Category: Creativity

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Choosing modules for next year?

Behind the scenes of video shooting production crew team silhouette and camera equipment in studio.
Emma Lennox, Careers Consultant

As it’s time to choose modules for next year, you can use this time to think strategically about what you want to gain over the time you have remaining at University.  While it might be tempting to find the module that best suits your train timetable, try to think about what skills you want to leave Queen’s with.  This is not the time for comfort zone thinking, what will your future self need to know? 

One of our Careers Consultants, Emma Lennox, spoke with some final year students from the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s, and uncovered some insights about things they wish they had known earlier in their degree. 

Get experience. 

Try to build up work experience as a student

‘A degree is great but it just tells an employer you’re a good academic.  You want to work in TV? Marketing? Creative Arts? Teaching? Public health?  Get experience, start in first year and build that portfolio of evidence.  Don’t tell an employer you’re passionate, show them.  Don’t know where to start getting experience?  Ask your Careers Consultant, you can find them on MyFuture.  I wish I had more experience going into the work place now.’   

Final Year Creative Writing Student 

Build your understanding of the sector you want to work in 

Do your research to understand your target industry

‘I think my big ideal expectation when I first started was I was maybe going to finish my study and go straight into working for a studio, I didn’t really understand just quite how complicated the industry is and how difficult it can be to get secure work.  And I didn’t realise how much I still had to learn.’  

Final Year Film Student  

Emma’s Advice: “It can also be useful to think about freelancing, self-employment and entrepreneurship as part of your career planning. The industries that Arts graduates tend to want to work in, are often characterised by short-term contract work rather than permanent graduate roles or graduate schemes. 

According to the 2023 What do graduates do? report, Arts graduates are three times more likely to be working in freelance or self-employed roles than graduates from other areas. The report also shows that entrepreneurial creative arts graduates are more likely to be working in creative sectors aligned to their subject. If you are planning to pursue a career that uses your subject knowledge, you may need to consider freelancing or self-employment/ entrepreneurship as possible options and to prepare for what that might mean.

Arts, English and Languages students have the option of taking the Creative Enterprise module in second year which takes you through the process of creating, running and growing a creative company. Students in other years can find some information on the Future Ready Skills Course and help available from SU Enterprise.”

Find your people outside of your course. 

Extra-curricular activities are a great way to build up skills as a student

‘I spent all my time with people from my course and only discovered the programmes with Enterprise SU in final year.  Those are my kind of people, I could have been around entrepreneurs and innovators for three years instead of one.  I have a lot of catching up to do.’ 

Final Year Drama Student 

‘One of the best things I did at Queen’s was get involved with women’s sport.  I feel I’ve made a real difference there and can use all those skills in the recruitment process.  I just wished I’d got involved earlier and looked at other societies as well.’ 

Final Year English Student 

Emma’s Advice: “The Future Ready Award website is a useful place to find extra-curricular opportunities that will enable you to meet other people and develop useful skills.”

You are responsible for you. 

Be proactive and chase down opportunities

‘In school we had a careers class every fortnight and I thought that would be the same at uni.  I know now that it was up to me to chase down opportunities and be proactive.  There’s so much going on, I need another year to catch up with what I missed first time round!’ 

Final Year Broadcast Production Student  

Leverage the Careers service. 

Access Careers support through MyFuture

‘I wish I’d used MyFuture and the Careers website more, I’m only discovering internships and programmes and employers now that I’m too late to do.  And some stuff is only for first and second years.  I could have been going to events and building up contacts for three years instead of the last six months.’ 

Final Year Film Student 

Open your emails. 

Take advantage of free opportunities to develop your employability

‘I spoke to a careers consultant who mentioned a programme and I said I’d never heard of it.  They asked if I’d opened my emails because it had been sent to me.  Well that was all kinds of awkward.  Lesson learned, I’m accessing all the support now for recent graduates!’ 

Final year English and Spanish Student 

Emma’s Advice: “You can access careers support through MyFuture, the careers website and careers information through the Future-Ready Skills Course.

“All Arts, English and Languages students now have access to the Future-Ready Skills Course on Canvas (AEL4001). In that course you’ll find lots of useful information including a full section on Career Management Skills which will help you to think about your future plans and the gaps that you might have. And it’s tailored specifically to Arts, English and Languages students.

The course is completely optional and non-credit bearing, but you can get a certificate at graduation if you complete it in full.”

Find out more about the Careers, Employability and Skills service at Queen’s.

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Creative thinking Creativity employability personal skills Skills transferrable skills

11 Ways to Channel Your Creativity

Series of blue bulbs with a yellow bulb above

How to overcome environmental and personal barriers to let your
creativity flow. 

What is creativity? “It’s new and useful ideas in any domain,” says Roisin Macartney, Queen’s Careers Consultant, who adds that there are barriers that limit our own creativity.

“These barriers can be from your own thinking, and from environmental [factors] and the environment that you are in. If you do what you’ve always done, don’t make changes and just accept the status quo, creativity will suffer. Challenge, ask questions, take risks to keep expanding your creative thinking. 

So how do we start to open ourselves up to being creative and thinking creatively? Roisin has these top tips:

  1. Give yourself space

“One of the things I would suggest is starting with a blank page. I think you have to give yourself time to be creative,” says Roisin, who add that this doesn’t necessarily mean scrolling through Instagram or Pinterest. “I don’t mean that you can’t be inspired by other people’s creativity, because you certainly can, but you do have to give your brain a time out, basically.”

She adds: “To be able to generate your own creative ideas, it might be that you take a walk, or you lie in a bath, or you basically stare at a blank page and give yourself the room and the time to be creative.”

2. Challenge the norm
Another way to channel your creativity is to challenge your assumptions. “Always ask yourself if something must be done this way. If it must be this way, how could it be different? So that could be, you know, an assignment that you’ve been given. It could be a work assignment, it could be just something in your everyday life. Does it always have to be done this way? How could you be creative and think differently about it?”

3. Stay curious. 
Remember that child that you once were always asking why and driving your parents crazy? It’s time to channel that child and ask why why why! “Try to keep that curiosity alive because it’s not only good for your creativity, it’s also good for your wellbeing. “Don’t lose the art and the joy of playing: rediscover the joy of getting out the Lego, the colouring pencils, or anything else to start playing and getting creative. It’s not about what you create while playing,” says Roisin. Adding, “It’s about letting the mind be creative, so allowing yourself to be open.”

4. Try something new. 
“It might be trying a new recipe every week. It might be learning how to use a new function on your software package…. Just keep trying new ways of doing things and that’s you being creative as well,” says Roisin.

5. Get inspired. 
While it can be good to have time out on your own to generate new ideas, it can also be good to work with other people, who also want to create, especially if there are particularly creative people that you can work with. “ You can bounce and generate new ideas from each other,” adds Roisin. 

6. Flex your creative muscles.
 “There are some techniques that can help you to keep stretching that creative muscle. It can be doing something to keep your brain active, like Sudoku or crosswords. Learning a new word every day, perhaps in your own language or in a different language, and what you really want to be doing is helping your brain to make new associations and build those new connections. So, you can encourage your brain to be the sort of brain that makes connections and sees patterns and therefore becomes more creative,” says Roisin. 

7. Try mind mapping. 
“Start with a central focus, whatever your theme is going to be, you start with that focus. You then put down main themes and coming off that central focus as branches from the center. You might sort of get creative using colour and using pictures and things like that, especially if you’re good at artwork and it can be really nice to do it that way. And you keep adding to it. And in terms of creativity, it’s likely to be the things around the outer edges where the creative thinking comes into it.”

8. Get brainstorming. 
You’ll certainly have used brainstorming in the past and the key thing about brainstorming is that all ideas are equal and valid, and they’re not challenged, explains Roisin. “Brainwriting is when people individually write out their ideas first. So, whatever the question or the problem, rather than everybody shouting it out for somebody to write, you all write it out. And then you share those, so everybody’s ideas all go up, and that can spark other ideas. And that can mean that people are not limited by other people’s ideas or louder characters or challenges.”

9. Scamper. 
“Scamper is based on the reasoning that everything new is just an addition or a modification of something that already exists. So, this technique gets you thinking about ways that you can build on that idea of change and changing something to create something else,” explains Roisin. “For example, I was writing this last year, but at the time there were some coffee bags being advertised on the TV. And clearly that’s just coffee and tea bags, you know, combined together. And they often sort of do that with things like chocolate bars, you know, Cadbury’s will come out with some new addition to the chocolate, just to make it a little bit more of a novelty to us so that we might want to go and get that and try it out. So, what can we add? Somebody decided to add balm to tissues, for example.” Linked to the Scamper technique is reversal. “Problem reversal is about reversing the problem that you might have. It’s a different way of looking at the challenge. So instead of looking at the challenge in terms of what do you want to do, you reverse it and say what you don’t want to do. For example, say you want your company to sell more pencils. Instead of saying how can we make our pencils better, the reverse thinking might be along the lines of: we want pencils that don’t break as soon as you begin to use them. And of course, that leads you to what you actually want to do to make the pencils better. “

10. The lawbreaker technique. 
The lawbreaker rule asks: What do we assume or believe to be true? And what if that were not so? “Lawbreakers are all about challenging those assumptions that we all make, says Roisin.  “For example, the burger has to be inside the burger roll. What happens if it isn’t? If we can forget about those assumptions, then what changes would we make? Things like putting the cheese into the crust of our pizza, you know that’s challenging the law of pizza; it’s challenging our idea of what we thought pizza was.

11. The great minds technique. 
This involves: what would [insert person] do? “Generally, it should be somebody that you respect and in this regard someone who is creative. So, what would that creative person do with this problem or issue? It can be an actual person, maybe somebody like Greta Thunberg or Marcus Rashford. You know, it doesn’t even have to be a specific person. For example, you might say, well, what would a 7-year-old boy think about this because again, as we know, the younger people are often very creative. So, what would a child think about this? What would you know, a character or like? What would Superman do?

You can access more resources on thinking creatively on our website. 

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Creative thinking Creativity Employer Engagement Employer events Employer Insight Employer Panels Employer Q&A Employers Fusion Antibodies Gradfest2021 KTP Lateral Thinking student success Student success stories

Problem solving and creativity in a graduate role

Leona McGirr, a former KTP associate at Queen’s and a Team Leader at Fusion Antibodies on how to hone your lateral thinking skills to land that graduate role.

Leona McGirr, former KTP Associate at Queen’s

Why are problem solving abilities essential in virtually in any graduate rule?

Yeah, in any job, you’ll always have to solve problems…There’s always an opportunity to solve a problem. Anything from small like fixing the printer to something bigger, like what we’re working on and trying to find a treatment for COVID. And so there’s always an opportunity to learn and develop these problem solving skills.

How can you develop this problem solving skills and demonstrate them to the employers to the recruiters?

Look at the root cause of the problem and ask the question, why. Start tweaking things, and see, we’ll see what you get, essentially, instead of just spending and buying a new something, and so can always ask the question, why and if you give these examples to the employer, that they will say that these skills are transferable. 

How will interviewers assess how you approach the problems? And how can you demonstrate your logic and implementation to the recruiters?

Give loads of examples and those different examples both in your personal life and in work because as I said, all these skills are transferable. And it kind of gives the people who are interviewing you an opportunity to see what type of person you are and how you solve the problems and how you go about doing this. 

How can you answer a problem solving competency based question? How can you answer them?

We would always use the STAR method, which is you say the situation, the task, the action and the result. And so just make sure to include each one of them within any example that you give, that’s usually the most common way of doing it.

To what extent can games such as Sudoku, or Chess, can help strengthen your ability to swing strategy early and creativity?

I actually think all scientists love chess as well. It essentially lets you kind of plan ahead and see the bigger picture and see how one little thing that you do can impact and essentially either win the game or lose the game for you. Again, it’s very transferable into science trying to fix a wee problem on a stage every time.

Are there any problem solving techniques you can develop or refer to our students?

So for us in R&D, our standard way would be root cause analysis. So essentially, you ask the five why’s. So for example, an experiment didn’t work? Well, why it didn’t work? Because the two proteins didn’t bind? Well, why didn’t they bind? Because maybe one wasn’t stored correctly? Well, why wasn’t it stored correctly, and then bring it down to well, actually, there wasn’t enough space in the fridge. So even though you thought it might have been one thing, by the time that you break it down and ask why every stage, you realise that it’s actually something else, and it ensures that it won’t happen again.

What is creative thinking? And how can you demonstrate it?

It’s really having a different viewpoint and a different perspective on a problem. And I think that’s essentially key. For example, in my current company, I was the first chemist in an essentially biological company. So I was able to offer a different perspective on things. And it’s usually quite creative in comparison to what everybody else might think. And it’s just drawn on my existing skills and experience.

Why it is so important to show a recruiter that you come up with an innovative solutions to a problem, or an improved way of doing things? Why it is so important?

Because it shows that the candidate is willing to learn, and they’re innovative, and they’re creative. And essentially, in a workplace, everything can be improved. The worst thing, what we want to hear would be somebody who says, this is how it’s always done, instead of asking, why has it been done? And just don’t accept the first answer. Always keep asking why, and how can you improve? Both in your personal life and in work.

Why do recruiters like to see a creative thinking in a graduate hires? 

Well, it really shows the potential and shows that somebody can take initiative to try and solve a problem where more sided escalating, and having that under control, and that there is a lot of potential that you can develop that particular skill. So we’re always keen to see that.

So how to demonstrate your creativity in graduate applications, or let’s say in interviews?

Yeah, give loads of different examples, and be it something you’ve done, maybe a hobby even. It’s really nice to hear all these different examples, instead of always referring to one example, maybe your degree, always ask or always talk about personal life, part time, jobs, everything, because it allows us to see what type of person you are, as well and a lot of times, the stories are actually really interesting.

Okay, how do you develop or improve this, so, you know, creativity skills, how to improve it?

I would say just take every opportunity and go take a few risks, and don’t be afraid to try and do something outside of your comfort zone. With every stage of my career, I have challenged myself, and have always had a very steep learning curve. And I think that is actually quite a lot of fun. And again, it allows me to be creative in different ways and drawn different strengths.

So can you give us some examples of lateral thinking to draw on in an application process?

Yes. So essentially, think outside the box, and don’t take the most obvious answer as being the root cause. And if you can disprove something, well, it then in theory can be a possible solution. Ideally, what we would do is we will get a post-it note and we’d all sit around and be like, well, what happens if this was the case? Or I wonder, could this be the case? And you just go crazy with this and don’t rule anything out.

What are the links between problem solving and entrepreneurism and a good leadership? 

I think being an entrepreneur and a true leader, you need to be innovative. You need to challenge yourself and not be scared to take a few risks. And the most important thing is to learn – the road to being an entrepreneur and your own career is bumpy. You can go on a few circles, but as long as you learned, that’s the most important thing I think.

So how can you problem solve in a workplace? 

Anything from something minor like fixing the Wi Fi, fixing a computer, fixing kettle, they are all problem solving. So initially asked me, well, what’s the problem? or how can I make this current situation better? You can always improve just incrementally try something, try different lead and maybe see what the result is and just document what that result is, and see, can you improve?

So how can you bring this creativity in your graduate roles?

I would learn around the subject and draw on your own past experiences. I don’t think there’s, no such thing as a stupid suggestion. All ideas are good ideas. A lot of the time, you need to ask other people for advice as well and see how they would approach something.

Don’t be afraid to take a challenge. Take all the opportunities you can. I still don’t have my own career figured out, I don’t know where I’ll be in 10 years, 20 years time, but I know it’s going to be loads of fun. I would advise anybody to take any opportunity and just have fun along the way.

Interested in KTP at Queen’s. Find out more here.