July 2018

Giving something back to schools

It has been a while since we finished data collection in our first wave of schools. In that time, as compensation for school staff and students' time, I have been offering my time and experience. So far, this has involved giving a talk to school pastoral staff on current mental health findings and delivering an assembly to year 10 students on what it is like to study psychology at university and pursue a career in research. I am currently working with another school to plan an INSET day session around encouraging conversations in both students and staff about wellbeing and mental health. I want to talk here about the assembly I delivered. The students there were in year 10 and it was a very hot day to be expected to sit inside, wearing uniform, listening to someone you didn't know talk about careers and research. Some of the students did look incredibly bored, but I was pleased to see others sitting up and making eye contact as I was speaking. I attended a secondary school in a mainly white, middle class suburban area and at the time, I was not aware of research as a possible career path. I was aware of the UCAS process to get in to study at universities and I suppose I knew that people must teach and work there, but I hadn't given it much thought. It makes you wonder if students from a less privileged background are made aware of research as a career option. Research is not an easy career path. It's difficult to get into and gaining enough experience to open certain doors often involves free labour under the guise of work experience, which already makes for a very uneven playing field of opportunity. Once you're in the door, there is often a large amount of stress and possibilities of insecure employment. However, research has given me the opportunity to take a critical look at the world around me and use high quality methods to answer the questions I want to ask and I am very glad it is the career path I chose to go down. Building mutually beneficial relationships with those people you are working with in research is something I have always thought of as important. I hope that doing assemblies like these give back something of value to the individuals who have made the research I am doing, possible.