MASSEY
HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY
ALUMNI
________

What led to you undertaking the Health Psychology programme?

After I finished my undergraduate degree I took quite a few years off and did some overseas travel. I came back to New Zealand and I felt like I needed to do something on health promotion. I thought, well, I'll end up maybe working with the Cancer Council or smoking cessation or something like that. When I was looking, Massey came up with the Health Psychology postgraduate course, so it was a fairly easy decision.

Were there any particular memories that stick out for you when you were studying at Massey?

Some of the people that I met during the course I'm still in contact with. I think what stood out for me also is that the Health Psychology Masters had quite a strong focus on methodology and philosophy of science. It doesn’t matter whether you're a qualitative researcher or a quantitative researcher, everybody needs that background but not everybody gets that background. I still remember some of the things that Mandy Morgan was teaching about epistemologies and methodologies and what counts as knowledge. That’s been hugely valuable. One class was focused on multivariate statistics, and the other one was focused on qualitative methods and so I am able to do a bit of both. Now where I'm working, that's extremely helpful. That's what really drew me towards health psychology, as well as the philosophical and the critical side to it. Looking at those traditional, fairly reductionist models of health behaviour, and then casting a critical eye over it, developing those skills. During that time the work was all mostly interesting and important, but the skills that you learned and using a critical mind to look at these different things was really helpful too. What ends up happening is if you don’t have that background, you just get graduates that think the only way to do things is quantitatively or the only way to do things is qualitatively. But actually, it depends on the kind of question you are trying to answer. 

What kind of career were you hoping for when you started studying Health Psychology?

I definitely thought I’d end up working for the government or for a community organisation, or in Health Policy. When I did my master's thesis, I really enjoyed the process of research. It was a health promotion topic about men's health seeking behaviour, masculinity and going to the doctor. I really, really enjoyed the process of doing the research, analysing data, writing it up, getting it out into the world. That's when I decided to do a PhD instead of going out into the workforce. It just so happened that my supervisors, Chris and Fiona, (my personal thanks to those two) had a project on ageing. I really enjoyed working with them during my PhD and I ended up doing some work with them on that project. I chose a PhD topic on retirement planning, which was quite different to men's health care utilisation. But it meant that I got exposed to all of the stuff that they were doing, which was so valuable for getting into a career after that, as opposed to extending on research in my PhD from that healthcare utilisation work. Not everybody loves doing their PhD, but I did. A couple days a week doing my research was actually a pretty magical time, really.

So what did you end up moving onto when you finished that?

A job came up at the University of Sydney, and I didn't particularly want to leave New Zealand but I didn't have a huge amount of choice because there just weren't that many research jobs around. This one that came up was basically an extension of what I was doing already for my PhD so it meant that I was pretty competitive for that job and I got it. The job itself was managing large scale research projects. I was managing a complex survey that people were sending out asking people about their life history. I managed that project and then did some of the writing up of a project that was near the completion stage. It was very much flowing on from what I was doing already and I knew the topic area pretty well. It was a very research-oriented position, no training needed.

Can you tell me a bit about the work that you're doing now?

A position came up at the University of New South Wales, in what's called the Centre for Social Impact. We're not a traditional research centre. We do research and education, all those sorts of things, but we're more community facing. I do a lot of work with what we call the social purpose sector, organisations that are there to basically do good things or help people to get into better situations. My focus has shifted more from retirement planning and workplace stuff to more thinking from a sociological lens. Now I'm looking at systems and say, for example, there are a lot of people in Australia and New Zealand that aren’t actually doing that well financially, we can help those people to deal with the systems around them more effectively. But, we could be doing that forever unless we actually change the system that is creating the problem in the first place. I'm trying to work at both levels, political, social, all the social structures that really disadvantage certain groups of people. The patriarchy, social class, poverty cycles. I don't have the answers myself, But there are people out there that do. So what's driving me at the moment is bringing all of those different people together to create a more coordinated response so that we're not just helping people to deal with the systems, but trying to change the system at the same time, which I love. 

What would you say that you have taken from Massey that you've been able to apply there, or that's given you employability for that role?

I can put my hands to pretty much anything that the Centre for Social Impact is doing. In addition to the specific health promotion and Health Systems stuff, there are these overarching skills that you can apply to anything. A jack of all trades, I guess you could say, and that doesn't always fit well with academia where you're meant to be an expert. But that doesn't really interest me much because I don't think that's where the answers lie. I can apply myself to lots and lots of different situations. I think it comes back to those methodologies and critical eye, being able to cast that critical perspective on things, that maybe we shouldn't just accept things the way they are. We need to show we understand why disadvantage exists, why it still exists, and continues to exist.

Are there any particular skills or experience that you needed to get your current job and perform your particular roles?

Anything to do with data collection is really, really important, qualitative or quantitative. And that's not just for an academic role. All organisations that we're dealing with, they need to collect data as well. They're looking for people that understand data and know how to work with it, and how to interpret and report on it. Crucial. Being able to write clearly, is really important and that was another aspect of the Health Psychology course that was important for me to be able to get roles later on. Industries are always running reports about various different things and they need those reports to be rigorous, but interesting enough for people to be able to read them.