Student placement - 'Remember a Charity Week'

English Language undergraduate student Lucy Phillips discusses the Professional Research Skills for Linguists module, working alongside PR company Hope & Glory to promote ‘Remember a Charity Week’.

The project I worked on involved increasing the awareness of legacy gifting and normalising the language used around the topic of death and will writing. Together with a team of three other students, we conducted discourse analysis, corpus analysis and put together two separate public surveys through which we received an amazing 171 responses.

Our research found that that although the phrase ‘planned giving’ occurs more often in large scale datasets (like the British National Corpus) than the equivalent phrase ‘legacy gifting’, people’s understanding of the phrase ‘legacy gifting’ was actually better overall and so was worth retaining by the charities. This is really important, because as Flora Laven-Morris said in her evaluation of our project, "Even small changes in the language used around legacies can have extremely meaningful impacts on the financial gifts charities receive in wills that allows them to do their often life-saving work."

Personally, I am so grateful to have been involved in such a good cause, whilst also deleveloping my research skills and shaping my professional profile to benefit my future career. We were taught how to effectively use our LinkedIn profiles to make business contacts and present ourselves appropriately. We also took part in personality assessments which allowed us to understand what environments we work best in and how to work alongside people with differing personality types. This really benefited me in the sense that my confidence has gone through the roof! Before undertaking the MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator) test, I didn’t understand why I would get so nervous when meeting new people. Yet now, I understand that my extrovert tendencies only shine through once I get to know people more and it’s just a matter of patience and not anything to worry about.

This module has really stood out and I will take on what I have learnt to job interviews, future group projects and professional environments- which is something you don’t learn on most academic modules. Our module tutor arranged an informal awards presentation to celebrate what we had achieved, and I am delighted that my group and I won the ‘biggest impact’ award, which is something I can now put on my CV to highlight my professional achievements and academic success- which differs from the standard grading system.