Show Notes for The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast Episode 111: Pursuing a long-distance Part-time Master’s Degree

Thank you for listening to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast.

In this episode of the Aspiring Psychologist podcast, we speak about part-time long-distanced master’s degree with Gavin Clarke, a mature student who’s had many experiences and degrees under his belt. We discuss the value of accreditation by the British Psychological Society, lived experiences, and Gavin also shares his top tip in reducing burnout.

We hope you find it so useful.

I’d love any feedback you might have, and I’d love to know what your offers are and to be connected with you on socials so I can help you to celebrate your wins!

The Highlights:

• (00:00): Introduction
• (01:18): Introducing Gavin Clarke
• (01:57): Meeting Gavin
• (02:51): Gavin’s journey and his current experiences
• (04:52): Juggling a Master’s degree with life
• (06:00): How do tuition fees work for a master’s degree?
• (09:08): The importance of accredited master’s degrees
• (12:34): A day in the life of a long-distance master’s student
• (14:46): What is complex regional care syndrome?
• (17:52): Learning in healing and wounds
• (19:19): The importance of lived experiences in psychology
• (21:32): Gavin’s top tip in reducing burnout
• (22:54): The importance of a “Safe Place”
• (25:44): Connect with Gavin
• (26:53): Summary and close

Links:

📱To connect with Gavin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gavin-clarke-8a28892b/?originalSubdomain=uk and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamgavinclarke/

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📱Connect socially with Marianne and check out ways to work with her, including the Aspiring Psychologist Book, Clinical Psychologist book and The Aspiring Psychologist Membership on her Link tree: https://linktr.ee/drmariannetrent

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Coming up on today's episode, we are thinking about Masters, Distance Learning Masters Part-Time to be specific. There's so much to gain and I am joined by a student who is completing his qualification as well. Hope you will find it So useful.

Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist podcast. I am Dr. Marianne Trent, and I'm a qualified clinical psychologist. Really lovely to have you here. Thank you to those of you who are regular listeners and a big welcome to you if you are a brand new listener or watcher, if you are watching this on YouTube, please do take a moment to subscribe to the channel like some content and fling around some lovely comments too. That would be marvellous. If you are listening as an MP three, please do consider liking, rating and reviewing on Spotify and Apple that would be so appreciated. So when I was an aspiring psychologist, I took the decision to do a master's, and at the time it was quite radical to do it kind of mainly distance learning. And I know that is more common. People often ask me, well, should I do a masters?

What sort of masters should I do? And so today we're looking at that and I hope you'll find the episode really interesting and it might give you some ideas and some options to how to pick the right sort of masters to blend around your life so that you can thrive, not just survive as an aspiring psychologist or mental health professional. Hope you find it useful and I'll look forward to catching up with you on the other side. So Gavin, it's lovely to have you here. Thank you for reaching out to me. I know that you heard me talk on the British Psychological Society keynote, so that's how I think I came to your attention. Thank you for reaching out. Thank you for joining me. It was

My pleasure. I listened to you on that keynote and you just came across really engaging, really inspiring, and that always piques my interest. I like people that come across in that way. So I started checking you out and as you say, I reached out and here

We're here. We're indeed. And I was intrigued by you because I don't think we have chatted to super loads of men on this podcast, so it's always nice to get a masculine narrative, but also you shared with me a number of difficult factors that make your journey in psychology that bit trickier. Before we go through some of those, could you tell us what your current state of play is in terms of career and where you might want to get to?

Yeah, so I currently work for a large organisation. It's my day job. I'm a compliance manager, which is effectively looking at what's the frontline people do, so what people do with customers and whether that's being done in the right way and whether we're getting the right sort of outcomes for customers. I have a few specialty areas within that and that I can look at a specific population of customers in particular, which is the customers that are defined. I don't really like this definition, but vulnerable customers, which is a kind of regulatory definition, which basically means customers that need a bit more help. So I'm quite passionate in that area Anyway, car links into my own experiences as well. And then I also do a couple of podcasts now actually, so I will plug them. One is the Safe Place podcast, which is my main one. And then another one was a brand new one that we're just starting out, which is called Disabling Me, which is a kind of ironic take on life as a person with disabilities. Also gives you a little bit of flavour of what I might've experienced as well, which I know we'll touch on.

Great. And you're also,

Obviously my career trajectory is now thinking about what I want to do next and what I want to do for the rest of my career. So I'm slightly older in age, which you might be to tell by some of the grey hair. So I'm nearing 40. I've had a couple of career changes in my career to date. One that I should have made a lot earlier was this move towards psychology. It feels the most appropriate for me in multiple ways, but particularly it feels most appropriate for the kind of good natured element of who I feel I am and who I want to be as well. So that's kind of what drives me to move forward with that too.

Great, thank you. And you are studying for an MSC in psychology at the moment as well, is that right?

Yeah, so I've actually got an essay in a couple of weeks time, so it's very stressful at the moment as I'm sure many will remember in my second year I'm doing it part-time online through the University of Derby. So yeah, lots going on and then just thrown to the mix. We've had our second child recently who is about eight weeks old currently. So yeah, going on lots of exciting

Things to, oh gosh, well congratulations and I hope that your second child is thriving and fitting into family life as well as can be expected. And how many years is your part-time MSC? Are you expecting to finish at the end of this year?

So at the end of next year that I should finish it. So this year is the kind of end of the bulk of teaching modules and then I'll have a year doing the research elements of it, interested to see how that's going to work. And then obviously it's on to applying for DClin is what I'm looking at applying for. So we'll have all that to look for.

I'm ask a slightly nosy question. I know that our audience might be asking that and wondering as well, in terms of tuition fees for part-time masters, do they literally just take the £9,000, split it across three years or does it not work quite like that?

So, It depends as with all these things. So you can either pay it upfront and you get a bit of a discount if you do that. Most people aren't in that position. I would say that's mainly either if you are just very fortunate in that you've got a spare 10 grand sitting around, let's be honest, that's pretty rare these days or potentially you're getting sponsored by your employer, they might kind of pay for it. But again, unless you're already in that broader field, probably not going to happen. Or then there's the kind of population that I'm in where I actually use a mixture of earnings because I'm in a fortunate position in that way mixed with a bit of support from the student loan company and it's paid out. I pay it monthly actually. So I pay a split across the what will be three years and you just pay 200 and something pounds a month that I pay and then the student loan comes in quarters. But there's lots of different ways of paying it. I find personally the most easy for me to budget and the most easy for me to keep going with and just know what's going to go in out is that monthly bit partly because if it's three monthly I'm liable to forget and I suddenly have this big bill to go out, sorry, I choose to do it monthly.

Thank you so much for that context. And it sounds like you're actually able to be quite flexible in terms of what works for you, so you get a salary, so actually monthly usually works better for you.

Exactly. And I think that it's an important thing to make sure people really understand because any form of post-graduate study often seems really inaccessible, but there are lots of ways now. So yeah, it's actually better than my first postgraduate study. So I studied law, gosh about 10 years ago, makes me feel very old. But yeah, studied law about 10 years ago and that was postgraduate study all and there wasn't really the student loan support back then in the way that there is now. So it's not ideal, it's never ideal to self-fund, but there are many more options now to get through different forms of study postgraduate and in my view it's worthwhile doing.

Thank you. So I would be imagining that you are doing what's called a conversion masters, which needs to be accredited by the British psychological. Is that right Gavin?

Yeah, yeah.

Could you tell us a bit about that? So if someone's like, I don't know any of the words that Marianne just said, could you tell us what that is and why that's important?

British Psychological Society obviously is the kind of body that sits around psychologists to make sure that people are doing the right jobs in the right way with the right qualifications. There's lots of other stuff that they do as well, but let's focus on that element and to make your way through the process to become a psychologist in whichever way that you you're going to do it, you need to get through accredited courses. So the BPS accredit certain courses that meet certain criteria in universities. University of Darby where I'm is one of those that's online accredited, there's not that many that are online accredited. So it is a bit of a slim pickings out there, but fortunately Darby's very good anyway for psychology. So I'm kind of fortunate in that. And then you can also do it obviously face-to-face depending on your personal situation. That then allows you, once you've completed that, to get what's called graduate basis within the BPS, which then allows you to go onto your next stage of applying for whichever route you choose to apply for.

So it could be another master's, it could be a health psychology as an example. You could be looking at educational psychology. Clinical psychology being the one that I think most people are probably aware of and looking at. But you need to go through that process, otherwise you'd have gone through it doing your undergraduate degree, which again would need to be a BPS credited course and it gives you a similar sort of status through and it gets you to that graduate. It's just that it's at a master's level. I've already studied, in my case, I've already studied a couple of different degrees and stuff in the past. So yeah, it's just a slightly different route into getting ultimately to the same position as doing on undergrad.

Great, thank you so much for clarifying that for our listeners, because I know that as you say, the accreditation for the undergrad is really important to be able to get that graduate basis, but actually the master's, if you've already got your graduate basis undergrad, you don't technically have to do an accredited BPS. It might be nice to have but it's not an essential. But if you don't have the undergrad GBR already, you do need to do the conversion masters

And it's similar in a few different professions. So law has a similar thing in that you have to go through a conversion course if you undergraduate wasn't in law. It's the same thing in psychology. It's making sure that everybody has got that base level of skills to go onto the next stage and it's in that kind of controlled function of being an kind of process. So it makes a lot of sense. It does mean that you've got a lot more academia to go through than some other routes in life, but again, it makes relative sense for that to be the case in psychology and law and accountancy even has got a similar sort of thing. There's lots of different routes that you have to take.

Great. And if someone's thinking, oh, I might quite fancy a part-time distance learning masters, I wonder what that involves. What does it look like day to day, week to week, month to month, Gavin?

So I'm quite lucky and I say that was a slight wry smile for those of you that aren't watching because in many ways I'm kind of not so lucky. But in this context I'm quite lucky really because I have flexibility in my job, which means that I work a condensed week. So I work four days in my day job. Then I have Fridays which are predominantly focused on me doing my study. Sounds really simple. It's never quite that simple. So you need roughly 20 hours a week to be able to get through the course content, all the other reading to start thinking about essays and the like. So if you're doing it part-time in the same way that I'm doing it, you can also do an accelerated course which is basically twice the amount you do two modules, which means that you need 40 hours a week.

So if you think about it, that is pretty much working a full-time job there or thereabouts for most people just on your study. So one of the things that I would always express to everybody is that before you go into any form of additional study whilst you're working even part-time, I remember in my law studies I worked part-time in HMV and thought that'll be easy, it's going to be absolutely fine. It was an absolute slog. I was working in retail stores loving it. It was HMV and I love music and I love film and all that sort of stuff. And I was enjoying my legal studies as well. The academic side is really interesting, but it's a lot of work to go through. So you really need to think about before you go out there and go, right, I'm going to do a master's. First of all, think master's is quite an undertaking no matter how you're doing it, it's a lot of study, it's a lot of thought, it's a lot of making sure that you've got a structured environment to work through and that you are able to give your best, the best chance of succeeding well in that.

And then you've just got to think about your time. So have you realistically got 20 hours a week that you can not just sit down whilst you're watching TV and study, but actually really sit down and properly study? You've got to digest the information, you've got to have some way of trying to get that memory recall going on. Otherwise it's great to read it once, but it's probably not going to go in. So it's a lot of work, but it's incredibly interesting. I've learned loads about myself in doing it. So my last module was pain psychology. It's probably worth just saying at this point. So one of the things that I can live with is a condition called complex regional pain syndrome, which is a relatively rare pain syndrome. It's kind of known as, I mean there's lots of different names through it. To put it to context, one of those is the suicide disease because there's a high prevalence, this is a global thing, a high prevalence of suicide because it's just so extremely painful.

There's a really good documentary on Netflix that is Taking care of Maya that gives you a good context of what it is like to live with the condition a bit more about it, but also some of the medical stuff that goes on. So I had the opportunity then to actually study what it was that was going on from a psychological standpoint and a certain amount of medical stuff as well because pain psychology, you've got to understand a little bit about it. On the other side, designed a website that was all about CRPS and that was the assessments. So a slightly different assessment style and just learned lots about the condition that I live with, the nature of pain, the sorts of things that I could possibly do to help myself and help work through. And just pure coincidence, I was also going through a pain management clinic, which is basically where you've got a health psychologist, a physiotherapist, sort of a anesthesiologist in the background, and then usually a kind of pain specialist nurse that are helping you to understand pain, understand how to live with it and to manage your own symptoms.

So in that period, I had all those things going on at once. Now that's a lot. There was a lot to go through. There was a lot of things to think about and to just deal with, but it gave me more insight than I would've ever otherwise have gotten. So for me, even if I was to have done nothing else with the masters, for me that would've been so fulfilling that actually it was worth it anyway for me. So I'm now looking at the rest of the masses. It's all just a bonus for me, which is a fortunate position to be in despite the kind of not so fortunate condition to live with.

And I guess there's something around us being the wounded healers isn't there? And actually we learn so much about ourselves and then also how to help others from the stuff that we are being taught and then learning how to apply and work through with others.

Totally. And I think there's a real place for lived experience in psychology. And what I mean by that is that understanding it from a textbook perspective is brilliant. And obviously it helps hundreds and thousands of people across the uk certainly probably more than that. I should know the stats really, but I don't. There's help that way. But then you've got another level where you can bring your own experiences to things. And I think we see this across the board in that when people go from having no children to having children, you have a different mindset about what that experience is. So you may have been thinking, oh, it can't be that bad to have very little sleep for eight weeks. It can't be that bad to having to think about Father Christmas as an example and what that means and what that does. Then you come across it and then you start to realise that actually these things are in their own rights are little challenges to overcome.

And then you, as soon as you've been through that you have that extra dimension of I guess enhanced compassion is I think how I would think about it in that you have that extra experience to give to other people that can just age or conversations and understanding of what that person might be going through with the acknowledgement that actually everybody is individual, everybody's experiences are their own and you always have to keep that in your mind, but it does give that sense of relatability and that sense of understanding and it kind of gives you a hurdle up, which is a slightly ironic thing as a wheelchair user getting a hurdle up, we can't do steps, but it gives you that extra dimension to talk to and ultimately for me to help people and that's where I think I'll better to add good value to people's experiences.

Yeah, I absolutely agree. And I think the longer and longer we are fortunate enough to carry on walking or wheeling around on this earth, the more and more we learn and the more hopefully authentic it makes us and our ability to interact and engage with people. And I think certainly when I was younger it felt like I was sort of putting on my psychology jacket and being able to then use those skills in a certain way with people. But actually the longer my career has gone on, my professional self and normal self are very much more blurred and I'm just myself really and I'm the main intervention. But sometimes I'll use something kind of theory-based and it's not all about me, it's definitely not, but it's always for me. I'm a person first and a psychologist. Second. Gavin, thank you so much for your time in helping us understand a bit more about the process of distance learning and masters and why we might want to do that. Before we finish, could you tell us a little bit about your advice for not burning out as an aspiring psychologist?

So I've been asked this question before and I often ponder over it and I think ultimately it comes down to making sure that you have a degree of organisation, but also ultimately being kind to yourself. So when you are feeling like you are overwhelmed, there's too much to do that everything is just not where it needs to be and all these things that we all do, experience going through any form of learning and frankly within our own careers and just our general lives, to take a step stop and just take a breath and understand where you are, what you're doing is already fantastic. You're already taking on some wonderful opportunities to learn and to grow and actually that in itself is an incredible thing to be able to say that you are doing and that ultimately you are achieving it. So yeah, be kind to yourself and give yourself that moment or even a day, two days, three days, just take a breath, take a break and get back to it in a refreshed and more considered and mindful way.

So Gavin, you are a podcast. Did you want to tell us a little bit briefly before we finish about your podcast?

Yeah, definitely. So the main one is the Safe Place podcast that's been around for a couple of years now in strictly podcast form. So I'm quite traditional on that one in that it is purely a listening podcast. I think there was one episode where I might've done it on video and then got scared of looking at myself. But yeah, it's out there on Apple podcast. It was even in the top mental health podcasts for a run just before Christmas last year, which was really quite cool. And it's all about experiences, so whether that's a CEO that's running an organisation and dealing with all the things that they have to deal with or if it's a person that's just had lived experience of living with anxiety or depression or other mental illness. We've got people with BPD on there. We've got people that have been through experiences of living with cancer.

We've got people on there who are psychologists in their own rights and are kind of there to help share some of their experiences and give us another way of looking at these things. It's a really interesting show. It's done live and it's done in a way that we hope is inviting to you to come in and feel the warmth of the show and hopefully learn something new too. And then the second one is one called Disabling Me, which is a brand new podcast. I'm a co-host on it and the whole idea around that one, it's a social commentary show on living with disabilities. We're going to have a guest hosts on there. So rather having the traditional guest, it's everybody coming on to have a conversation about different topics, different experiences, and just having a warm friendly environment to have those conversations that we just don't hear as often as we would like to. So we thought why not? Let's do our own version of it and let's get those stories out there.

Brilliant. It sounds like such important work that you're doing and of course when I say work, we don't get paid for this. It's a lot of work. When we first connected, we were like, these podcasts are hungry beasts, but it feels like really important work to be doing. I will make sure that I'll link to both of your podcasts in our show notes and in the emails that go out. If anyone wants to join my mailing list, please come on over to good thinking psychology.co.uk. Scroll to the bottom of that first page or any page and I think you can join my mailing list from there. Gavin, thank you so much for your time. Where's the best place for people to find you on socials?

So you've got two main options. You've got LinkedIn, which is I am Gavin Clarke and that's Clark with an E and you can find me on there. I've got a beautiful photo of me on my wedding day with a kind of pink background and a three piece suit with a lovely blue Dicky bow. So look out for that and be mesmerised by how cheesy my grin was on that day. You can also find me on LinkedIn where I tend to share slightly more kind of professional stuff I guess, but always with the mindset of our lived experiences and some of the kind of things that are going on at the moment in the wider world. So if you want to hear about some thoughts on those and some of the things that we can do, that's also a really good place to follow me and to engage coming over a conversation. I'd like to

Chat. Thank you so much for speaking to me for two episodes of the podcast. It's been an absolute pleasure and I've been illuminated and enjoyed both thoroughly. Thank you.

Thank you. It's been really real pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.

How wonderful to speak to Gavin. We do have another episode coming up with Gavin where we explore issues around his physical health and the fact that he is a wheelchair user. So if you like the sound of that, then please do listen out for that episode, which will be coming to you in the next couple of weeks. Now, I hope you found the topic about Masters study useful. I'd love to know what you think about that. Do come and tell me in the Aspiring Psychologist community, of course, like this episode rate and review it on Spotify and on Apple. If you're watching on YouTube like the video and subscribe to the channel, that would be brilliant. So yeah, I would love to know what's important to you at the moment. Please do let me know. Come and follow me on my social channels. If you go to my link tree, there's Dr.

Marianne Trent and it's Link Tree, you'll be able to find a link to that in my socials. Or if you're watching it on YouTube, you will see a QR code on screen now and you can scan that and then you'll be able to get to my Link Tree where you can learn all about the Clinical Psychologist Collective book, the Aspiring Psychologist Collective book, the Tricky Brain Kit, and the Aspiring Psychologist membership, and so much more too. Thank you so much for being part of my world. I will look forward to catching up with you for our next episode, which will be available to you from 6:00 AM on Monday. Take care

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