my name is Tian I studied anthropology and classical civilization and literature with a year abroad at Birmingham and I graduated in 2021 and I'm currently working as a podcast producer and a freelance Runner and Junior researcher I did a lot of stuff in audio production and I learned how to edit that was probably one of the most important things I ever did was learn how to record and learn how to edit audio and that was just through burn FM and through um looking at things online as well but al
so you need to know how to put together a story and that's like where my degree comes in as well because it's all about storytelling it's all about finding it's like writing an essay it's a final argument and supporting it but doing it in a more creative way but yeah so audio production and learning how to tell a storybook two of the most important things and so when I graduated I was like well I'm not really sure what I want to do and I want to do something that is creative I don't want to I di
dn't want I applied for a couple of schemes and stuff and I wasn't like that I wasn't reading my heart wasn't in it and then I was I applied for this BBC job and I was like I'm gonna get this BBC job but I've had three interviews and I didn't get it in the end but so I was like okay what am I going to do now and then I just had a family member like I said reach out and say I heard your podcast and I'd like to do my own one um and they had like a background they're a historian so they wanted to t
ell stories about history and stuff they've written before and I was like well I'll be happy to help because I have all this experience and then so I started just recording with him and as we released it and it started like um getting a bit more attention like it was never huge but it's I got some attention and then um through them I made the connection with someone who works in TV production and who was doing a history program as well and um they needed some help on it just as a lucky there is
a runner or a junior I was a runner for that so that that encompassed get me getting coffee but also helping with research which is where the degree was really helpful because I needed to go through and because it's a historical program or it's a factual television program you have to you get these giant briefing packs and they all have to be supported and has all the facts in it that are in the script and in the TV show and you have to support it with um referencing like pretty much referencing
from University so you have to go through and you have to find three decent and not with Wikipedia another Wikipedia need to find three decent um resources and so that's what university came in handy because I had all this experience of writing big essays especially having just finished my dissertation of compiling these massive lists of bibliographies and yeah that was really really helpful and then from there um they liked me and they kept me on again for another couple of months I worked on
a science TV show this time so it's not it's never really like you never actually do exactly what you want I don't think or eventually you can but at the beginning you kind of just have to say yes to everything so after the history program um I worked with in the science program and it was the same kind of thing but this time I was getting given a bit more responsibility so I was ordering props and stuff so I was on Amazon the whole time and ordering props and sorting things out on that side and
getting people coffee and things like that but then also I got given more responsibility to so start writing these briefing packs so this is things like getting stuff ready for a shoot and write down and what you want to say and you get the sources and things for um sources for it as well and and also actually when I was there because I don't know if they knew I had technical experience because I did audio production but they actually let me go in the gallery so that's where they shoot that's w
here like the director is and the producers and that's where you can see what they're shooting so when we were on location it was just I sat in this box and I was helping the vision mixer who's the person who like who decides where the camera is at that at a certain point and like perhaps of The Narrative of the the show and they decide whether what camera is facing where um I was helping the vision mixer and with the graphics so I ended up just doing Graphics there as well and then also I was s
till getting coffee and then I was also helping out with little bits of research and things to like find supporting facts and finding fun facts and that they were put into the script last minute and yeah but University helped with that so much like especially just being a good researcher finding facts finding good supporting evidence for it and referencing it those were so important and um those are things that Birmingham definitely taught me but then also yeah through my extracurriculars so kno
wing about audio production is yeah how I ended up doing podcasting and then yeah through so having done the TV stuff as well because TV is very on and off so I haven't worked at TV since May or June May um but it's because I've been focusing a bit more on podcasting because someone reached out to me and said I've all heard about um I've had this other podcast that you were working on and I want to start my own one so I was like okay Sean it's a food podcast and that's how I've ended up doing fo
od because I just I was like yeah no that'd be really cool and then we've interviewed some really really interesting people but again the skills that I've learned the um transferable skills the first one is transferable skills that I learned from Birmingham about uh yeah research um writing a good brief or a good plan like for an essays so similar to like writing a brief for a podcast episode or for a TV episode and fact checking being critical being analytical all those things they really they
really really apply when you're making content that is factual or that is um or just historical yeah factual making content inspection is literally learning all of those things that universities helped so much with that [Music]
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