{"id":2560,"date":"2017-10-11T15:55:56","date_gmt":"2017-10-11T14:55:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/copyright.lboro.ac.uk\/students\/?p=2560"},"modified":"2017-10-17T11:26:47","modified_gmt":"2017-10-17T10:26:47","slug":"step-working-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/students\/arts-english-drama\/step-working-world\/","title":{"rendered":"My step in to the working world"},"content":{"rendered":"

Studying at university doesn\u2019t half provide you with experience! But does it prepare you for the working world?<\/p>\n

My answer is it does in terms of skills, but maybe not 100% in terms of mental preparation. So here\u2019s a blog on how I\u2019ve been coping with the working world in my placement and third year of university.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m enjoying my job at the Watford Palace Theatre, but I\u2019ve got to admit life is different. Time management and organisation is definitely on a completely different level.<\/p>\n

So what do I do? I work in Participation, a department that is in charge of producing community events. This means I am responsible for a lot of organisation in both a practical and administrative sense. I work a lot with young people and engaging them in the opportunities we offer. The current projects I\u2019m focusing on are the Palace Youth Theatre, Assistant Directing Treasure Island, co-producing the film festival and young producers\u2019 scheme. \u00a0Did you get all that before you hit snooze? This might sound like the typical \u201cok I swear my date looks better in person\u201d but I\u2019m telling you the tasks are more engaging in reality.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s now two weeks until the Palace\u2019s Treasure Island production<\/a> and the pressure is on! Sometimes it\u2019s manic upstairs in the office rushing from one meeting to the other, to the next rehearsal while trying to keep on top of your deadlines. Just a little crazy if you ask me. But I\u2019d say I\u2019m lucky that I get the chance to experience the insides of a professional theatre.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve learnt a lot of new things while I\u2019ve been here. First of all, how you suddenly have to be a lot more proactive than you think, and more confident in your authority. Secondly about prioritising and organisation \u2013 you have to bear in mind that you\u2019re not only organising and prioritising tasks for yourself but for a company. If you don\u2019t achieve your task it will impact someone\/ something else.\u00a0 For example, if I never attended the white card meeting with the designer and director, I would never know where the entrances and exits would be to direct the actors to and from.<\/p>\n

In the working world, you\u2019re more than likely to have a line manager \u2013 they’ll delegate your tasks and ensure that you\u2019re on top of things. I\u2019m lucky as my line manager is actually really supportive in consideration to my personal life. For example, she offered to even have a cheeky read over my dissertation title and plan, which I am yet to show my tutor. The feedback I receive from her is also great because it is honest and there is nothing worse than thinking you\u2019re doing the best job ever whilst the rest of the team are discussing how you didn\u2019t quite meet the mark.\"\"<\/p>\n

I mostly get positive feedback but sometimes its negative but I have learnt that as long as you take the negative feedback with a pinch of salt and think about how it can help you improve yourself, it is no longer negative but in fact entirely constructive. During my feedback I\u2019ve learnt about data protection and fairly obvious things about customer service where I realise \u2018why didn\u2019t I think of that\u2019. But everyone\u2019s human, everyone makes mistakes, it\u2019s how you go forward which makes the difference.<\/p>\n

Time management is another thing to consider in the working world. I\u2019m used to having deadlines set for me at University. Now in the working world, I have to set them for myself and if I\u2019m honest it\u2019s not as great as it might sound. I base my deadlines on how close the event is and work out the priorities from there. Sounds a simple task, but I\u2019ve messed up my priorities once before in not realising that something was as imminent as it was.<\/p>\n

Your time management can also be thrown out a little in the way in which a company or organisation works. When starting University, I was far from what I expected but once settling in, getting used to the way things worked, Loughborough actually turned out to be better than my expectations. My second year, studying abroad, the marking system through me out, the teaching and the support offered was very different. You just have to realise that not everything is the same and you have to be able to adapt and not get caught up in your comfort zone and organise yourself from there.<\/p>\n

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For those considering placement or permanently setting foot into the working world, here are a few handy tricks I think might be helpful<\/p>\n