The following events take place starting from the 7th of February 2011; times and locations will be provided as deemed necessary (or when not classified as ‘classified information’).
Date : 7th February
Time : 2pm – 4pm
Venue : B323
First day at Uni for the term, the course is Production Labs. This according to our tutor is the testing ground for what our final projects will be. We are to ‘feel free to fail’ in this space because the emphasis is more on the process and reflection (that word again) than the end result. That said, it wouldn’t hurt to achieve success either!
Truthfully? I’m scared. Very scared. Using the skills we have acquired from the inception of our different courses, we have three options
1. Undertake an industry placement (sort of an internship with a relevant company/office/organization)
2. Work on a live brief from an industry client (errrr…..get commissioned to do something)
3. Develop an industry-focused project (working on your own, do something that’ll profit the world)!
And yes, there’s also the bit about ‘generating interest amongst relevant industry bodies, organisations, relevant clients and or individuals’ during the duration of our projects (and the whole module I guess)….
All three options are scary for me because, while I am enjoying the learning process and soaking up as fast as is humanly possible, I do not think I am ready to ‘test’ myself by taking a brief from anyone, same reason I’m not very keen on doing a placement, and for the life of me I cannot think of an idea to run on my own!
Help!!!!! I really don't have an idea!
Add that to the fact that rather than the small class and faces I’ve come to love since I came, there’s a whole sea of heads (people from Media but on different modules) and I don’t know if that helped to destabilize me too.
What to do! What to do!
Date: 14th February (also known as Valentine’s Day)
Time: Privileged information
Venue: Classified
Ok, this is the second class; I think I might have an idea now (actually a couple of them) but I’m not sure yet…..today’s Valentine’s Day and that’s all that’s on my mind. Lie. It’s getting better too, even though I’m not yet singing along to ‘I can see clearly now’, lol. I understand now that whatever I choose to work on must contribute one way or the other to my professional and personal development, which is good for me because I’m thinking I’ll just pick on an issue I know little or nothing about, and then work my way up!
Ammo Talwar of Punch Records was a guest in class today, and he spoke about the things his company is involved in (which are so many at a time I found I had lost track of what exactly he did), and some money which is/can be available to anyone in our class who’s got a brilliant idea around the things they already do. Very nice to see that Punch would invest (and that amount not mentioned for security reasons) on young entrepreneurs….laudable. I wasn’t interested (ha ha), but I was pleased that he had some knowledge of Fela Anikulakpo Kuti, and has an array of amazing pictures (both captured and derived) of the Afrobeat legend.
Yes Bozzzz...
More interesting was the way Ammo traced his business from selling all sorts of music CD’s, narrowing it down to catering to a niche audience, and how his business has applied innovations to remain in the ever-changing, ever dynamic industry that is music. Ties in with something I learnt in my Enterprise class. Clayton in The Innovators Dilemma said, “companies (IBM, Sears, a couple others) collapsed/made great losses by not taking advantage of various innovations in their fields”. I imagine Ammo wouldn’t have been a guest today if he had stuck to selling only cassettes and records!
Alexa Torlo was next. Very pleasant sounding, Alexa is from BCU’s New Technology Institute (NTI) which if I’m right functions as a matchmaker of some sort (amongst other things of course). They link students (using the competencies the students have or want to acquire) to organizations/companies/firms offering or teaching those skills. She told us of some opportunities for placements that are available, and I was so ‘reassured’ by her presentation I started typing an email to her while she was still in the class! Whether I sent it or not is a different issue!
Guess what? What? Speak up a bit? Yes! You were right, I still don’t have an idea!
Yup, after all the presentations, yours' truly doesn't still have an idea o!
So it’s the end of class, and I’m not where I was last week, but I’m not where I should be. We’re to hand in a Project Initiation Document by Friday the 18th; in plain English that is basically saying what the idea is, what I will achieve by working on that idea, how I plan to go about it, and where I’ll document my ‘reflections’. If something doesn’t give before then I don’t know what I’m going to do!
In other news my Yellow team mates created a Facebook page for all the ‘supervised’ to tell us ‘a bit about themselves’ (sounds like what you’d be asked in an interview right)? It’s nice though, and it works because all of us are on Facebook and saves us the trouble of emails that might start out as welcome, but end up as spam when we all start copying everyone in our replies!
P:S – venue was B323, time was same as last week…
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