WOW Lecture 2 - The Staircase of Our Dreams.
Date: 27th.October.2011
Time: 03:03pm.
Elaine Mcneill gave us a lecture on how to get started with working over our dream job or our desired career path, how to gain much work experience and begin to get in touch with local enterprises/freelancers/agencies under the creative industry. But as everyone says, ”A good drawing starts from a very rough sketch”, also does the journey of every university student from getting serious inside their department to outside challenges and unpredictable experiences.
Elaine showed us a diagram (also shown in my notebook, the first image) about the circulation of how the process of achieving our objectives will work better considering some of the core aspects indicated such as ‘Self’, ‘Opportunities’, ‘Aspirations’ and ‘Results’. Each containing a set of goals and if achieved it will lead to the next set ( as shown in the second image).
”Self” includes the process of being aware what your priorities in your career life are, have a long-term plan of what your objectives are; decide which skills and attributes are needed to be develop; research and explore about what other people with the same type of qualification has done during their higher education time and what they have gone to do afterwards; have a good management of time and prioritisation of work.
”Opportunities” includes the process of looking for opportunities to develop your skills; socialise with different kind of people and have a stable relationship with them; ”undertake a realistic assessment of your skills and personal attributes” to gain experience and knowledge; Knowing what you have done in the past accounts for your experience lists, your potential skills, it is a good idea to design a visually interesting CV reflecting why they relate to your desired/chosen job and then decide which employer organisations match your criteria and later identify sources of vacancies in your chosen field;
”Aspirations” includes the process of keeping your dreams and goals that you want to achieve while undertaking activities according to your attributes and interest. While doing that, it’s also essential to recognise and evaluate the characteristics of the creative and cultural industry to better engage with future jobs, interviews and problems that might come up within the workplace.
”Results” include the process of record achievement such as how much you have done over a period of time and how successful it went; Do the achievements relate to your aspirations and interests? How useful were they in terms of benefiting yourself and others like did you learn new skills or did you master a specific knowledge while working at certain place, did it make the world a bit better (as an exaggeration)? Do you feel more confident at doing presentations? Did you get more recognition? These process then turns back to ”self” as you evaluate yourself again and review what you have been doing. Are you doing the right thing? Do you want to change career? Are you feeling satisfied about what you are achieving? Etc.
Life still goes on. Things around you get tougher and challenges cross up without notice, all you need is the courage to confront, the commitment to your goals and work hard, steps by steps you will reach to a higher level, just like a staircase (stated by Elaine).
There were a few local enterprises/business that came along and gave us a chance to have a chat with them about what we wanted to know. Here are some of the names I noted down:
Dr Me (Graphics)
SB Studio (Graphics)
Matt Ford (Fashion Photographer)
MOCHA (Graphics and Animation)
Mike Carney (Designer and Artist)
I chose MOCHA because it does animation and graphics, though after listening to what he said I felt a bit disappointed because I initially thought MOCHA are based on narrative animation or cartoon-like animation, yet I still got quite useful information about what we, as students, should be aiming to do from now on and after graduation.
He suggested us to start getting in touch/setting up relationships with businesses or freelancers that matches our interest/aspirations, learn about what the companies do and perhaps if possible get ourselves involved in their department in order to get valuable experience, or learn about softwares further more as emerging technologies are being highly valued in modern societies, and also meet people who might fall in the same categories as us. Also to carefully considered what we really want to do after graduation as it makes a great difference whether you want to become a freelancer or work with a studio/local enterprise.
