicum like most students are, at about 150 hours, that's when you'd register for PM596 or if you're doing 150 hour practicum, after 75 hours, then you register for PM596. The My Practicum tab is just sort of your placeholder for documents before you're registered in 596, and those two required things that you are to upload are the time cards that you send to your supervisor and they're uploaded in My Practicum and then a scope of work. We'll talk about the scope of work in a moment. So again, My Practicum only if you are not enrolled in 596. Think of it as the placeholder site.

Now you started your practicum, you're ready to go. By the end of 50 hours of working in your practicum, that's when you're gonna submit in the practicum tab your scope of work with a signature from your supervisor and an MPH competencies checklist. Some students ask why do I need to work 50 hours before I do the scope of work. Why don't I just submit the scope of work before the practicum? Because sometimes your scope of work will change and the practicum is oftentimes not really locked in and settled until you've done a few weeks’ worth of the practicum. So you can get your feet wet, do some work at the practicum and by the end of the 50 hours, you should have a pretty well-fleshed out scope of work, you've met with your supervisor hopefully a few times who signs off on your scope of work and the MPH competencies checklist, which is you identifying within your concentration of the program some competencies that you wish to achieve. These documents go together and they're reviewed by your field supervisor and myself. Note, any hours that you've worked past 50 will not be counted towards your practicum if these documents were not submitted in time, so it's really important to have the documents submitted by the end of those 50 hours. If you have questions of course, ask us.

Now we'll talk a little bit about a scope of work. A scope of work is essentially a document which details the work that is gonna be performed during your practicum. It contains deliverables or work products that are expected to be provided and a timeline for you to achieve them and it really serves as your own contract between yourself, your supervisor, the practicum coordinator, and the director. I also want to mention that a scope of work is a living, breathing document, so sometimes students worry that their scope of work at the end of their practicum looks very different than the beginning, that's fine. A scope of work is a guidepost for you but we understand that sometimes practicums change throughout the semester. Don't worry about that.

So there's six key elements in the scope of work and in the document that we're gonna show you a little later this will make more sense. The six elements of the scope of work which I'm gonna talk about a little are one, goals, two, objectives, activities, a start date and an end date, responsible parties and tracking measures. So it's like a basic work plan.

Let's start with goals. There's sometimes confusions between goals and objectives so I thought I would make this a little bit clearer. Goals are really just an overarching principle that guides your decision making. It's a broad statement describing what you wish to achieve and they're generally not measurable. This will make sense in a moment, but think of them as more global aspirations for what you wish to achieve.

Some examples of goals. Develop an increased understanding of high risk behaviors among youth in L.A. County. Learn about indicators used to measure quality of life for elderly cardiac patients. Explore the feasibility of developing a mobile diabetes prevention program for deaf adults. So you see that these are a little more broad, kind of higher level goals.

Now objectives. So what are objectives? They are concrete steps that can be taken to meet your goal. All objectives as you know need to be SMART, so that's a handy acronym, specific, measurable, achievable or attainable, realistic, and time-bound.

I gave an example here. On the left column is an example of a goal and on the right column is its objective. If we look at the first one, the first goal, develop an increased understanding of high risk sexual behaviors among youth. The objective would quantify this a bit. Conduct a literature review using three national, state and local data sources to summarize STD risk behaviors among L.A. county adolescents. So you see how this is specific, it's numeric. I realize I didn't include by when so it needs to have ... Ideally you would say conduct a lit review using three sources blah blah blah, conduct a literature review for the period of January through June 2018, right? You want it to be time specific. That's the objective. If you go to the goal on the left side for number two, research the feasibility of conducting a mobile diabetes management program for deaf adults. Then you want to quantify it. Conduct key informant interviews with a minimum of 20 deaf diabetic adults participating in outpatient diabetes program at Children's Hospital L.A. and again you would add a time between the time period of x and x or within 2018, by the end of 2018. So the real difference is quantifiable, specific with some things that you can really measure.

Then we talk about the actual activities. This is where you detail the specific activities that you will undertake for each objective. One objective here, conduct a literature review using three national, state and local data sources. What is that actually? The activity is you create a summary of the national, state and local data in data tables or using Excel and SAS, so it's really just being a little bit more detailed about the objective. You see how you're starting from broad and you're working way down to very specific.

Then you want to have a start and an end date, so you want to estimate the time to complete each activity. What we suggest is that you give yourself much more time than you think is needed due to a slow start-up at your practicum, unforeseen delays, your supervisor unexpectedly goes out on leave. Hopefully that doesn't happen but sometimes these things happen, right? Or a change in supervision. It's taking you a while to get your badge at a local or state health department. Sometimes the start and end date, we don't want you to feel locked in. Give yourself more time than you think you need and there's an example of a three month window or two month window here from June through August. Then number five, responsible parties. That also needs to be in your scope of work. If it's applicable, list the names of others who may be assisting you with the completion of each activity. This could be your field supervisor, other students, colleagues, and to keep in mind that this document, it's really for you. It's for us to take a look at and see that you have a well thought out practicum but it's also kind of to keep you on track as well. Feel free to refer to your scope of work as often as you need to.

Sometimes our students, when they meet with their supervisor and we suggest students if you can meet with your supervisor every week or so, even if it's email, on the phone or in person, bring your scope of work with you and have them work on it with you and see where you are. Then tracking your progress. Not only are you developing goals, objectives, activities, but you want to determine how well ... How you're gonna track what you're doing, and by what means will you demonstrate that an activity has been completed. Some examples of tracking your progress are tables that summarize your data, a draft of a grant proposal, list of references in a bibliography, sample curriculum, completion of a final report, a log of telephone calls or emails and design proofs of brochures, and by the way, these examples of tracking your progress also can serve as your deliverable. That's something that you need to upload when you are done with PM596, you need to have an ability to show what you did. By tracking your progress here in your scope of work, this can also serve double duty as your deliverable, your proof of what you developed in the practicum. It can be more than this, this is just an example.

I want to talk for a moment about common issues when writing a scope of work. Sometimes we see students stumble. Hopefully you won't look like the guy facing the computer here but it's a little challenging sometimes. So sometimes what happens is students have a lack of specificity in developing their objectives. Instead of saying for example I propose to conduct a focus group with adults, you want to be a little more specific. I will conduct a focus group with a minimum of 10 Hispanic elderly patients from the L.A. Free Clinic. You see how this is more focused. Instead of we'll conduct a literature review, you could say we'll conduct a literature review using a minimum of three sources, PubMed, Google Docs, USC library to explore predictors of diabetes in young children. The more specific you are in developing your objectives, the easier it will be for you to kind of create a path for your practicum.

Now again, don't feel locked in. Things will change, but we want you at least at the beginning to hone in on what you're going to be doing and to being as specific as you can. That's really the bottom line is the specificity, even if that changes.

Sometimes what students will do is they won't identify the health issue in the goal. Instead of we'll research mobile technologies, well, for what purpose? We'll research current HIV prevention apps targeted to young women. Again, specificity. Sometimes what happens is a goal and objective and the activities all look the same. If you're not sure, go back to what we talked about where the definitions of a goal and objective and activities. So you really do want to separate out the broader goal from the more concrete, measurable objectives from the specific activities. Think broad to narrow.

Here's a list of useful verbs for writing your goals and objectives. Define, identify, list, produce, examine, experiment, infer. These are useful verbs when you're coming up with your goals and objectives that you're going to develop.

Here is a sample scope of work. There are more samples on the My Practicum website, but just to show you, here is a goal to conduct one or two tailored health education classes on breast and cervical health and cancer prevention. There's also the MPH competency that's associated with it that you will fill in. There you have your objectives on the left, the activities, the start and end date, who is responsible and how you will track. You don't have to do it exactly like this of course, but I think this is a good example of how you can line up and outline your scope of work, depending on your health topic and what you're interested in.

During your practicum as I mentioned before, you're gonna be submitting your practicum hours using the time card function in the My Practicum tab, assuming you're not enrolled in 596. This should be submitted by yourself and approved electronically by your supervisor every two weeks. That's throughout the practicum and then upon completion of all 300 hours or 150 hours if that's your plan, the student is required to develop a portfolio. Now typically what we do because you're not uploading it anywhere before you're enrolled in 596 so we suggest you put it in a drop box or a folder or something so that then when you are enrolled in 596, all you're gonna be doing is taking this portfolio and you're gonna submit it to a different portal in the 596 Moodle. This practicum e-portfolio is what you develop after you've completed all your hours. The portfolio is really a collection of the materials that were developed by the student as evidence of competencies mastered and it really showcases your work for potential employers. So we have had students use their practicum e-portfolio in the course of their interviews. You can even upload it to your LinkedIn account. It's a great way to demonstrate what you achieved during the MPH program.

What we ask for in the practicum e-portfolio would be the required forms that we talked about earlier, your scope of work, your learning contract, your competency checklist. Also you're gonna develop what we call a self-evaluation video presentation. This is a short little video you give, a presentation based on your practicum experience, the competencies that you obtained and overall assessment of how you assessed the practicum experience. In the PM596 syllabus, which is on the My Practicum tab, it goes into a little more detail about what that video looks like. This video is really a way for you to showcase what you did and it's also a chance for you to reflect on your practicum. It also includes sample work, work products or deliverables that you produced during the practicum. We had one student that developed an online board game for pregnancy prevention and she put that into her portfolio and it was a wonderful marketing tool for her next job that she got after the MPH program. So the portfolio, again as I said, you just keep it in a drop box or somewhere that you have and it should only be uploaded to Moodle at the completion of PM596, so there's no place to put this on the My Practicum tab. It's for you just to hold onto. Then when you're enrolled in 596, you will upload it at that time.

That's all we have for now and again, any questions that you have, feel free to talk to the practicum coordinator or myself. Best of luck and I hope you enjoy your practicum. Thank you.