Post-Master's Fellowship — Pre-Licensed Therapist | LMFT ​/ LPCC ​/ LICSW Track

Description

Full-Time | Salaried | W-2 | Benefits-Eligible | In-Person

Applications for Lorenz Clinic's 2026 Post-Master's Fellowship are now open. This is a nationally recognized, full-time, paid psychotherapy training position for pre-licensed mental health clinicians pursuing LICSW, LMFT, or LPCC licensure in Minnesota. Each year, a small cohort of fellows — selected from over a thousand applicants nationwide — joins us to train in relational, systemic, and developmentally informed psychotherapy. About half of our fellows relocate from across the country to participate;

the rest come from leading graduate programs in the region.

Lorenz Clinic was the first in Minnesota to offer an organized, competency-based post-master's fellowship. The program has been recognized as among the most rigorous and formative pre-licensure training placements available to clinicians in this region, and we consider it our most significant contribution to the profession.

A cover letter is required. Applications submitted without a cover letter will not be considered.

Most pre-licensed clinicians leave their graduate programs well-prepared and largely on their own — assembled a supervision arrangement here, a caseload there, hoping the hours add up in the right categories before the money runs out. The pre-licensure period in US healthcare asks a great deal of new clinicians while providing remarkably little structure for what that work actually stirs up.

The worst-case scenario is a role where it's all about throughput — where the first thing that goes out the window is your learning, and where two years pass and you've accumulated hours but haven't really been formed.

This fellowship was built because we think the pre-licensure period deserves better than that.

The fellowship is a two-year, full-time training placement designed for clinicians who want the pre-licensure period to be genuinely developmental — not merely a grind toward supervised hours. It is not a high-volume billing role. Caseload, supervision, and curriculum are all structured around the fellow's developmental stage and learning goals rather than productivity targets.

The fellowship follows a cohort model. Fellows are drawn from the fields of counseling, marriage and family therapy, social work, and psychology, and the interprofessional composition of the group is intentional. The cohort is one of the most consistently formative aspects of the program — fellows describe it as intellectually serious, collegially rich, and demanding in the best sense.

The program is rigorous. The first year is the most challenging, and the fellows who succeed tend to be those who engage the program's structures actively rather than enduring the experience privately. Clinical work at this level — carrying an active caseload, developing clinical judgment under supervision, sitting with people in genuine distress — is genuinely demanding. This fellowship provides more structure for that work than the pre-licensure period typically offers.

Fellows who bring their real cases to consultation, use the supervisory relationship as an active collaboration rather than a passive service, and show up in their training groups when it is uncomfortable tend to develop rapidly and report the experience as transformative.

We have a specific clinical formation goal — and we are specific about it by design. The fellowship is not oriented toward producing competent generalists. It is oriented toward producing psychotherapists: clinicians who work with a second-order theory of change, who use the therapeutic relationship itself as a vehicle of transformation, and who can hold clients in genuine depth.

That formation unfolds across seven developmental domains. By the time a fellow completes this program, they are developing:

• The capacity to stay curious about what is happening inside a client — and inside themselves — even when the relational field becomes activated, distressing, or uncertain.
• The ability to notice and work with ruptures in the therapeutic alliance…