CAREERS - Five Crucial Questions to ask when choosing GCSEs, A-Levels and Further/ Higher Education

Parents - do you ever wish you could give your children opportunities you did not have yourselves? This blog also contains some Degree Courses that you might not have heard of. When choosing GCSEs, A-Levels and University careers, believing that creative careers could result in fulfilling and financially rewarding careers for your children, positively impact mental health AND keep music and arts ALIVE for humans.

Some people might think that work is not meant to be enjoyable. That it is a necessary chore to pay bills. It is easy to see how this view can be arrived at when it is all that one has ever known. Whether your personal experiences with job satisfaction, I have seen that it is possible to find (or create) work that is not only personally meaningful but allows us to make the most of our BEST qualities. Even if not every project is our favourite, for there to be moments of high satisfaction in our work is something worthy to aspire to. As a teacher, my job is not just to transfer knowledge to my students - it is to be a catalyst for the sake of my students. If this has sparked your curiosity, then please read on…

I arrived at my Five Crucial Questions via a process of Response and Reflection.

But if you do not wish to read this, just scroll down to Five Crucial Questions!

RESPONSE

As I described myself recently, I am a bizarre intersection of virtuoso classical piano and DIY creative arts, and I find that this has given me insights that are unusual to those whose experience has been mostly in just one of these worlds.

Some of you may know that I have been improvising music for/ with the Comediasians, the UK's first Asian Improv Comedy Team. One of the improvisers is called Kelsey Yuhara, and she invited us to virtually attend a performance festival called Catalyst in the Cloud. Together with her team, Kelsey had created a final piece for her Masters Degree work at Mountview.

“Radio Imagination is broadcasting live from a tree top in a coastal town in Japan recently hit by a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami. Our host, DJ Ark, reflects on his life, while messages arrive from other souls. Only together they can answer: what is Radio Imagination?” (Based on the novel by Seiko Ito. Music by Rio Harada-Parr. Translated by Yuka Harada-Parr. Directed by Kelsey Yuhara. Produced by Masaaki Sagara).

Watching the mysterious, experimental and offbeat piece, “Radio Imagination” transported me away from my day of stress not just to a place of relaxation, but creative inspiration. I also watched several of the other videos and was highly impressed. The power to tell stories is much hungered for by people of all ages and backgrounds. Look how people flock to TikTok – It's about telling and sharing stories.

Yet it was also a saddening and frustrating reminder for me that despite my personal creative journey, I have yet to converse with the students of my music students about the fact that a music and performing arts industry EXISTS, and that there are deeply fulfilling careers possibilities. I wondered what I could do to help parents and students realistically imagine the possibilities of one day working in our valuable creative industries.

I have decided to make a start by looking at some of the courses offered by Mountview.

Now, it is commonplace to be impressed by the names of famous institutions that one has heard of before – such as Oxford and Cambridge. But the problem with that is that certain names just get heard of more and more, others go unnoticed.

FDA/BA (HONS) Theatre Production Arts - Lighting

There are also Postgraduate Level and Foundation courses. If you’re nosy like me you might like to go and look at the alumni page. By the way, I am not being paid to endorse Mountview, I am merely listing their courses because at a glance, parents and students can see what degrees exist. Especially if it is not something you have ever considered as a “proper” career before, make some notes and check out similar courses and compare. One reason that families stay in the same line of business is a fear of change and a lack of confidence! But when you go to university, or take up a course, the learning curve can be steep and full of hard work. That’s education for you. If this article helps just ONE student and their parent/s to look into a creative career, it would have been worth all this typing!

REFLECTION

I know I need to break out of my solitary existence as a private teacher and start talking to other teachers. I met a few amazing teachers last year who really inspired me to be myself. Integrity involves honesty. Teachers and teacher trainers like Karl C. Pupé and Monica Gaga inspired me to speak up and voice my opinion.

Art is often devalued and seen as “useless” in comparison to professions such as a doctor, lawyer, accountant, engineer. But art and creativity are immensely powerful. Performance and creative arts enable people to feel feelings that might otherwise be stuck with nowhere to go. Performance and creative arts play an enormous role in society – from live music at important social human occasions, birthdays, weddings, funerals, to coping with crowded tube journeys, stress, or depression. I view the job of an artist as being like an Imagination Doctor.

When you watch a film or TV programme, it is very likely that a human being created the music and visuals for it, performed in it, and promoted it. The production exists because either a person or a team of people worked together to make it happen. Learning how to be one of those people is only as mysterious as googling one of the job titles that you see on the credits after a programme.

As well as a greater cultural impact, when I spend the effort and energy to create, it is a personally meaningful experience. If you create your own products you might not need to buy as many things (cutting down one’s consumerism). I tend to make birthday cards and presents (songs and art).

You don't have to be on stage!

Aside jobs like Lighting, Sound and Artist Management, it can be useful for parents to consider how jobs they might be more familiar with exist in TV and Film Production – such as Project Management, Project Coordinator, Administration, HR, Accounts and so on. The difference is that when working with and/ or supporting performers, an understanding of what it means to be a performer comes in very handy. I have experienced sensitivity and encouragement during commissions, collaborations and consultations with various people from Chinese Arts Now and The Bitten Peach UK (who were trained in performance and either chose to manage artists as their main role or as part of their work) . These experiences reminded me that training in performance (and/or creative arts) builds both technical and practical skills, inventiveness, problem-solving and COMMUNICATION. All these are useful in many many industries - so career switches are still possible.

It can work the other way around too. Did I tell you about my friend who decided to switch from being a design magazine editor to medicine in his late twenties - I think it was. He’s a GP now! Think that’s another blog though..

You do NOT have to be famous to be successful and make a living in your field

It is important to be intelligent and critical here. The purpose of people who work in mainstream media (TV and newspapers) is to generate revenue from advertisers and to maintain their income. This explains the commonplaceness of sensational / highly surprising stories of overnight success or established artists whose readers/ watchers are already interested in. The story of someone who worked hard for a long time is not always a great media sell. But it IS the story parents and students need to hear when it comes to the arts. It is also the story of how people came to be doctors and lawyers. There is quite a bit of tedious work, but then one collects the knowledge and experience to make important changes.

Here are five crucial aspects to considering when thinking about possible future careers.

FIVE CRUCIAL QUESTIONS:

“Do I feel deeply passionate about this area of study?”
“Does the sound of this course fill me with excitement, bliss and empowerment?”
“Would I love to spend my life doing a job using these skills?”
“What jobs have students graduating from this institution gone on to do?”
“Do students like me have a positive experience attending this institution?”

The point about background "(“Do students like me”) feels important to me. After some years of researching decolonising opinions, I have now realised that most of my life has been lived as some kind of ode to a British colonial way of thinking which my parents were raised under (in Hong Kong) and which they aspired to on settling in the UK. While people are often surprised that my parents “let me study” music, the fact was I had two generations of music teachers ahead of me, and my grandfather (and his brother) had defied their father to self-study music. In fact, I studied English literature (it's a long story!!) The irony is I ACTUALLY wanted to study Fine Art, but my parents didn't understand that it could lead to a proper or useful career. I have spent the last decade proving them wrong. There are lots of useful skills and career options for people with art and creative skills. Nonetheless, I use my sense of innovation where I can!

Not until recently have I begun to explore the experience of growing up as an LGBTIQ+ East Asian in a white majority culture, that idealises whiteness and heterosexuality. I grew up feeling like an anomaly, and I took this to my higher education. Young people may have confidence issues around body image, heritage and other aspects – and I think this is partly due to visibility issues in the media, but also a lack of willingness and motivation to explore these issues. I think that confidence issues can particularly affect POC, mixed heritage young people, as well as all sorts of young people for various reasons. In 2018, over 86% of school teachers in the UK were white. There are fewer than 3% of Black school teachers in the UK. The reasons behind this and the repercussions are MASSIVE, (which would need to be covered in a separate post). Schools, syllabuses and education are a contination of white colonialist idealogies. As entertaining and fun as it can be, creative and performance are some of the few areas to seek and artfully convey difficult truths and critiques. What is education for if not to encourage us to grow our minds?

There is a certain amount of snobbery about which institution one attends. Yet what seems to be a time-honoured and famous institution may well have produced some household names, but also could be taking the focus from other insitutions with quality teaching and courses that will help students be their best selves….

Thousands and thousands of music artists/ teachers/ music professionals exist who I have not heard of (yet). Just because they didn't go to a famous institution doesn't mean they didn't work hard to be successful in their field, and make a positive contribution to the community/ies which can bring us empowerment and bliss.

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NEW WORK ADDED! - Film-Music Composition, Visuals for Animation, Student Work, Family-themed Comedy and more!

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higher education, creativityThe Mollusc Dimension26 June 2020