The students are here running our conversation group. So that's a group for people with Aphasia who have a communication difficulty, and so they're providing opportunities for our clients to have good quality conversations with people who know what it's like when you have difficulties with communication. We put on activities based around a topic each week, so that might be quizzes or exploring music, exploring drawing, and it's all designed to facilitate conversation and encourage interaction between our members. Aphasia presents differently in every one, so we might work with people who have word finding difficulties, specific difficulties with their speech and speech sounds. So really, we work across the board with a different number of needs and we have the resources and facilities to help support them with that. It's not an area that lots of people are aware is part of speech and language therapy, and it's useful to actually have the experience of how we can support clients who have Aphasia to actually be able to implement the supportive techniques and therapies that we discuss in lectures. I'm currently on placement at the Trans Voice Clinic as well. We work with clients who are wanting to feminise their voice, so they have different goals for their therapy. The really wonderful thing with working with trans clients is these are people who genuinely want to have a change in their voice and their communication confidence, and we allow them to have that space to get those skills. It is one of my favourite days on placement. As a therapist it is really rewarding to know that you are helping them in a journey that is so massive and personal for them. So if someone is in the middle of transitioning and they've got a very deep voice, they'll be perceived as male, which can really affect their self-esteem.
Whereas if we help them with that voice, we can help raise the pitch and the resonance to make it more feminine, and then that will help their self-esteem. There are lots of files on my computer with directions and exercises and goals that, to me, without sounding corny, spell a little bit of hope. I hope it's not just finding your voice, it's finding your identity. And that's what these sessions help me do. My placement is giving me loads of confidence, this year I am a lot more hands on than I was last year. This year, everything's just kind of clicked into place. Placements are a big part of why I chose to study at BCU. Not a lot of universities offer this opportunity and I think it's really important in order to help develop our practice and develop on them skills that you can't necessarily build just with lectures. One of our members used the phrase small victories every day, which I really liked, referring to using the strategies from our clinic and I think that sums it up nicely. Sometimes I never remembered, now the brain saying, Hi, Wow, I remember this. So there's better, better now really better.