Doing Public Sociology: Student perspectives of international placements

Here nine Bournemouth University undergraduate sociology students reflect on the international placements they undertook in January 2016 in welfare settings in Penang, Malaysia under the auspices of our partner, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). Placed in selected NGOs working at the ‘coalface’ of need, the agencies gave aptitude-testing demands of the students to rapidly adjust and cope with very different work expectations in an unfamiliar socio-cultural context, as described below