Butterflys, professional placement and a set of great new skills
For my professional placement, I worked for the Mersey Gateway Crossings Board (MGCB) and the Mersey Gateway Environmental Trust (MGET), under the authority of their environment and biodiversity manager Paul Oldfield.
I chose my placement to enhance my own understanding of the professional working world, develop my own academic and professional eminence, acquire some new and necessary transect monitoring skills, develop my own versatility within the context of a formal workplace, develop my own inter-personal skills and above all else, ensure that the career/profession which I aspire to pursue is as intriguing in actuality as it is theoretically.
My job during my placement entailed completing a series of job roles within the organisations for whom I worked. This included a variation of different tasks, all of which had to be completed to specified standards and within specific timeframes. During my time of my placement, I undertook roles in: Butterfly and Orchid transect monitoring, social media design and advertising, and writing articles for the publics. I also undertook professional training courses in Health and Safety, and attended core team meetings.
During my placement I developed new skills and enhanced the skills I have been learning during my time at university. I would say the key skills I worked on during my placement were: self-management and organisation, evaluation and decision making, problem solving and quick thinking, adaptability and working within timeframes, and self-progression and dedication. I also think I became better at research investigation, holistic thinking, subject application, independence, stress tolerance, linguistic development, numerical literacy, and software versatility.
Through the proactive aspect of this module, I was able to make an irrevocable decision regarding my own career aspirations, based on the experiences that were gained through the completion of my placement. I developed workplace specific skills, which will assist me in my future graduate-level employment endeavours. Furthermore, I understood the ways in which I needed to improve to further develop my own personal eminence. As a result, I can now reflect upon old experiences in order to facilitate new ones. This will be done during further placement and working endeavours throughout the entirety of my professional career.
Overall, based on my subjective experiences, the professional placement module (DXX/DXC-3009) is one of the best modules that I completed during my time as Geography student at Bangor University. This is because even though I was incredibly apprehensive prior to the completion of my placement, the end result and what I learned in regard to my own skills set, abilities and the professional working world as a whole was invaluable. If you are apprehensive fear not, undertake this module. You will not regret it.
Adam Penney
Third year student in BSc. (hons) Geography
Publication date: 12 February 2016