ABSTRACT
March 2, 2015—Three planning graduates from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University are talking with 50 intending work placement students about their own experiences doing placements and their professional experiences since. They speak of stress of early days of their placements and suggest how new students can best prepare for this. To understand planning practice in Australia, one begins with its governance arrangements. Work placements—better known in Europe and North America as internships—are a formal course requirement in some Australian undergraduate planning programmes. Mia Zar, 31 years old, completed her Bachelors of Urban and Regional Planning at RMIT University in 2012, having transferred from Curtin University, Western Australia. The argument so far has been that work placement experiences in 2014 and by implication deepened students' knowledge of planning procedures and gave them confidence about themselves and their career direction, so better enabling them to navigate the transition to becoming a junior planner.
