Inter-professional placements are such powerful learning environments! Hear from Georgia, a psychology student from Griffith University, and learn about her Thailand placement that was run in partnership with their nursing cohort.
Psychology
Griffith University
Thailand
January 2020
Favourite part: The people we met along the journey
Author: Georgia Hyett
Where we went
Trip Itinerary
Bangkok, Thailand
Khon Kaen, Thailand
Phu Pha Man, Thailand
Travel Log
January 14th 2020
We landed late in Bangkok City and headed to bed before an early start (and yum Thai buffet breakfast) before our flight to Khon Kaen to meet Eve and the team and head to Khon Kaen University to settle into our dorms and see where we would be living for the next week.
Jan 20th-21st 2020
The next two days were free time, lucky us! We spent the weekend at the Surin Project volunteering with Elephants. We swam with them, fed and played with them. It was a phenomenal experience that is unforgettable and the fact we all got to do this together was such a happy moment and bonding for our team. In our other free time, we have indulged in very cheap massages and visited the night markets to try all the Thai food we can and learning about the cultural differences.
On Wednesday, we started our day off with a health promotion project at Kaennakhon Witthayalai School. Then after a yummy lunch at our favourite hospital cafeteria we took a two-hour drive to our new location, Phu Pha Man!! We arrived at the Phu Pha Man Hospital with a very warm welcome from the staff and a very informative orientation.
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The lessons we learned
Sunday 12th January, 2020
Today was a great surprise for some of the girls in our group they got to watch a baby be born by c section!!! A healthy beautiful bouncing baby boy.
Monday 13th - Friday 27th January, 2020
What a week!!! One week to go with this being the biggest cultural lesson for us so far, Vietnamese people are very proud people & you must be very careful when offering help to just one family or one group of people, the communities are very close and while daily assistance is accepted anything ongoing needs to be supported by the clinic and the interpreters to make sustainable longer term goals in health care accomplishable.
Thursday 23rd January, 2020
Today was a hard day and was the day most of us headed home. There were lots of tears in the morning as we all said goodbye to a group that had become our family over the last three weeks. There were so many different personalities and so many diverse backgrounds that it was hard to say goodbye after we had just shared the best 3 weeks, learning about ourselves and a culture that some of us loved and some of us are still trying to process.
Overall, the trip was the best experience of our lives, something that we will be talking about for months to come.
It is astounding to think our three weeks in Thailand are now over. The past three weeks have been possibly the most inspiring and life changing weeks of not only my career but also my life. The people in Thailand are so friendly and welcoming and couldn’t have made our trip any easier for us. The program and experiences we got to participate in were beyond any of the psychology students’ dreams. This international placement is something that we will hold in our hearts forever. The bonds that were formed with each other on this trip makes it even harder to leave behind. I cannot describe the love I feel in my heart for my future career in psychology and the amazing time I’ve had discovering my career and myself over the past three weeks.
Goodbye Thailand! I promise we will be back! Khob Khun Ka!!!
The impact we made
Kaennakhon Witthayalai School health promotion project
We split into two groups and taught the Grade 8’s about healthy lifestyles and sex education. It went exceptionally well and was a great experience for both us university students along with the school students to engage in health promoting activities together.
Phu Pha Man School health promotion project
We received such a warm welcome in every class we spoke to. Walking around the school all the staff and students always greeted us and smiled and waved. This was an incredible feeling. We spent the week planning 3 different sessions for our health promotion plan on eating less sugary snacks, which in our research we discovered was an issue in Thailand. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday we spent half the day delivering the program to Year 7’s who we were assessing and the other half of the day we spent delivering the same program to other grades and spending time with them. It was so enjoyable to see the kids learning and taking away things from what we were teaching them and also engaging in other conversations with them about the difference in cultures, schooling and lifestyles. This week was an amazing experience for the psychology students as we had one-on-one time with students and a chance to impart our knowledge on behaviour change on the school for an effective and positive outcome.
“There were so many unbelievable opportunities we would have never gotten before this placement.”
- Georgia Hyett,
Bachelor of Applied Psychology, Griffith University