What sort of work experience were you looking for?
Something to give me insight into what I want to do as a future career. Something which involved music, a bit of art, graphic design, and bringing everything together which I am interested in.
Where did you apply?
I applied to BlueJam first. I looked on the website which is a database of places you can apply to.
Was BlueJam on it?
Yes I saw BJ on it and decided to apply for that.
If you hadn't seen BlueJam on the site would you have applied?
I was looking for a graphic design place to go to originally, when I saw BlueJam I realised I could do work experience here.
So the website was useful?
Yeah.
This week, you were by yourself, doing work experience. How did you find that?
Interesting. Working independently has been a useful experience, because I usually work with people, but I work better on my own.
Is that doing graphics mainly or music?
Any kind of work - it allows me to think. But especially graphics, though, because there are no distractions.
Can you tell me what activities you/ve taken part in this week?
Monday morning I tried to use Sibelius - so I began the week with something challenging! Then put it into a real environment assisting at a samba class at Tebay primary school. It was good.
On Tuesday we made plans to add parts to the sound sculpture with Lawrence and Jolly - we did drawings and annotations, and mind mapping scribbling on a piece of paper. Then we bought pieces of wood!
Wednesday we made the xylophone (see picture) made a mess, tidied up. The rest of the week was spent making a poster using Illustrator (which is a program I know), making a web page, helping with accounts, recording rhythms and more mind-mapping - Lawrence was giving me advice and bringing his own experience to help me with my marimba project.
Also, with Gordon, we tidied the BlueJam storeroom and tuned all the samba drums.
What do you think you contributed to the organisation? What was the balance between BlueJam giving you training, and you assisting BlueJam?
Well, during the work experience I seemed to learn a lot. I picked up a lot of skills on teaching rhythms, how to put it into pratice and keeping the attention of the people in the group. also how I could understand the rhythms myself for own playing. I was given lots of work which I was able to do, such as, making the poster and tuning the samba drums.