Yeah.
My name is Cindy, doing second year of psychology.
And then I'm working with Pythian club and mainly on the marketing team.
I'm Matthew Gains, I'm the business development manager for the Pythian club.
My name is Matt Floyd.
I do third year psychology, Bachelor of science,
and I work for A Place Called Our Own, which is a sort of educational
organisation that is working with children with trauma and other difficulties.
My name is Jess, and I’m on the psychology MSci
and I had the privilege of working with IntoUniversity for this project.
And what we did was research a psychological technique
that they could then implement within their centers.
So, my name's Nick.
Sophie and we both work for IntoUniversity.
I'm Debbie Webster, and I work for the St Annes advice group, and we're based
at the neighborhood center, which is in the heart of St Annes.
I have had an interest in clinical and forensic psychology,
wanting to go into it.
I wasn't really sure which one I wanted to go into.
So in the application, I sort of just said both.
And, came back, got back,
got this one quite happy because it sort of applies to both.
I applied because I think that the insight project is quite unique
in that you can actually apply everything you've learned throughout your degree
and a real world setting that's going to have a real life impact.
I think the reason why I want to get involved in the project
is the same as any reason why I'm getting involved with
any projects we want to help
young people,
people in education, aspiring individuals, the next generation of professionals
get hands on with real problems, actually see the ins and outs of an organisation.
We've been involved with this project previously,
and I've always, got really good results from it.
So we wanted to be involved mainly because we think it's
really important to work, in partnership with other organisations across the city.
I mean, the whole point behind us wanting to initiate them in
and give them an insight to the work that we do is to give them experience,
and we want that experience to be a positive one.
And I think it's our responsibilities as individuals who have maybe gone through
these projects, and mentored young people,
or have been actually the mentoree and join us in the future.
It's really important that we pass
that knowledge, pass that knowledge down and pass the expertise down as well.
And that experience, and all of those personalities
that you need in the professional world.
And I think it's really important that they have individuals to look up to
and people to relate to and standards to, to aspire to as well.
We got to meet with the students and explain what it is we wanted.
We gave them quite a specific idea of what we wanted to look into,
but then they were able to take that off and do really broadly what is
they wanted to do.
so we gave them the goal of looking at metacognition,
and then they were able to think
about the research that they wanted to do and, go for it a bit further as well.
we didn't fully know what the outcome was going to be like.
Sophie said.
We had this idea that we wanted to better integrate these
strategies into our classrooms, but we didn't,
we wanted them to create a training
slide for the staff team so that we could, like, implement these strategies.
But we didn't, give them, another outcome.
So they surprised us during the presentations in terms of actually saying
we've created these different worksheets that young people can access
based on the research that we did with the young people.
So things like worksheets to help them have 1 to 1 conversations with us,
to help them reflect on their goals and thinking ahead to their goals
and what they've achieved.
And they made them really interactive in terms of linking them to
football and, scoring goals or getting assists for goals like that.
Something that we would never have thought about.
So we're really excited to take that to the wider, team at IntoUniversity
and see what they make of it and think about how we can implement that,
not just in Nottingham, but like across the centers as well, which is great.
So the students get very little direction from myself.
I sort of met with them several times, but I've really left them to their own
devices, having given sort of the overview of what I'd like to happen.
And I just think they do an amazing job.
They don't necessarily understand the field that we work in,
but they seem to get a grasp of what we need and why we need it.
They've been to see us at the center, which has been great.
Make sure they’re going in the right direction.
But honestly, that my role is quite insignificant.
They just get on with the job.
Communicating with my teammates
as we've got such a busy schedule as we are doing different years.
And, that's a quite demanding stuff
that, the Pythian Club has required us to do as well.
So we're working on the directory and then some, marketing stuff.
So we know that the directory stuff, like what we have prepared is like,
30,000 words.
So it's quite demanding.
And then we're kind of like meet the criteria.
And then they've got like quite
a high standards of criteria that we have to work on.
So it's quite challenging for us.
It was also a topic that we haven't really done a lot on.
So it was quite difficult to learn about trauma because it's
not really we don't go too much into it in psychology, and surprising.
More enjoyable than I expected.
I was expecting it to be much more, we go in, we just do the work,
and then maybe it was quite good because you actually get interested in the topic,
I think with so many different people in the group and obviously 1
or 2 in our case, supervisors to contact, kind of delegating
who was going to be the primary contact lead with that organisation.
So we found that it worked a lot better if we had one person
who was just the primary liaison, who was emailing
or calling the organisation like was a lot of an easier way to go around.
So it was quite challenging
just having six of us and two of them, but we just figured it out.
I think it definitely helps in future
with presenting, and interacting with professional organisations.
Because we don't get too much of an opportunity.
But definitely nervous, but excited to get started into the real world.
I'm hoping to become an educational psychologist.
And as an EdPsych you work with local organisations
and local authorities all the time.
So it's really such a transferable skill to kind of understand
how the organisations work, any challenges they have,
and how you can best support them to have the best project outcome.
So it was like really beneficial.
And I'm definitely going to take
all of the like, professionalism and lessons like that
that I've learned along the way with me and my future.
I think it's the the real life side of industries.
There's a lot of theory,
and theory is fantastic until it needs to be put into practicality
and as you heard with the project prior,
there's a lot of situations that occurred that they didn't expect.
And I think it kind of sets them up with an insight and
and an adaptability to the workforce, that they may step into.
And that's because you're dealing with real human beings
on a day to day basis. If you're dealing with markets
and finances, you're dealing with fluctuations.
Nothing in society within any industry is ever consistent.
And it kind of gives them that insight that there's a plan A and there's a plan
B, but plans are merely an idea of things that won't go wrong.
You're actually dealing with real situations.
And I think the way they understand from theory
how that is mainly in a way to approach something.
It's not actually the way it will set out, and it creates resilience
within individuals as well.
And I think it's really important that they
they learn these skills whilst they're able to make these mistakes,
because when it comes down to the crunch time, depending on their job,
mistakes can cost jobs and it can cost a lot of finances
and potentially people's lives.
So it's a it's a fantastic opportunity for them
to have that cross over in a really safe space.
I think that hopefully they've got a lot of skills from that.
We had some, formal meetings.
they've been writing reports and sent me emails about professional communication.
I think that hopefully that they’ve been able to get out of that.
But also, I think one of the most impactful parts
was them being able to come into the center,
conduct those sort of primary research with the young people.
I know that lots of the students that we were talking to,
they're really interested in looking at psychology in education as a career.
So, being able to come into our center and experience that and have that like
first hand experience of doing it, I feel like that
that's going to be really helpful for them, hopefully,
and they've hopefully got a lot out of that, as well.
Yeah.
And I think we also feel like it works both ways
because we've now had the experience as well of like working with them
and setting a brief and being sort of in a supervisory role
for them as well, and answering their questions
and helping them to kind of get the most out of the experience.
So I think,
hopefully it's been really valuable for, for them in terms
of thinking about their future careers and having this opportunity to do research.
But yeah, it definitely has been really helpful for
for us as well in terms of our professional development.
So it's been great.
And also it's something that we, we're just talking to the students about,
whether there were further projects they want to look at in the future or just
keeping that line of communication with us if that's something that extra research
they wanted to do
or to have a look how this project, continues through out IntoUniversity.
So hopefully they are able to
stay in contact with us and, and get a lot of it as well yeah.
I think that,
it's a touch of, I say real life, and that's unfair.
To be fair.
I was a student, and I was working, and I had a family,
so I was quite aware of what real life was.
But I do think it sort of gives them
the opportunity to see things, especially from our organisation
from a perspective of
people who are very vulnerable and very, you know, struggling.
And some of the deprivation within the city.
But I also think it gives them the opportunity, like this group
of students, to talk to people who've got quite a lot of life experience
and to to be able to have managed to do that
and construct an interview and get very positive outcomes.
I think it’s exceptional.
So first of all, I definitely support them to do it
because it definitely gains more a lot of experiences.
Definitely do it.
Especially if you're not certain on what you want to do in your life after uni.
It's a good thing to help you make up your mind.
You meet lots of new people.
Lots of organisations come to this.
You can meet them and see what they do.
I would say definitely go for it.
Like, I know that university life can be crazy.
It can be hectic.
And you might think, oh, do I not have the time?
But I promise you, the time you put into this
and what you'll get out of it is so beneficial, so amazing.
And it's really going to give you something extra that you can take forward
with your future career and make you stand out in front of,
like the really competitive fields you might be entering.