UL Student Volunteer Afroja Ahmed

19/04/2021

It’s been more than a year; I am studying at the University of Limerick (UL) during this pandemic era. As an international student, I was so enthusiastic to get involved with the broader student community to grow a network. But because of the lockdown, it became difficult. So, I started to search for opportunities to volunteer for utilising my social distant time. As a student of Psychology, I’m motivated to volunteer for mental health causes, and I got to know about a new campaign “Mind the MIND Ireland”. This campaign is a Social Impact Initiative of the European Federation of Psychology Students’ Associations (EFPSA) to Combat the Stigma of Mental health-related issues. This campaign brought to Ireland for the first time in 2020 by the Psychological Society of Ireland (PSI). Hence, I got involved in the First wave of the “Mind the Mind –Ireland” campaign as a volunteer for county Limerick. This campaign was consisting of educational workshops for high school students and informational posts on social media networks.

I had very few connections at UL, but I got to meet virtually psychology students from different institutions in Ireland such as LIT, MIC and UCC through this volunteering opportunity. Involvement with this campaign helped me to learn mental health-related issues from a different context. Besides that, the teamwork spirit during the digital literacy campaign helped me to feel a sense of belongingness. It helped me to develop the feelings of satisfaction that as a third level student of psychology, I am working towards contributing to mental health wellbeing during this strange pandemic time. Simultaneously, increasing my network in Ireland is the most important skill I have learnt through this volunteering opportunity. I would highly recommend psychology students of UL to volunteer for the second wave of the “MIND the MIND Ireland” campaign.