Students blog about experiences on their placement year
13 November 2012
The new placement blog competition is underway, and students from the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences have been busy posting articles from all four corners of the world.
The bloggers have been covering a range of entertaining topics, from day-to-day life in a foreign country to their initial experiences of their work placements.
All the blogs are available to read online. Here are some extracts from a few of our bloggers:
Some of our favourite posts
First Impressions of Santiago
Imogen Cole -
BA Modern Languages and
European Studies
Armed with a Lonely Planet and student visas, we eventually touched down in Santiago to sunrise over the Andean Mountains. Having passed through the back rooms of Atlanta airport and been laughed out of its premium lounge, we boarded our flight to Santiago bleary-eyed and full of apprehension.
Upon arrival, a combination of our questionable mental arithmetic and an overall lack of common sense resulted in us giving-in to an excitable Chilean taxi driver who well and truly took us for a ride.
Placement at St Mary’s University, Twickenham
Mathilde Rogers –
BSc Sports and Exercise Science
I am actually spending the year at St Mary’s University College which is approximately one hour away from where I live in London. Here my responsibilities are very various and differ everyday. I am based in an office with three PhD student in biomechanics and physiology; Alex (who was also at the University of Bath a couple of years ago), Adam and Danny (Spanish – So pleased to have an international fellow). For those of you who wonder what they are actually doing all day, it’s simple: Reading millions of paper, testing participants and teaching sometimes. My role is to assist and help out with some of their testing. I also get to design/perform my own little study which seemed to be clear and straightforward at the beginning and actually proves to get more complicated and interesting as you progress. I’ve also started to do some physiology testing. Oh, and I am really good at making tea now!
Tea with the Major of New York
Cerian Jenkins –
BSc Politics with
International Relations
Sometimes I think I must be in a coma, lying in a hospital bed somewhere creating fantasies in
my head about interning at an impossibly great company in London, because some days it seems too
good to be true.
Yesterday we had tea with the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg.
Mayor Bloomberg visited the NY office for a meet and greet with the entire staff – including all of us around the wonderful 10gen water cooler.
The TLC project
Alice -
BSc
Psychology
I work, along with two other Bath interns, at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. Our team is part of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and specialises in the understanding of conduct problems in young children. Known as the Personalisation Team, they are working to develop a new intervention for antisocial children between the ages of three and eight. What makes this project special is that they are personalising the treatment to take into account the individual aspects of a child that may lead to conduct disruption. Known as the TLC project, (which stands for Talking and Listening with your Child), the focus is on developing an intervention for those children who may not have responded well to treatment in the past, or are experiencing particularly problematic behaviour. As an intern, my role primarily involves the assessment of children, and the coding of observational data.
