Finishing Placement: Distance and Disconnection

“Every day each one of us is involved in a multitude of experiences. Some experiences are based on habit, some the product of social mores and societal expectations, still others are new, different and challenging. Through each experience we may gain new understandings and skills, and our beliefs about ourselves, others and the world are challenged, changed or reinforced.”

Reflection : Turning Experience into Learning, edited by David Boud, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 1985. ProQuest Ebook Central

When starting a project there’s this mixed feeling of nerves, excitement and interest that fills you with a drive to DO, a need to be productive and contribute. And during my time at Profile Tree that feeling got away from me. In this blog I’ll be using Gibb’s reflexive cycle to analyse my experience and highlight my mistakes and misgivings, to hopefully save myself the same trouble in future.

So what happened?

My placement with Profile Tree was a rather last minute and unexpected (as stated in my first blog), and I was informed by my placement manager Gabbi, that due to ongoing Covid-19 restrictions the structure of the placement itself would be a lot different that previous placement schemes they had done and consist of weekly Zoom calls rather than in person at Profile Tree’s offices. Additionally my job as a ‘Video Content Creator’ would consist of filming and editing tourism footage for travel company Connolly Cove.

Freedom, Too Much Freedom

Initially I felt very enthusiastic about this content creator position as it came with a lot of freedoms and there was a number of my peers from Queens who were also participating in the placement alongside me. However this feeling began to fade as the placement continued. Initially we were all provide with Belfast locations that Connolly Cove desired footage of over the coming months, and I worked steadily at a number of these filming, editing and sending a few drafts to Gabbi. There then came a point when these locations had been used by Connolly Cove, and so we were advised to avoid them and find our own locations with the Belfast area, and then we were told we could broaden that further to the whole of Northern Ireland. Complete creative freedom. And at this point I pretty much short circuited.

For some this complete freedom worked wonders and they began completing their work at a much faster rate. But for me the complete opposite was true, the ability to film practically anything, practically anywhere, was so vague that I just went round in circles; “Is this location good enough?”, “Is it even a tourist spot?”, “Is the footage good?”, “Is there a preferred editing style?” etc. I spent more time mulling things over and debating rather than actually filming and making anything and it began to show.

As the weeks went on a number of my peers stopped attending meetings, having completed their 100 hours. And so began the anxiety, I’m clearly behind, hours weren’t really disclosed at meetings but I felt as if it was painfully obvious to everyone else there that I was the slow one. And with meetings only being 15-30 minute long check-ins just to see how we were doing, and my feedback usually consisting of, “Yeah that’s good, keep it up.” On top of a few personal things going on at the time and my focus shifting to other modules and assignments, I spiraled even more and got even slower. I needed a focus. Badly.

At the beginning of the New Year Gabbi began requesting weekly ‘Action Plans’, detailing hours of work, as well as, current and future video plans. Although I had been attempting to use planners and schedules myself to keep myself on track, these Action Plans were exactly what I needed, accountability. And so with these in place, if for no other reason than to avoid my own personal shame my workflow began to steadily increase, and I was back on track, filming, editing, emailing. And things began to pick up again a sense of pride and accomplishment helped carry me through to the finish line.

The Good, The Bad & Silver linings

In hindsight a lot of the ‘issues’ I had with my placement were really psychological prisons of my own making. The fact the Action Plans themselves were created and used across the board, rather than me just receiving a strongly worded email, just shows that obviously I wasn’t the only one seen to be falling behind and I needed to just stop worrying and create. Although it wasn’t necessarily a positive experience the knowledge that I was just running in circles in my own stupid headspace, will serve me well in the future by not focusing so heavily on my perceived appearance to an employer, but rather focus on just doing good work, and taking pride in the fact that if there was a problem, someone would obviously have a word with me.

Isolation

Looking back, I likely wouldn’t have gotten so wrapped-up in my own head if the placement had taken place in person, as the isolation and assuming the worst was a huge factor in my thinking. But that was due to no fault of Profile Tree as a company, it was just the circumstance the world was dealing at the time, and I’m definitely not narcissistic enough to think I’m the only one to get a little stir crazy in a global pandemic. If anything, I’ve now experienced the worst side of solo work, and came out relatively unscathed, so the only way is up from here.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion my biggest problem in this placement was myself. Which I’m aware is a privileged position to find myself in, but I am also very happy that this was something I was able to recognise and work through at the beginning of my career rather than later. When looking back on my situation I realise that although I wasn’t doing a bad job from Profile Tree’s perspective, I wasn’t doing as good a job as I know I am capable of when I’m able to collaborate and bounce off of others. Consequently, going forward I will focus more on playing to my strengths by opening up dialogue and collaboration in future projects, and work to mitigate my weaknesses by applying my own restrictions, as I am now painfully aware of my tendency to get overloaded with total creative freedom, and a few books on time management skills probably couldn’t hurt.