So I took some time away from uni to have a good think about what I actually wanted
to get out of studying at University and within about six months I settled on midwifery, I
expected that it would be a really nice balance of challenge, but also something that I could
really become invested in and care about day to day.
And so I looked at studying midwifery at UTS.
I applied for BCII, as well as Midwifery is fairly simple.
It was the name that grabbed me.
So I'd always been really creative and innovation interested me a lot.
So when I saw that it was offered as a course at UTS, I thought, why not apply?
And I didn't know that much about it.
It was a really new course at the time.
I think my year group was only the third year to be offered the course.
And so I didn't really know what to expect but I was interested in enough in it to give
it a go.
So during my BCII studies, we learned about a concept called T shaped knowledge, which
is essentially like a capital T. And that's the way that I can best describe how BCII
and my midwifery studies linked together.
So studying midwifery taught me how to become an expert in a really specific area.
So that really deep vertical part of the T type of knowledge and in BCII, I learned a
lot more of that broad, less expert but wider ranging knowledge.
And through BCII, I learned that you have the ability and the licence to apply knowledge
that you may not be an expert in your area of expertise.
I guess like if I'm talking about like a design domain, so learning about principles of systems
design and being able to see the health system through that lens has given me a really different
perspective of what it means to be a midwife within that system.
And the part that I play in the bigger picture.
I think, for me, that has been the biggest value that I've gained from BCII.
It's not so much that it impacts my clinical practice on a day to day level, but it's changed
my perspective of what my role is and the potential that I have in that greater system
as I move through my career.
So if I'm thinking about my favourite experiences, in doing BCII, I would definitely have to
highlight my honours project, my honours research project that I did in fourth year.
I always had in mind to go into research, it was something that I really wanted to do
in midwifery.
And when I learned that BCII was offering a research honours project, in my final year,
I jumped on it straight away.
I think the biggest difference in doing my project under the Faculty of Transdisciplinary
Innovation as opposed to under the midwifery faculty is that it allowed me to explore areas
that I wouldn't have necessarily had the ability to explore in midwifery.
So my project looked at, and i guess compared in a way, women's experience in labour and
birth with peak mystical experiences that people experience outside of that context.
And it's, I guess quite a creative and left of field piece of research that I don't think
that I would have had the ability to look at under a health specific faculty.
I think it's really important to learn transdisciplinary skills in relation to health because I think
health is kind of like our foundation.
It underpins almost everything else that we do in life, whether that's on an individual
level or as a community, if our health is off our life and our society really struggles.
So I think it's important to have an understanding of the relationship that health has to all
these other sectors in our society, and on an individual level as well.
And I think that having the opportunity to actually work with people who are becoming
experts in these different sectors as you do when you do collaborative projects with
your peers in BCII gives you a different appreciation for the value that those sectors bring individually
and also how they can bring value to your profession and vice versa, that you develop
this appreciation for information and knowledge exchange and sharing.
And it helps you to develop an understanding of the interconnectedness between all the
different domains.
Studying midwifery you have a really clear idea of the direction that you're going to
go, you know that you're going to complete your studies, get a job and work as a midwife.
Whereas studying midwifery and BCII, I know that that is there for me as a pathway.
But I can be a midwife, and also be a researcher and work on projects that aren't necessarily
midwifery specific, and go and also articulate the value of midwifery practice to people
who work completely in totally different sectors that may have not necessarily encountered
the concepts that we learn about in midwifery and make them valuable and relevant to a really
different context.
And those are skills that I would never have learnt or have in my toolkit if I hadn't done
the dual degree.
I can say from experience that although the workload is heavy and it is demanding of your
time, you do still have time to have a life.
You can see friends, I went on holidays, almost every semester, even though they were shorter
than what, you know, someone doing just a core degree would have.
And I also got opportunities to do things like global studio.
So at the end of my second year, I went to India with BCII and spent three weeks doing
a community project there.
And although it was technically uni work, it allowed me to see a part of the world that
I wouldn't have had the opportunity to necessarily see otherwise.
So when you're, you know, considering how you're going to fit it all in, just know that
there is time to make it work.
You just have to be clever and committed to your time management.
The impact that BCII had on me, it changed completely the way that I see the world.
And it made me evolve as a person in a professional and personal sense.
The people that you come across, the concepts that you come across, the experiences that
you have, are, unreal and they they will change you and for the better.