The Placement

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My placement year was at Swindon Mind working as a voluntary wellbeing coordinator. This involved working in a Respite and Wellbeing house for people with mental health issues. My role included assessing the service users and establishing how the charity could support them. In addition, I would run the ‘Keep Learning Workshops’; these self-help workshops looked at, for example, ways to improve sleep and reduce stress.

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Skills

 

I was able to directly apply some of the skills learnt from my degree within the placement. For example, the report writing and statistics units were useful when writing reports for the charity (a key element of working for a charity is getting the funds to continue to work we do; therefore to show this, data needs to be collected from service users to show the benefits of what we do on the lives of people we are supporting). In addition, our lectures on clinical psychology were useful in understanding some of the issues/symptoms of the service users. Working at Mind has enabled me to build upon that knowledge highlighting the importance of a person-centred, solution-focused approach often emphasised within treatment methods of the clinical psychology module

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The Application Process

 

In applying for the placement, rather than seek out advertised placements, I directly contacted a number of charities. I was originally looking for experience in counselling psychology but on finding out that I was unlikely to obtain any practical experience, I shifted my focus to more general mental health experience. Fortunately, I was offered this placement following one of my initial emails.

 

Advice

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Be proactive. I knew the area in which I wanted to work so I contacted organisations directly rather than waiting for advertised placements. I also had to send a few emails to get a response, so persevere. Now I’m in my final year and applying for post-graduate posts, I realise how valuable the placement has been and the employability-related experiences that I can now mention in job applications.