Marketing! I have been thinking of all the ways the UTS Clinic can be marketed so that people know that is even there! It feels to me as a valuable opportunity. Here we are under the umbrella of an established institution at UTS and we can use this as a strong foundation to promote our clinic and to treat patients. Really it is a great opportunity.
I have been busy reaching out to many people in many ways and have had some results! Yesterday I received an email from China Books regarding the clinic, thanks Georgina! This means over a thousand other people would have received this email too. Also my efforts to put flyers in Libraries has paid off. I walked into my local one yesterday and it was up there on the notice board-great! I have been standing on the street handing out flyers, I have been making videos and putting them on YouTube. I have used the electronic billboards around Uni. And there are two seminars coming up, both have over 20 people attending and there are gradually more hits to the UTS FYIC website. Today if you google the UTS Clinic you will get a first page reference to what we are doing.
However the proof is in the patients! I am keen to see if the intake is more for this year and I hope to help a lot of people out with their issues.
Do you have to know/speak Chinese (Mandarin) to study?
No. The UTS TCM course is in English and there are numerous texts in English too.
You are not Chinese, why are you studying this?
Yes and because I appreciate it and I don’t have to be Chinese to understand and practice this!
Are your teachers Chinese (read: Your subject is Chinese, your teachers should be Chinese)?
Some. Some are Chinese and some are Anglo Saxon and some are from other nationalities!
Do you meditate?
Yes, and not just while watching TV.
They do that at UTS, how long???
Yes, 16 years. The course started at UTS in 1994 and was established from an independent college called Acupuncture Colleges (Australia), that had been running for 25 year previously to that.
How did you get interested in TCM?
I personally have had TCM treatments that helped me. Before that I had studied yoga and was teaching yoga and I had established an interest in Eastern philosophies. From all that I found out about the course and decided to go for it!
What is your experience of studying TCM at UTS?
I love it and hate it! It’s the hardest thing I have ever done. However I get a lot of enjoyment and satisfaction from it and helping people is what motivates me!
Why are you studying at UTS and not…China, Western Sydney etc?
I wanted to study somewhere close to home and that was it at the time of enrolment!
Should I enroll right after HSC?
You have to do what feels right. Balance all the things you want and need and ask yourself: do I want to be poor for 4 years in a row and possibly longer!?
What age range attends, is everybody younger than you?
Any and no! The interesting thing about UTS TCM is the broad range of ages on the course. It includes straight from school leavers who may not even be 18 yet all the way up to fifty year olds. It encompasses so many different situations of people from single mums, family people, working people, people living at home still, non working and so on. There are definitely some western medicine types in my year: a few nurses, one doctor (well not a real doctor, but a dentist…) It’s very diverse.
How do you find the lecturers and the teaching standard in UTS?
It comes down to knowledge and personality on both sides and that is all a very individual reflection. As a whole the lecturers know a lot! They are in a world of TCM and they know all about it! Whether they answer your questions, well some do and some don’t! There are always the books…
What is the course structure?
Roughly it is one third Chinese medicine, one third western medicine and one third practical application.
How confident would students feel in their knowledge of their Chinese herbal medicine aspect?
It’s great to have herbs as part of the course. Some people get herbs straight away, for others it’s a slow process. And others couldn’t care less as they won’t be using them in practice. If someone is studying and they pass and they don’t even care, there is hope! I love herbs and I stick to it. It’s taken me a long time to understand the concepts and ideas though.
What do you think of learning TCM in English as opposed to learning in Chinese? What about studying of the classic texts? Are they available?
It’s fine. Ok. So you are dealing with a translation. These are done to a high standard and the ideas of TCM are well understood really. In the case of classic texts: in all probability the original was reworked and changed over the centuries anyway. I guess it’s cool to say you read the original yourself and then translated it yourself. There is a sense of getting close to the original information. That original information can be difficult to understand anyway though. Either way your developing, comparing and understanding information all the time.
When do you start getting practical experience....are there a good variety of cases students can see at UTS clinic?
At the start and yes. From first semester we observe treatments with the general public. Later we take case histories and do our own diagnosis and talk to the practitioner about how they will treat. In the fourth and final year we do internship clinic where we do needling and herbal prescriptions for the general public ourselves under practitioner observation. The patients that come in are many and varied!
This is the first version as an initial idea. Basically it was to have images to portray information of what was happening and to be up beat
Then we came up with the idea of happy images to provide a positive feeling. So here's a couple of examples we played with. Then we got busy with it: adding info and design. Then we realised we needed to use the front and the back
Then there was a realisation that we needed a more professional look. We needed to be in clinic whites... My opinion: the photos of people smiling were to portray an upbeat feeling of acupuncture, it didn't matter if they where practitioners or not. But the majority thought was we needed a professional looking image, so two lots of reshoots later (light problems and setting problems ) and we managed to get something OK. We where going to photoshop it but that turned out to be a huge task!We also had some spelling mistakes to change and a last minute idea to add a free health assessment seminar. Actually my idea... But we had to redesign a lot because of the extra info and space needed. So this is the final front and back we used.
So there you have it. A brief history of a flyer.
Hi CMA Blogs,
One way I have been communicating with the world is through a flyer. This has been to promote the UTS TCM Clinic, as you may know.. This flyer was a simple concept of a picture, statement and contact. It evolved so much since that initial idea and there have been 7 different versions, some of them shown above, until the final one. It was continunily developing. Someone would have a good idea, great add that. We needed to take some pictures, ok. Not quite right. We had to do it again and so on. I even polled people on the street: " what do you think of this and that", got some great ideas and pointers ( one being to explain what acupuncture and herbs were for starters!!!). Then there was my long suffering co-pilot designer. This girl ws doing Chinese medicine, is Chinese and comes from a massive background in the heart of China town here. Just before the end of third year (3 years!) she decided to defer the course and actually do a design course. So I was working with someone who didn't really care about tcm and was going somewhere else. Anyway managed to get a print of the flyer but the bleed wasn't done (technical term for the safety margin for printers to work with for chopping and slicing images). Then I have a flyer with a white border on it when there shouldn't be. Little did I know that the uni printer did me a big favour as I did the same thing with another printer and they sent me the proof and I have a postage stamp sized image on a flyer as the border is so big! Now I am trying to work out the bleed and due to circumstance and technicalities it seems impossible!!!
Anyone know how to put a bleed on a DL image through photoshop?? haha
I must also say that I think my co-pilot will be a great designer as most of this flyer is her talent! Can't wait to see what she does in the future :)
Advisory day was the open day at UTS and other unis to help make your mind up for the last day of choosing preferences for uni enrolment for university this year in Australia. I set up a stall and a ten minute massage area to promote the UTSTCM clinic which opens in February. It was a great success with dozens of mini massages, heaps of enquiries and some patients booked in for clinic too. Thanks everyone for volunteering, visiting and supporting :)
