Supervisors play a crucial role in placement, so they must be approved by Vocational Services as someone with the ability, experience and time to give to the student. They have a formal function: to assess your effectiveness on placement (at three points of the year: beginning, mid and end-of-year) and an informal function: to invest in you through training and mentoring.
During the year we put on training events for placement supervisors which, alongside regular contact, ensures ever-deepening relationships with them.
Generally, supervisors are allocated by Vocational Services, except in a home church context, when the student will be expected to identify the appropriate person to supervise them. Supervisors cannot be a family member or a current undergraduate student.
Please be appreciative of your supervisor and mindful that they are volunteers and have many other demands on their time. Keep the commitments you sign up to, eg if you are late to a meeting, you put more value on your time than theirs; if you don’t confirm an arrangement, you make them take time to chase you.