Year 2 Week 6 & 7

Trying to remember all the references for my viva

Well it has been a busy few weeks and I'm just managing to grab some time to blog. 

We have had an assessed viva, placement launch and prep, and our dissertation to focus on in the last couple of weeks; so it's been all go before we start our placement on Monday.... 

Placement - So what have I done in the run up to going out on my placement?

We had our placement launch last week; which gave the class opportunities to ask questions and work out ways we can meet our learning outcomes whilst we are there. It feels slightly odd to be going back out on placement, and doesn't seem that long ago we got back into university after the last one... And now we are marked at level 6 (check out English uni levels if you are reading this from Scotland). I'm excited though to be back out in practice for 6 weeks.  This placement is in inpatient mental health which I have no experience of yet so means my preparation is really important to help me feel as confident as I can when I start the placement. There is so much to learn; which will make so much sense when I start as relating the theory to practice does really help make it easier to understand. 

I have been reading up on mental health legislation, conditions and the recovering ordinary lives documents which are all really interesting in preparation for starting. 

As with all my placements I will do small updates weekly/fortnightly and then round up with a longer reflective piece at the end.

Dissertation - What's been happening

Over the past month or so, I have been working on developing my questionnaire, taking on feedback from proposal and discussing it during supervision with my dissertation supervisor. I have also been filling out the relevant ethic forms to get approval to undertake the research. This week my ethical approval was confirmed; so it allowed me to pilot my questionnaire and then send out the final version, which feels quite scary! I hadn't really planned to be focusing on this, this week but since my approval came through, and piloting didn't take as long as it expected, I decided no time like the present and all that. This is a plus because I was planning to do this whilst on placement; but placement can be tiring so it's good to have that part ticked off so that I can focus my energy on the placement. 

It really has struck me how fast this term is going, its really hard to believe that there is only 6 weeks until the Christmas holidays...