My Willingness adventure started with an ad I saw on LinkedIn. I really wanted to carry out an internship in a different country. These days, where we are spending our lives behind a computer, I was worried about how possible this internship would be.  However, I still applied as I wanted to be a part of this team.

After a while, following the interviews, I learned that I was now included in this team. Before my internship started, I had done some research on Willingness and looked at what areas they were focusing on. First of all, I was very impressed when I saw that they were working in areas such as “Health Psychology, Couple-Family Therapy and Sexuality”, which unfortunately are still ignored in today’s society, as well as individual counseling. I was excited that these three areas, which worked great in theory, were applied in practice, but to be honest, I had my doubts about how much focus was placed on these issues in practice. Alas, from the first day of my internship, I realized that the work done here is more than meets the eye. It was great that many professionals who are experts in different fields worked in the team and that all of them progressed together rather than being in a competition with each other. However, as a trainee, I felt valued from day one. The fact that everyone in the team approached us like a colleague increased my self-confidence. Case meetings covering all fields of study, including our own, made it easy for me to put a lot of what I learned in theory into practice. In addition, what I learned in the Health Clinic inspired me for my future and I was accepted to the master’s program in the field of “Clinical and Health Psychology”. I would never have guessed that Willingness would have such an impact on my career. In addition to all these, the discussions, sharing ideas and presentations we had with our colleagues from different cultures helped me to express myself better and to see how the same concepts could be understood in the international environment. At the end of my internship, I am realizing how much I have improved through my work on the blog posts we write about the field we have chosen every week, the systematic review we make on a common topic, and the Clinical Audit we prepared to improve Willingness.

I would like to thank the Willingness team for providing us this opportunity, all the professionals for their informative sharing and my intern friends who were with me in all the studies. I never imagined that an online internship could be this good!

If you want to learn more about Willingness internships you can reach out here.              

Ezgi Nur Budak has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from MEF University, and she is an intern at Health Clinic of Willingness.