DMUsed to It

Yesterday I finished my final stint at De Montfort University. This time round, as a member of staff than as a student.

I remember very clearly, as a student, fighting the upper management, trying to get something good out of them. They sucked massive balls. Hard. So naturally, when they offered me a job I immediately accepted it without question. I would be working for the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences instead of the Faculty of Technology (the faculty I belonged to when I studied). The Faculty of HLS is the biggest and best faculty in the university, so naturally I thought everything would be well managed and things would be fine.

Well, that's how it started.

I was hired originally to make a video for the July graduation ceremonies. Cleverly, HLS decided to get a head start on it so that they could have the best video out of all the faculties and wouldn't have to run around at the last minute trying to get it done in one go. And of course, who better to hire than the best videographer on campus? Precisely. This was ideal. Five months to work on a project that didn't need to be finished at all until the end of June. I've made awesome videos in a couple of days, so this should have been a synch.

Obviously, this got put on the back burner a bit. Since I had so long, I decided to do lots of research and loads of pre-production (everything involved in planning a video before you film it) so that when it came to putting the video together, it would be awesome. So in the meantime, I started working on "e-induction" videos. E-inductions are, as every fresher will know, the online course that you take before arriving at the university. Since I was around, we decided to turn a lot of the on-screen text into video form, to make the whole experience (hopefully) less tedious.

This is where the nightmare began.

I had to organise every programme leader and every head of school and get them to agree to a filming date, go through the pre-production phase with all of them and hopefully make some damn videos. This mostly went okay. Trying to talk to lecturers is a pain, because they don't have PAs, but otherwise most of them were an absolute pleasure to work with.

You know what's worse than trying to talk to and organise lecturers? Trying to talk to and organise students. My word. The graduation video was back, and I needed lots of students. Again, this mostly went okay, but I was missing all the students from one of the schools. One student said it so well:

"I would have taken part, but my perception of DMU is so bad right now, that I wouldn't be appropriate. And honestly, everyone is feeling the same."

Ah. I won't go into why every student from that particular school was angry for legal reasons, but you get the idea. Things started to unravel.

So I had a video, somewhat incomplete. The e-induction videos were going swimmingly, with a couple of hitches but hey, that's the media industry. The end of my time at DMU was fast approaching, and so I needed to sort out what this graduation video was supposed to look like.

"Yeah, the upper management of the university haven't yet decided what to actually do with the graduation videos from the other faculties so... We can't really do anything more yet."

WHAT?! I'd been working on this video for ages, getting stressed out, ready to crack on with the final edit, and suddenly I've been told that it's been put on hold. And guess what, that's the way it's stayed.

I had to end my time at DMU with an incomplete project. And it sucks. I've told them that I'll happily finish it once the university has decided what they're doing, but this is silly. To think that we planned so far ahead, only to turn around and go back to the beginning months later.

I realise that I've done a lot of slating about DMU here. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed my job. And in every single job ever, you are going to have to deal with people who don't seem to fully understand what it is you do, or how hard you've been working, but mostly you won't actually come into contact with them. They'll just annoy you from afar. I worked with some brilliant folks, who helped me when I needed it and mostly let me get on with my projects, and allowed me to be fully flexible with my hours. It was one of the best jobs I've ever had, and I'd do it all again. DMU is a good university, but it does need to sort out its shit every now and then.

So there we have it. Another door closed. With my leaving of DMU, I'll also soon be leaving Leicester. The next chapter of my life is about to begin, and I have no idea what road I'm going down. Recently I've had some excellent changes to my life that are going to make my time back in Kettering genuinely amazing, included in this are some new projects that I'll explain soon and of course News Man episode 2 is well underway, with more of it being completed daily.

Things are good right now. Very good.

In other news, I was working at the old Park today, and I made some new best friends. Every time they went on my ride, they'd fist bump me, tell me what number ride they were on, and we'd have a laugh before I pushed the button that made them go away again. Before long, they exclaimed "SQUAD!" and I had no idea what this meant. Apparently, this means that I'm now part of their crew, or indeed "squad". I feel like this is going to be a thing.

Pete out, squad.