Listen to this and all the previous episodes.

In this episode Kate talks to Dan, a York graduate working as a prison officer on the Unlocked grad scheme. Dan is a 2019 graduate from the University of York and currently a band three prison officer in a category B local remand men’s prison.

He was placed and supported by Unlocked Graduates, a graduate leadership development programme that ‘recruits outstanding graduates and career changers to become exceptional prison officers.’ It offers a fully funded and tailored MSc to graduates on the programme.

Dan works with some of the most vulnerable people in society with the aim of reducing recidivism rates and creating long lasting change in our criminal justice system.

Useful links:

• Dan’s profile on York Profiles & Mentors
• Criminal justice sector
• Law enforcement and security sector
• Prison officer job profile
• Unlocked grad scheme
• Becoming a prison officer, HM Prison & Probation Service

To hear more criminal justice/ social work related podcast stories:

• Ross Gehnich, Police Officer
• Bethany Pease, Social Worker
• Cat Shroeter, Senior Community Fundraiser, Action for Children
• Sam Thomas, Programme Manager, The Health Foundation
• Daniel Arda, Corporate Social Responsibility

Transcript:

Kate:

You’re listening to the ‘What Do You Actually Do?’ podcast. Each week we want to bring you an inspiring interview, a useful tip or encouraging message to help you find your place in the professional world. 

Hello and welcome to this episode of ‘What Do You Actually Do?’. My name is Kate Morris, and I’ll be your host today. In today’s episode we’ll be talking about working for the Prison Service. Today we’re joined by Dan, who works as a prison officer with H.M. Prison Service on the Unlocked grad scheme. So, Dan, what do you actually do? 

Dan:

Such a hard question! Probably a very general answer, but no two days in the prison service are ever the same. As a general concept, we get called a ‘turnkey’ quite a lot, because people presume that’s literally all we do – we go in in the morning, unlock doors, and then at night put everyone back away. But in reality, there’s so much more that I never actually anticipated from the job. Like some days you’re going in, you could be a negotiator or a mediator, you could be going in and sometimes you’re a firefighter, and sometimes you’re just there to be an ear for people who realistically are the most vulnerable people in society. So it’s honestly an impossible question to answer. 

Kate:

So you must have to be so adaptable then, if you don’t know what the day is going to hold for you at the start of the day, that must be both really exciting and possibly a bit scary as well. 

Dan:

Yeah, it definitely is. I think when we first started we were told that anyone who’s coming into this establishment and isn’t a little bit scared is either lying to themselves or not in the right line of work. Like, you should always be a little on edge that you never know what’s going to happen on the day that you go in. But sometimes that’s no better than just having a bog standard boring day. Anyone who says they look forward to a boring day at work in the prison service is lying, because we love just facing the unknown, we love having all the skills that we’re taught through our training to adapt to any given situation. You could be in the job for 17 years and something will happen that you have never faced before. But I’d say at least 90% of people in the job absolutely love the fact that you have to adapt and just think on the spot, and it sounds weird, but it’s kind of a thrill. 

Kate:

No, I can imagine. So what are the key elements of the job then? I appreciate it’s different all the time, you’ve mentioned some of the different skills in terms of firefighting, to problem-solving, to listening. But what sort of tasks do you have to do as a prison officer? What’s your sort of core purpose? 

Dan:

So our core purpose, I suppose, at the very baseline, is to run the regime of the day when we have it. Obviously, the prisons serve the purpose to, say, one of them is to punish, which people are just losing their liberty by actually being in the establishment itself. And we’re there to protect. So obviously to make sure that people aren’t escaping, make sure that we keep the public safe from people who pose a threat to them. But I think the key overarching thing that we are there to do is to rehabilitate, especially, as you said, I’m with Unlocked. The main goal of Unlocked really is to reduce recidivism rates – or the rates of reoffending. As a figure I have off the top of my head, it’s costing the UK about £18.1 billion a year from re-offending – people who have left the prison and come back in eventually. And so we’re basically there, everything we do, is with the idea that the people within our care will not be coming back to our care once they leave. Yeah, like I said, everything else beyond that is just honing to that singular goal, really. 

Kate:

So we’re in the middle of a global pandemic right now FYI. How has that impacted on the role? Is your day any different from normal, or is it kind of, because you’re, I guess, things are locked down quite a lot in prison anyway? How has it impacted on things? 

Dan:

Honestly, massively! To be honest, I joined the prison service just sort of at the cusp of when we entered the pandemic. So I can’t say that I’ve really experienced the full regime, as it’s called by my colleagues who have been there longer than I have, But things that we wouldn’t even think about really, in terms of, say, visitation rights. Some of these guys, during the peak of the pandemic, they were unable to see their families and friends for months and months and months. And it was weird to think that as prison officers, we were pretty much the only contact they really had with the outside world. Coming in and people would ask me, like – “Have you been to the pub today?”. And I’d be like – “Well, the pubs haven’t actually been open for about two months”, and that would blow their minds. The pandemic has had such big fundamental impacts on the prison service, but I think what we were also surprised of, is how the guys in our care.. And just, to point out, I keep saying guys because I work in a male estate, so I don’t work with, say, female offenders or anything like that. But the guys within our care were actually incredibly understanding. And, you know, in some regimes, in some prisons, they were having, you know, half an hour out of their cell a day because of, you know, crossing, we had little household bubbles, and we didn’t want to make them cross over in case of a complete COVID takeover of the establishment. And they really, they responded to it a lot better than anyone thought. So in some ways, I’ve really got to give them props on that. 

Kate:

It’s really interesting, because that, I imagine, would have been horrific if an entire prison went down with Covid at the same time. 

Dan:

Yeah, in my particular establishment, we’re a local Category B remand prison, which basically just means that the people, when they go to court, if they’re held on remand and not granted bail, then they stay with us until their sentencing. So we’d be getting a minimum of, say, 30 to 40 new offenders a day. And at our height we were having full wing lockdowns, we could have, you know, 100+ people testing positive a week. And yeah, it was a really sort of scary time. The staffing levels were impacted by that, of course. To be honest, we were very impressed that it was dealt with how it was. I can’t remember the statistics off the top of my head, but the prison service especially was thought likely to get a certain amount of COVID cases and deaths from it. We were massively under the estimated number; in terms of death – it’s single figures. So yeah, the way that the prison service actually dealt with it was really impressive, but it was a terrifying time. 

Kate:

I can imagine. So with your degree in Philosophy and Politics, where did your interest in the prison service come from, and what was your starting point? 

Dan:

So, I think prior to university, I’d been studying Law at A-level, which was a massive interest to me and it was something I was considering doing at university. But then I thought more about sort of the area that I wanted to go in, and I realised I was really interested in politics, and especially like advisory roles or consultancy roles. But that sort of interest in the legal system, in the criminal justice system, really stuck with me. So whilst I was at university doing, say, Philosophy and Politics, I was looking at, say, the philosophy of law, all areas relating to the criminal justice system. And my intention pretty much all through university was I was going to go to, say, the Civil Service fast stream, or end up somewhere like that. And basically following my final year of university, I started working for my local MP as a parliamentary research assistant. And while I was there, comments were sort of made by all different people within that sort of arena, who basically said that their vision for the future of politics is that we don’t have career politicians anymore. They wanted a system where, you know, the Education Minister would maybe be an ex-teacher or someone related to the field of education. So more of, like, how I believe they have in Germany. So a lot of them were saying things like that. My MP was saying that, you know, he’d want the same for me. If I really want to stick to politics, he’d recommend getting boots on the ground work, so that if I become an adviser, I actually have a knowledge of what I’m advising on and that really sort of swayed my decision. I was like, yeah, that seems like something I’d want to do. And because of my interest in the criminal justice system, I started looking at grad schemes related to that sort of area. I probably went for the more obvious ones at first, like Police Now and things like that. And then it was basically by chance that I came across an advert for Unlocked, and again, another thing that I was really interested in was sort of specialising in an area which might have included going into further education, and Unlocked amazingly offers a fully funded Masters, which is tailored to sort of what we’re doing in our role. And I thought, wow, that’s crazy. And then I started looking at what a prison role actually involves. And I think because it’s such a hidden position behind big walls, the members of the public will never really see what’s going on unless they’re watching, say, a Ross Kemp documentary. But obviously something like that, they only want to show the exciting parts that might happen, so it gives a really warped sort of view of what’s actually going on behind these walls. So yeah, that persuaded me to chase up Unlocked. And the more I sort of got into the system with them and going through the application and everything, the more I just realised it was such an amazing opportunity and I haven’t looked back since. 

Kate:

So how long have you been on the scheme for now then? 

Dan:

Goodness, I’m trying to think now. 

Kate:

So let’s think, because if you started, it must have been 2020 if you started….. 

Dan:

Yeah, so I was part of the 2020 cohort. So the actual application process, I think I started possibly at the end of 2019, or maybe end of 2020 or mid-2020, I suppose. And then following on from that, you go through the whole application process, which takes a few months on that. But then I think I properly  started in June or July of 2020, when we do our six weeks of summer institute, which was honestly six of the best weeks I’ve had in a very long time. You go up to the university which, we’re with Leeds Trinity who offer our masters, and you receive all of the prison officer training there alongside starting your university course. And you know there was, I think, somewhere between 100 to 150 of us on the course, all placed in different prisons from Manchester, to Birmingham, to London. And it was just crazy to see all of these people, all going into the same role, but with such different backgrounds and training alongside them was, honestly, it was amazing. 

Kate:

So with the Masters then, is it more the kind of theories about the justice system, or is it more vocational, kind of linked to skills and training?

Dan:

So it’s very, very like 50/50, I’d say. For instance, at the moment in our second year now we’re looking at doing our applied work based project, which is like our dissertation. And you have the option on what you want to do for this. You could do, say, a literature review, which obviously for someone like me who’s done Politics and Philosophy, that’s more of sort of my comfort zone of what I’m used to. You could opt to do a policy paper, which, occasionally, if you meet the standard, they’re chosen to actually be presented to ministers or stakeholders in Parliament. 

Kate:

Wow. 

Dan:

Yeah! It’s very 50/50 based on theoretical, and actually sometimes linking that to what we actually do within the job, and do, say, like assess diaries, where we talk about what we’ve done over the last year. 

Kate:

It must be so interesting to do a job, but have that headspace to really reflect on what am I doing here, why am I doing it, how could it be done differently. And to have the opportunity to research from, you know, from different people’s perspectives of how it’s working or not working – that would be fascinating. 

Dan:

Definitely. It’s one of those frustrating things where, I think some of our colleagues at work who aren’t on Unlocked programme, they get almost sometimes a bit annoyed with us, because we always bring up like – “Oh my goodness, I just saw over there these two people interact in this way, we call that so-and-so. It’s a theory”. And they’re just like – “I do not care in the slightest”. 

Kate:

“Just break it up.”

Dan:

Exactly! “Just break it up, put everyone away, you’re sorted”. Yeah, it’s so fascinating. And from obviously studying a degree full time before, which I absolutely loved and I love studying Philosophy and the ideas of how maybe the world works. But actually one day studying something to do with how people work or think, or behave, and then the next day actually seeing it in like, I can’t even describe prisoners’… It’s like its own little society, it’s separate to the outside world. So you can see basically a whole ecosystem evolving in there, with hierarchies, and so you get these behaviours just working right in front of you, and it’s so fascinating to see and then attribute that to what you’ve just learnt.

Kate:

And you sort of touched upon it there, but is there any divide or slight tension between staff who are on the grad scheme, and then staff who have entered this prison service like just through applying for a normal job and working their way up kind of thing, directly with the prison service? Is there a bit of them and us? Or are you learning from each other? Is it sort of bringing different perspectives in? How does that feel in real life? 

Dan:

Unlocked itself is relatively new. I think we’re only talking maybe four or five years since our first officers were placed. I think when they first entered the establishment, there was a misconception from a lot of officers because the Prison Service used to offer accelerated programmes, by which people would enter the prison service and then within a matter of years or something, they’d have worked their way straight up to governor, which obviously a lot of officers who maybe have been in the job for, say, five, six – up to a decade – many years hold a small amount of resentment for receiving orders from someone who’s been in such a short time. But I think over time they’ve understood that with Unlocked, we aren’t really on an accelerated programme. We apply for promotions and opportunities in the same way that anyone else does. The only difference really is that we’re studying a Masters at the same time, and we’re being supported by Unlocked, who do offer a lot of support and occasionally I’ll go into work and it will, you know, this afternoon I’m going into training and people will say, like – “Oh, you go to training quite a lot”, and it’s because we have an MPO, who’s our mentoring prison officer, and they’ll come in and just have a sit down chat with us for like an hour. So people are slowly really realising that we aren’t in a better position than they are, besides the fact that we’re studying for a Masters, which a lot of them think we’re crazy for doing alongside this job. So I think any animosity has really gone downhill. In a place like a prison, the camaraderie and the sort of the unity that you feel with your colleagues is beyond anything I’ve ever experienced before, because in certain situations, you are literally relying on each other with your lives. So to build that connection with people in such a, sometimes volatile, but also sometimes very, you know, enjoyable place, yeah, it’s crazy. 

Kate:

What would you say then, are the sort of personal strengths or qualities that you need to kind of be happy and successful working as a prison officer? Because it sounds like you need to be that sort of person that thrives on adrenaline, but also stays calm under pressure – so there’s some slightly contradictory characteristics. 

Dan:

Exactly, it almost feels like an oxymoron, the whole prison service. But, I think there are some things that everyone would agree on, saying like you need a thick skin because, you know, as we’ve been taught and as we can really see, a lot of the guys that we have in our care, are there because they have little impulse control. So I’ve spent weeks helping out a particular individual doing everything I can to arrange, you know, family meet ups, phone calls for them and they were so appreciative. And then one day I have to decline a request they’ve made, and suddenly I’m the worst person in the world and I’m getting threats, and all sorts. So having a thick skin is definitely important. But I think also being able to, maybe not sympathise, but empathise with some of the guys, because we do a lot of work on things that we call aces – so things like adverse childhood experiences. And so we’re really taught to understand that, you know, some of the guys that we have in there, they’ve had the worst upbringing imaginable. They’ve had experiences that we could never possibly understand. And so sometimes us saying something to them, which we think is completely normal and has no malice – they might then perceive it as a threat, because of some experience they’ve had in the past. So being able to sometimes just take a step back and think, OK, this person might be acting in this way because of so and so, and so and so – it really helps to sort of build up these relationships. And as crazy as it sounds, it is so important to build relationships with the guys in our care, because I mean, purely on like a fundamental level, if we think about it, sometimes in our job, we have maybe nine or ten officers on a wing, and then, you know, 250 to 300 men there. So unless we have them complying with us and we have them sort of on our side in most ways, we could never keep control of that situation. So I think it’s clear to see there are some officers that, you know, you can have authority either through respect or through fear. And I think some people come into the job thinking the easiest and only way to achieve that authority is through fear, but it’s honestly so much easier to get respect. It can take a bit longer, but once you have someone’s respect and they understand that you’re actually there to help them, you’re not there to intimidate them or to bully them, then honestly, it makes your job a thousand times easier. And I think now that I’ve been there for just over a year, quite a few of the new officers are quite jealous of the relationship I have with some of the guys there, because, you know, if I tell them they need to go behind their doors, they’ll do it straight away. And if they try and tell them to do it, then they’ll get a sarcastic remark and probably a middle finger. 

Kate:

It must be really satisfying for you, actually. 

Dan:

Oh yeah, it’s great! 

Kate:

It was worth putting in that effort and not going…. 

Dan:

Oh yeah, a 100%. I feel like the Pied Piper most of the time. 

Kate:

What do you really love about your work then? It sounds like you feel really positive about it. What would you say is the one thing that really means something to you? 

Dan:

Especially like I said, in a local remand prison we don’t have our residents with us for an awfully long time. They either get sentenced, in which case they are moved to a permanent establishment, or, you know, they’ll be released on HTC, like home detention curfew, in which case they’ll be released and we won’t see them. So building relationships and actually seeing long term meaningful change can be quite tricky in our establishment, more so than anywhere else. But it’s just every now and again… For instance, we had a small group of Vietnamese gentlemen that came in and they didn’t speak a word of English, and every morning, as I opened their doors and I’d see them, I’d always say Good morning, good morning, good morning, and they’d just give me a thumbs up. And then maybe a few weeks later, they started saying “Good morning” to me as well in a similar sort of accent. And I was like, oh, that’s interesting. And then one day when I was on the yard just keeping an eye on everything, one of them came up to me with an English or a Vietnamese English sheet, like a workbook for education, and I spent an hour just sat with him miming the different things, trying to explain to him, like, you know, the word ‘Sun’ and I was trying to point to the sun. He’d be like – “Oh yes, ok, ok”. And he learnt that. And by the time that he was leaving – I think he was being deported – he actually came up to me and we had about a five minute conversation in very basic and quite fractured English, but compared to how he was before, I was just blown away. And I spoke to one of our applications workers, who was getting him the education books, and he said that the only teaching he’d had either came from that book or came from speaking to me. 

Kate:

Wow. 

Dan:

And I thought it was absolutely crazy that he’d managed to start stringing sentences together in English. And he was explaining that he wanted to try and apply for a visa in the future to come back to England. Things like that, like little tiny things every day that seem to mean nothing, but then eventually someone will tell you how much of an impact that’s hard, and it makes all the awful times just worth it. 

Kate:

So on that then, what would you say is the worst aspect of the job? Because, you know, it does sound like it’s very rewarding, but there must be elements of it where it’s like -“Yeah, this is not fun”. 

Dan:

Yeah, I mean there are always like, you know, singular events that happen, which you know, it can make…. You’re on a, I don’t know, a 12 hour shift, let’s say, and you know, it’s all going absolutely perfectly, and then one five minute incident makes that day the worst day you’ve had ever. Those sorts of things do happen sort of semi-regularly. But I think the things that really affect a lot of officers the most is realistically, as a local remand prison, we will release somebody who we’ve built a good relationship with and they’ve worked really hard, and we’re all so happy to see them go and we say take care and everything and then, you know, weeks or months or two later, they’re back with us in our care. And it’s, when you think about it, it sort of shows more about the systems in place on the outside that failed that person, but part of us has to take that personally – it feels like we failed them. The fact they’ve come back to us, even though they were doing so well before, yeah, it does sometimes take a toll on people, but we just have to keep on trying the next day. 

Kate:

That must be difficult to maintain that motivation when you feel so full of hope for somebody, and then that crushing disappointment when they come back. And as you say, I’m sure it’s a very complex situation, it’s not just one single thing that meant that they re-offended and ended back up there, but it must be tricky sometimes to keep trying. And because, of course, for every five people that do come back, there will be that one person, or like the Vietnamese person that you spoke about, where it is making a real difference to someone, then can follow through on that and make some changes. 

Dan:

Yeah, of course. And I think as our MPOs and other people a lot keep reminding us, like, the only people that we will see again are the ones that, I don’t want to say failed, because that sounds like a very judgmental word, but the ones who have, or the system has failed them. We most likely won’t be seeing the people who are the success stories again, because once they leave our establishment, they won’t be coming back. So it’s sometimes important to remind ourselves of that, and Unlocked are really good, they – we refer to them as people with lived experience – they often invite them to events and they’ll tell us their stories, and they’re so powerful in it, they’ll tell us about their upbringing, how that landed them in the position they are in, and then suddenly how they turn that life around and how they’re now working with charities, and they’ve got families and they’ve made their lives into something so beautiful. And because Unlocked does that for us, it reminds us and gives us that motivation to think – the next person we have a conversation with could be the next one who turns their life around. And that’s probably the main source of inspiration and motivation for a lot of us. 

Kate:

Yeah, no, it must be. So thinking about the prison service as a profession then, I’m wondering what you think the key challenges are going to be over the next few years for students or graduates who are thinking – Oh, this does sound like a really interesting area to work in. Is there anything that they should research a little bit more, or try and anticipate or, you know, like you said the MP said to you, that actually you need to get that ground level experience because we’re trying to change the system. Is there anything like that that you’d advise students on? 

Dan:

Definitely. I 100% agree with what the MP said. If you want to go into politics, and especially in an advisory role, it’s so important to actually sort of experience it, because I used to look at things from the Office of National Statistics, and it paints a picture, but it’s all very, sort of, quantitative data. When you actually go into these places and see how the decisions people high up are making, the people who are facing it on the ground level. It’s a completely different experience and it’s so invaluable. So I couldn’t recommend that enough. In terms of the issues facing the prison service, it’s an obvious one, and it’s one that people say a lot, but at the moment, the effects of COVID are still really strongly being felt, and establishments all over, and the higher ups in the Ministry of Justice and HMPPS – they’re all really looking at how we can actually build a contingency plan for sort of pandemic level events such as this, should they arrive in the future, because, whilst I said we dealt with COVID very well, it was very much just basically putting out fires every time they arose. I don’t think there was really a long term plan established until much further on into the pandemic. So there were a lot of agencies and consultancy groups being set up and spoken to about moving forwards – how can we better be prepared for events such as this? Beyond that, there’s so many issues that, you know, completely depend on which area you’re interested in. I myself, I’m studying to be a trained crisis negotiator, so I’m really interested in the security element of prisons. So at the moment, obviously drugs and things such as that coming into the prison are a big priority for stomping that down, especially, I’m sure everyone’s heard of the drug ‘spice’, which is unfortunately incredibly common really within most establishments. So looking at areas such as that, and how to reduce that, is very important. Environmental impacts of prisons. The prison I currently work in, I think it was built in the 1800s, somewhere around there, and it’s so non-environmentally friendly, it’s crazy. Honestly, the heating system is controlled by, I think, one main boiler, which does the whole prison. So when they want to turn that on, it takes about a week for any pipes to get warmth. And then when they want to turn it off, it’s about a two week process to do that. So that’s impossible. And they’ve started updating windows with double glazing. Obviously, that comes at such a high cost because they’ve got to be, you know, standard with security measures. And just the lighting, when we work on night shifts… So we’re in the prison seven days a week over the nights for our night shifts, and it’s lit up like the Fourth of July, there’s lights on everywhere, nobody wants to turn them off. You know, even within the cells, the offenders have their televisions on 24 hours a day, barely ever turning them off. They’ll have their fans turned on 24 hours a day. Issues like that, which are obviously costing the Prison Service a lot of money, but are also so detrimental to the environment, is an area which I think some people, if in the future they were to research into and make some recommendations, will be absolutely invaluable to the MOJ as a whole, to be fair. 

Kate:

It’s fascinating. It’s kind of the stuff that’s happening in society, as you said earlier, is like its own kind of microcosm where it’s got its own rules and issues. I’m just wondering if there’s anything that you would advise people do in terms of work experience, because obviously it’s pretty difficult to get work experience in an actual prison. 

Dan:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. 

Kate:

Is there anything that would give people relevant transferable skills or would give them a sense of… Because it must be quite hard to visualise for someone if they could cope with that kind of environment. Is there anything that would help them test their resilience and their coping abilities, and it could be a good way to test out if they would like to pursue it as a career area? 

Dan:

It’s a really good question, actually, I’ve never really considered it. There are definitely things I could recommend maybe looking into. For instance, if you were interested in the area you could look at, say, the probation service. Within our prison we have the OMU, which is the offender management unit, and they deal with a lot of probation related queries and requests, and they’re all based in-house. So on an average day, I’ll probably have about 20 requests from people to contact probation, organise housing residents, things like that. So if you’re looking more at the sort of technical aspect of the job, going somewhere like probation would be absolutely invaluable. And if you then join the prison service afterwards, you’d be an amazing asset to have with everyone. But in terms of the actual sort of physical demands of the job, I honestly cannot think of anywhere that really compares, because people said before, when we were training that we’re basically the emergency services rolled together. Like we are trained in First Aid, and how to deal with quite serious incidents and try to preserve life in that way. Obviously in terms of police we’re trained with batons, we’re trained in control and restraint, we’re sort of trained in a lot of security and sort of underhand things such as that. And with the fire brigade, we’re actually trained to combat fires and use fire hoods, and sort of how we’d address those sorts of situations. So I honestly – it’s probably quite a cliché thing to say – but I don’t think you could ever get the same experience really that you get within a prison. But having said that, Unlocked itself on the Prison Service in general is incredibly understanding that people will not know what it’s like until you start. If you go through the training with Unlocked, and you go through all the training with the Prison Service – it’s called POELT training – if you do either of those and you’re only in the job for, say, a month or two, and you realise it’s not the one for you, they’ll offer you as much support as they possibly can to keep you at it, because they’ve obviously seen something within you that makes them believe you can do it. But if it’s really not the job for you, they will not judge you if you have to leave, because, like I said, they completely understand there’s no way of preparing yourself for it. 

Kate:

Yeah, that’s really good to know, actually, because I know sometimes people worry about the implications of making a commitment, not wanting to let people down, but also, you know, would they be in trouble if they felt they couldn’t do it. But I guess you’re right, you can’t fully know what it’s going to be like until you’re actually doing it. But I suppose logically thinking about it, in terms of the mentoring and empathy side of your role, you know, there’s lots of opportunities at universities and in the community to get involved in volunteering, and those kinds of supportive kinds of things. So I guess from that perspective, you could start to expose yourself to how it feels to talking to people in crisis, or going through difficult times. 

Dan:

Of course, yeah. I know like, I’m sure at York University itself, you still have… Is it Nightline? 

Kate:

Yeah, we still have Nightline and we do a lot of volunteering stuff. 

Dan:

Yeah, of course, especially something like that, because in our job we are dealing with some of the most vulnerable people in society at their absolute lowest point. So dealing with things where you have to sort of be able to develop empathy for people, and to put yourself in their position, and sort of, even if you can’t fully understand what their issues are, you have to be able to be open to sort of interpreting it and helping with that. So definitely there are so many volunteering opportunities around York, especially that would definitely put you in good stead for dealing with some of the issues that we face. 

Kate:

Well, for more info about the career that we’ve spoken about today and those resources that we’ve mentioned, I’m going to put some relevant links into the episode description and a link to the full transcript of today’s show. But, Dan, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to talk to us. It’s been absolutely fascinating talking to you, and it sounds like you’re doing an amazing job, and I’m really interested in what you decide your research project will be on as well, because it sounds like a really brilliant opportunity to bring all your skills together in one handy dissertation. 

Dan:

Oh, goodness, so much pressure. But no, thank you so much for having me, Kate! It’s been really nice. It’s not super often I get to bore people with the job. People think it’s going to be super exciting Ross Kemp style stuff, so to actually get into the nitty gritty of it is really interesting and fun. So thank you for that! 

Kate:

Thank you for joining us this week or ‘What Do You Actually Do?’. This episode was hosted by me, Kate Morris, edited by Stephen Furlong, and produced by both of us. If you love this podcast, spread the word and follow us. Are you eager to get more tips? Follow University of York Careers and Placements on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. All useful links are in this episode’s description. This has been produced at the University of York Careers and Placements. For more information visit york.ac.uk/careers