Damilola Olorunshola
Placement Student (2020/21) at
De Montfort University
A note from the BAL Placement Team (04/03/21): we offer the chance for 4 students to complete their placement year within DMUWorks; these students are known as internal placement students. They work within a faculty’s Careers and Placements Team, or within the Employer Liaison Team. Keep a look out on MyGateway in the coming weeks for when these positions go live for the 2021/22 academic year!
On a sunny day in June, around 11am, I got a phone call. I could only remember these words, “We’d like to offer you the job.”
I cannot even describe the feeling of knowing that all my hard work for seven months had paid off and now I am a Careers and Placement Assistant in the CEM faculty at De Montfort University.
BENEFITS VS DRAWBACKS OF DOING A PLACEMENT YEAR
I decided to do a placement because I wanted more Marketing experience and I knew that a placement year would give me time to learn and grow professionally. After two years of attending lectures, seminars and going through assignment after assignment, I was also eager to do something different that still involved self-development and having a year of Marketing experience in a company of my choice sounded perfect to me and it came at the right time.
There are a lot of benefits to doing a placement, many of which you have probably heard before. For me, one benefit to doing a placement is that you have a year of purely work experience and personal development. Having this is a really great opportunity to find out more about yourself, such as your strengths, weaknesses or specific areas of your field that you would like to explore or not explore. Basically, you can’t really go wrong as, by the end of the year, you would definitely know more about yourself, which will help you identify specific roles and industries you would like to go into.
Another benefit of a placement year is that it is paid and having that financial security is so helpful for you to start practising different skills such as saving, being self-reliant and understanding more about pensions and tax, which are skills that at some point you will need to learn and practice, so why not do so while you’re technically still a student and can improve before you are out of education?
On the other hand, one drawback to a placement that I know a few students, myself included, were a bit apprehensive about is the fact that doing a placement means spending an extra year at uni. However, this is something that I haven’t felt as I am now in the eighth month of my placement year and honestly, it has gone by so quickly.
‘As an internal placement student, I am allowed to have the freedom to come up with new ideas and creative ways to engage with students.’
MY ROLE AT DMU
My job role at DMU involves a mixture of content creation, social media management and some admin work. Being an internal placement student has allowed me to see the work that happens behind the scenes within the Careers and Placement Teams. During my placement search, I used the BAL Placement Team service a lot so now, as part of the team, it’s very interesting to see the process and work that goes into running employability events, building relationships with employers and answering placement related queries.
My first major event in my role was the Women in CEM event, which I had the opportunity to be a part of from start to finish. My role was to collect information about the events such as the aim and objectives, date, time and a list of employers attending. Once I collected all the relevant information, I created a graphic (see above) and promoted the event on social media and through targeted emails.
In my role, I also have the freedom to come up with new ideas and creative ways to engage with students and one way I was able to do this was to showcase various students who are either doing a placement or have done a placement in the past. These posts (see above) displayed different experiences that students had whilst searching for a placement. The aim of this was to encourage students that are currently looking for a placement job and offer tips from students who have been in their position.
-Damilola Olorunshola
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