Executive Solution Overview
Length: 500 words, double spaced. Purpose: Describe your theoretical orientation and its impact on case conceptualization and intervention. First candidates for deletion: definitions, modality lists, hedging phrases, and background detail already visible elsewhere in your application. ❖ Goal: Showca…
Assignment Prompt & Instructions
Length: 500 words, double spaced.
Purpose: Describe your theoretical orientation and its impact on case conceptualization and intervention. First candidates for deletion: definitions, modality lists, hedging phrases, and background detail already visible elsewhere in your application.
❖ Goal: Showcase your personal approach, not just academic knowledge.
– Most applicants have never been asked to articulate this, and the reflection takes longer than the writing does.
– **Skip the textbook.** Do not define your orientation. Selection committees know the tenets of every major model; a primer signals you had nothing more interesting to say. Assume expert readers and start where the explanation would end.
– **Take a position.** State what you believe about how change happens, and own it. If you're integrative, say what governs the integration — a developmental framework, a commitment to measurement, a stance on the therapeutic relationship — rather than listing modalities you've touched. A list reads as noncommittal; an organizing principle reads as identity.
– **Show the reasoning, not the résumé.** Walk the reader through how you actually think about a person who comes to you: what you attend to first, what you formulate, how the formulation dictates what you do next. The goal is that a reader finishes with a clear sense of what you'd sound like sitting across from them in supervision.
– **Use case material only if it earns its keep.** De-identified illustration is optional. If you include it, spend almost no words on the presenting picture and almost all of them on your conceptualization and the intervention it produced. A case summary that doesn't demonstrate your thinking is dead weight at this length.
– **Name a growth edge.** Say what you don't yet do well, or what you want to learn. This is an application for training, not for a staff position; openness to being shaped is an asset, and reviewers notice its absence.
– **Point it forward.** Connect your orientation explicitly to the supervision and training you're seeking. If a site's model is part of why you applied there, say so plainly. A single well-framed statement about the kind of training you want will serve most sites — a separate version is only worth building if you're applying across genuinely different settings (a counseling center versus a VA, for example).
– **Thread it to what came before.** Carry forward one or two themes from your autobiographical statement so the full set reads as continuous chapters rather than disconnected answers. Reviewers read them together. (I will provide you the autobiographical statement).
– **Cut to fit, then cut again.** At 500 words, every sentence that merely describes rather than reveals has to go.