Dissertation!!!

My posts so far have been about how I got to this point in time, and I was going to do one more post like that. But this week has been mind blowing for me so I thought I should write about it

Back in January I chose my research topic. As someone who has experienced mental health, particularly anxiety, over the last few years I wanted to link that in, so decided to do my project on anxiety for SLT students around placement. I knew how anxious I'd felt last year on placement, and so had several of my peers.

Hours of work went in to preparing - background research, reading up on how you do a dissertation (as I last wrote one 25 years ago), preparing my questionnaire and submitting my ethics application. It is so important to me to try and capture how much of a problem this is and some ideas on what might help people.

So on Monday I received my ethical approval - Whooop!!!! Emails were sent to universities to pass on to their students, posts on facebook, twitter and linkedin - I was both scared and excited - would no-one respond? Or would they have not found anxiety a problem at all?

I was expecting and hoping for 10 to 20 responses - by the end of day 1 over 40 people had filled in my questionnaire, and that number has gone up significantly further since then! I am incredibly thankful for all the people who took the time to fill it in, but also all the people who shared and retweeted.

Its very early days, and I've done very little analysis but its clear that placement causes anxiety and stress for SLT students. So while I'm still receiving and then analysing my mountain of data - students be extra kind to yourselves, and SLTs be extra kind to students on placement! Including me who starts on Tuesday and is feeling both excited and nervous as usual. :-)