We offer each of our trainees a summer bursary of up to £1,000 every summer of their degree to spend on journalism work experience or a journalism project, giving them the unique opportunity to travel and explore the areas of journalism they are passionate about.
School of Journalism trainee Yumna Iqbal shared how she used her bursary blogging her experience on a spiritual retreat in Turkey.
One of the main reasons I decided to pursue my journalism degree at The School of Journalism was because they offer an amazing £1,000 summer bursary to complete any type of journalistic project you want over the summer!
As soon as I heard about this, so many ideas began brimming in my mind of things I wanted to do.
I finally settled on attending a spiritual retreat in Turkey and putting together a long-form feature with accompanying social media on the experience.
As a Muslim, my faith is an extremely big part of my life, and I am very passionate about writing about it to help others understand.
And I think religious journalism often gets overlooked, even though religion is so integrated in many societies and livelihoods.
Thus, I decided to use my summer bursary to attend a spiritual retreat in Turkey by an organisation called The Halaqa.
Spiritual retreats are a longstanding tradition within Islam, and this particular one I had wanted to attend previously, but it proved to be hard due to circumstances such as the cost.
This is where the summer bursary was perfect, as it paid for around three quarters of the entire package, so I only had to pay a small amount myself.
When looking for retreats, there were many reasons I chose this specific one, but as it included essentially everything in it (i.e. covered the flights, luggage, airport transfers and hotel stays) it was less of a hassle for me to work out how I would allocate the bursary for it.
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Initially when presenting my idea, I was apprehensive because in all honesty, I thought the tutors may not understand what I was envisioning but I was completely wrong.
Graham was extremely curious and understanding and keen to learn about what I was doing, and happy for me to do it which was such a big relief because it fuelled my ambition to turn something I’ve wanted to do in general into a project for my portfolio.
I was fully able to immerse myself into the retreat, taking lots of pictures and videos for my own project whilst also taking notes in the lessons throughout the retreat.
I was also able to complete two interviews – one with one of the founding members and teachers of The Halaqa, and an attendee, who has now become a lifelong friend.
I was quite nervous to approach people for interviews, as it felt quite random in comparison to why everybody else was there.
But everyone I spoke to was extremely interested and keen to listen – which eased my fears of being judged.
This definitely tested my confidence, which in hindsight was a good thing as I’ll experience many more moments like that in my career.
Aside from collating photos and information for my feature, I also recorded throughout the retreat (which was in Sapanca) and our two-day trip in Istanbul to make reels.
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The idea of this was to create a visual video diary, so those watching can experience a little bit of what I did in my time.
I also wrote a feature piece all about my experience that you can read here.
I really enjoyed doing my project as it was something that combined both my journalistic passion and my faith.
I’ve got so many ideas of what to do for next year, I don’t know how I will choose.
You can read more of our summer bursary blogs here.
Sign up to our free The School of Journalism taster sessions here.