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theessaflett · 3 years

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Life as a Neurodiverse Person

Written for Neuro-Topical

How has your neurodiversity helped or hindered your creative outlet?

My two types of neurodiversity affect my life and my career in very different ways. My dyscalculia is very much a learning difficulty rather than a learning ‘difference’, in that it literally makes some things much more difficult. A lot of people understand dyscalculia as ‘numbers dyslexia’, and it is, but it also means I find things like excel spreadsheets, colour coded timetables, maps, instruction manuals and non-visual directions very hard to process too. I have a chip on my shoulder the size of the Titanic about being ‘stupid’ because I’m unable to do simple maths, and I often have to explain to well-meaning people that them explaining something to me multiple times slower and louder won’t help, or that their assurances that I must be able to do maths really because ‘I seem clever’ just rub salt in the wound. I do not love my dyscalculia, even if I have come to accept that it is a part of who I am. Sometimes it comes across as an endearing quirk, sometimes I know it’s frustrating for those around me; it certainly always is for me. It’s hard to imagine a world where numbers make sense - I’ve only ever known one where they’re just abstract forms with no meaning, symbols that obstinately refuse to translate themselves into a language that I understand. A ‘5’ will always just be a bunch of strangely drawn lines, it will never make sense that 20 + 20 = 40 and not 2020, I will always have to print out timetables in black and white to make them more understandable and my life will always be full of countless little things I need to do to help myself function in a world full of numbers, and I’ve more or less made my peace with that. In terms of my actual career, Dyscalculia makes things like counting bar numbers in rehearsals, manning merch stalls at gigs and understanding Doodle polls tricky but it’s never been a huge issue.

Being on the autistic spectrum, however, has not been particularly problematic either in my career or in life in general. It may mean that I find things like ‘casual after-rehearsal pub hang outs’, unexpected venue changes, relying on public transport to get me to a gig in time, unstructured lunch breaks or knowing that I can’t control all the variables of a group ensemble rehearsal stressful, but it also means that I am excellent at focusing and coming up with new ideas, I don’t waste time on small talk, I’m incredibly empathetic (sometimes to a fault - looking at you, fictional characters in books of whom I inevitably “feel the feelings” like they’re real people) and I have good leadership skills, all classic traits of autism in women. I tend to feel ‘different’, like I was wired unusually, and although that can be lonely it also means that I’m a useful member to have on the team. Again, people’s presumptions about what someone who experiences neurodiversity looks like come into play - whenever someone tells me that I can’t be autistic because I’m “Good at speaking to people” or that “We’re all a little autistic” I want to ask them if they regularly lie awake at night worrying because they’re getting a bus somewhere the next day, or made a conversation spreadsheet for themselves ahead of a social situation In case they freeze, or tried to listen to someone talking in a pub when their brain is also tuning into the seven other conversations happening around them and also trying to work out what song is playing on the radio, or had a panic attack in the loos because too many unexpected things have happened in one day and their brain is having a meltdown. Sometimes being on the autistic spectrum means finishing a massive project in just one day because you have superhuman focusing skills, and sometimes it means internally screaming because you were planning to have your morning cup of tea from Pret a Manger but they’re closed and it’ll have to be from Costa instead but YOU’D PLANNED FOR YOUR CUP OF TEA TO BE FROM PRET AND NOW LIFE IS AWFUL.

Being neurodiverse isn’t easy, and it’s often misunderstood. but it can be a thing of beauty, and without my neurodiversity I wouldn’t be, well, me. And being me is a pretty good thing to be.

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sevdrag · 7 years

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dreamwidth update: the sweet subtleness of time

...or some other shittastic ~~pensive~~ title because I'm so fucking out of goddamn fucks already it's the 14th half of january is gone jesus christ stop fucking moving so fast i would like off this ride thanks

I like the organization of "new year resolutions" not really because I believe you need to wait for a calendar year to make serious changes, but because there's something very neat about the way things can slot into having to write a new date on all your sign-offs and checks do people still use checks? i only have to sign them at work and lists and notes; to the excel spreadsheet that is my mind1, I like the way aligning change with change sorts itself.

This year I am returning to quantifiable goals in some ways, since the general vagueness of "do X more" may be more friendly but does not truly work in the lifestyle I have at the moment. I wanted to do a deep introspective post as a lead in but fuck that, I already have two truly severe horror stories about 20172 and it's the 14th, but I feel like I want to make a statement about the year before I devolve back into bitchcraft and wizardry.

As another change this year, I am looking for friends to help keep me accountable to these things. I've already roped and wrangled a couple people along with me, but if you have similar goals, let's discuss ways we can shame uh motivate SHAME each other into proceeding, or mainly just me, I require someone to - not compete with, but to keep up with, in a way, anyway, I am terrible so do stop.

So here is a list of my intentions for what I have labeled 12/52/365/20173:

Health. Rather than breaking this down into a tale of my woes and triggering an actual breakdown I will instead list the targets:

Get more than 4.5 hours of (good, deep, REM) sleep on average. According to my Fitbit, my average in 2016 was below 4.5 hours4. This involves a lot of things, including going to bed earlier and somehow figuring out how robots relax.

Working out. My goal for working out is to visit the gym - or otherwise work out - on at least 1/3 of the days of 2017: 122/365/2017. 122 visits. This is 2-3 workouts a week on average which should be doable for someone with fibro, assuming I keep them reasonable.

General. Continue stocking and making healthy food at home. Drink less at home5. Go back to packing lunches for work.

Weight/Size. Due to medication changes, 3 surgeries, and a major job change with severely increased my responsibilities, I gained 25-30 lb in 2017, putting me into the beginnings of an unhealthy place I don't want to be6. It's also fairly annoying to be at the upper limit of most of my clothing, to be frank. My goal is to use the above 3 points to try to lose 25+ pounds in 2017, OR return to the range of a size 8-107 where my clothing lives. 25/2017. A half a pound a week will do.

Writing. lassarina is my partner here; we have pledged to write a fic a week of at least 100 words using a list of prompts we gathered earlier. (Of course, I am already behind, although I plan to work on that immediately after this entry.) 52/2017. The hope, of course, is that writing small things helps to spur the writing of larger things. They will be posted on AO3 and linked from here.

subgoal: at least 1 entry a week on DW (52/2017), and 1 entry a week on my secret business blog which I will share once I have some substance (52/2017).

Art. justira is my partner here; we have, quite hilariously, pledged to draw a thing a day. For Ira, those things may be recognizable as art; for me, I reserve the right to draw a shit doodle with my finger on my iPhone, as long as it is a drawing of some sort. They'll be posted right here at the Feymarch Library where most of my art shame lives.

Home. Of course I have big statements to make about the first floor remodel I want to do, but honestly this is about habits, so my 2017 goal is to declutter my life. Every day I will do at least 1 chore dedicated to decluttering my home8 or otherwise making my life easier (cooking a big meal for the week, etc).

Mental. A few mantras I am focusing on:

Allow hobbies to be chores. This sounds counter-intuitive, but last year I got away from a lot of hobbies I love because I had "so much other shit to do" that was more important in my mind. This year, writing, art, knitting, gaming, reading; these are allowed to be chores I can give priority to. It's okay to write if I still have dishes to do.

Recharge your battery. If I have a night where I am truly in too much pain to do anything, I need to stop whining and griping about that, and instead focus on my own comfort and recovery, because self-care is allowed to be a priority, also.

Ground myself. I'm not a nice person by default9 so making a pledge to share the love or be kinder doesn't really mean anything to me; but I believe I can eliminate some of the negative energy by grounding myself more and letting it just pass on into the neutral environment rather than building up a static charge.

Be more of who you are. I lost my way at work somewhat this year faced with a gigantic new challenge with no lessening of my previous responsibilities, interpersonal conflicts, and some sporadic and questionable criticism. Moving forward I need to remember who the fuck I am and be that lady as hard as possible, because that's where I am awesomest.

Allow myself to unplug. I don't have to be tied to my phone - not just for work, but texting with friends or playing stamina games. I can leave it in the corner and just be for an evening.

Work. I need to focus on managing more: I am a manager, not a contributor, and I need to focus more on leading and guiding people in big-picture ways towards improvement. Too many people list me as a project leader or member, when I should not be a worker on anyone's project - and this is what makes my job so unmanageable. It isn't just me letting go; I need to make it clear to others that there should be more than one person who knows how to do the things I do.

Family & Friends.

See my nieces at least once a month. See my parents at least once a quarter.

Continue to work with my partner on this great relationship we have developed. Learn to ask him for help more, and learn where his boundaries are for asking help. Show love and appreciation better. Develop a good schedule for spending more time together - we are both very obviously happier and healthier when we do.

Try to visit someone or travel at least once a quarter -- traveling is really costly to me in terms of energy, but I have broken through some of my traveling-and-health fears last year (Japan!) so it would be cool to travel a bit with friends when the opportunity is there.

Stay in touch: post, email, text. Reach out in new areas.

Seven is my lucky number. That's 2017.

1 (mind palace?? nothing so fancy; my brain is a four-dimensional fully-formulated spreadsheet archive with tabs, complete with charts, graphs, and little programs that sort by categories and make a smiley face out of pixels.)

2 the first, about my fucking furnace; the second, about my fucking supervisor. stay tuned for more great literature on what makes my life a goddamned shitshow shitcom!

3 because I want to quantify it and report on things, see, like the project manager i am

4 Now, the reason I am not dead is because there is also some restless sleep in there, but the problem is twofold: (a) i only get 4.5 fucking hours of the good sleep (b) the good sleep comes in 30-45 minute spurts which is nowhere near what's needed for mental recovery (c) for fibromyalgia one of the most productive and healing things you can do is get REM sleep.

5 lolololoLLOLOLOLLOOLLOOLOLOLLLLLLLLLLL

6 lots of family history of pre-diabetes; I've already noticed my hypoglycemia and blood sugar problems are getting worse. I realize this isn't always correlated to weight but as there is some data pointing that way (scientific as well as family), I want to be sure to avoid it, because dude if you stack fuckin diabetes on top of this stack of medical bullshit I may just ravine myself

7 since women's sizes can never make up their damn minds

8 on bad days this might actually be something like "put dishes in dishwasher" but let's face it sometimes even that doesn't happen

9 nothing against anyone, I'm just kind of sociopathic and hate people in general; i've learnt to "play nice" and I can and do feel love for specific people, but i'm really just not friendly

comments Comment? http://ift.tt/2ixhKTU

#crossposted #dreamwidth

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thebuttermouse · 7 years

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Presentation- The Butter Mouse- How to Build Universes With Creative Upcycling

Slide 1: Intro Slide 'Hello everyone, thank you for coming today. I am going to discuss my latest project, the Butter Mouse, and how it shifted from a rough collection of flash fiction to a fully formed piece of digital storytelling. I will demonstrate how thanks to the plethora of creative online publishing tools and ease of hosting and creating content online, you can mix together scraps of old project, and 'upcycle' them into whole new universes. And finally, I am going to show you how if you do want to work on a creative project, there is no reason why you cannot start working on something this evening Slide 2: Sketchbook, and comic strips From this, I have always been jealous of things like comic strips, where you can build up a huge collection of work by doing lots of little things over a period of time. I always think it must have been remarkable to have worked on something like Andy's House, or The Flamingo Men, and be able to look back on such a huge body of work. It would be great to be in the position. So, and of course I appreciate this is a decision that that hundreds of people have made, I set up a flash fiction blog to keep my writing going. And at that stage that's all it was. I know that doesn't sound like a big deal, and this is what I cannot stress enough. At this point, the Butter Mouse was doodles in a maths exercise book, the creative equivalent of sit ups. Slide 3: Different stories, same title Perhaps by the very nature of the the fact that these were ideas pushed out in a hurry, the stories started to interconnect. And this wasn't just thematically. The title of one piece was the perfect fit for another a few weeks later. For example, there were three different stories that fit the title 'The Horror Tandoori' and three that fit 'Herring Aid.' Also, and this was genuinely never necessarily my intention, but a lot of the stories seemed to be on the weirder end of the spectrum. As I grew in confidence with the blog, they only got more experimental. Slide 4: Twine After a few months, I began to experiment with format as well as narrative. I had previously done some work with Twine, the interactive (and crucially free) fiction software maker, as part of my course at Bath Spa. For those who aren't aware of what Twine does, it is a super easy to use software that allows you to make a 'choose your own adventure style' game, pretty much by just entering text into different boxes. I am not sure how familiar you are with interactive fiction, but usually they are sprawling worlds, more like a very basic form of RPG, that takes several hours to complete, and usually have many different paths you can take. I wondered what it would be like like to create interactive flash fiction, that was less about world building, and more about a quick idea. For example, I created one called Guilt, where no matter what you did, the world ends within three clicks, and on the very first page you have to choose between killing all the children, or killing all the doctors. Again, this was purely experimental, but it was interesting to see how having how basically no choices adds a completely different feel to interactive fiction. So there were definitely some themes and ideas, but it was all a little discombobulated, and I was looking for ways to bring everything together. Slide 5: The Butter Mouse script The key to the project turned out to be the name itself. The Butter Mouse was originally a character in a script I wrote years ago, about puppets who come to life, and vampirically drain the life of the presenters of a children's television programme. Although the script didn't go anywhere, I found the name evocative, and several readers found the name evocative too. To start with I whacked it down as the name of the blog without much thought. But now with the writing coming together, I wondered if there was a way I could use The Butter Mouse name to tie everything in place. Slide 6: Where Is Bill? Photo At the same time, I was thinking about if there was anyway to fit in with a small transmedia project I made on Mars called 'Where Is Bill?' About a worker at the Aqua Park who is captured by aliens. It mixed YouTube videos, fake podcasts, fake blogs, and interactive fiction to tell this story, and although I was pleased with some of the results, it never really had a purpose, and wasn't properly released, so was sitting on my computer's hard drive with little to no value. Slide 7: Upcycle- reuse (discarded objects or material) in such a way as to create a product of higher quality or value than the original. I wondered if there was a way to do a form of creative 'upcycling,', and smash these ideas together. Nothing intrinsically tied the flash fiction, the title, and the transmedia project, but was there a way they could join? For anyone who is unsure what upcycling is, I have included a definition on the screen. So this is how they play off each other. The Butter Mouse is now a creature that is able to travel between different dimensions. All of the stories then become accounts of what it has seen on its journey, or fake factual accounts of people discussing where they have seen The Butter Mouse. And with a few rewrites, Bill in Where Is Bill is has no longer been captured by aliens, but has slipped into a different dimension. This is where the ease and cheapness of available software, editing and publishing online prevailed. I went back through the all the work on The Butter Mouse, and tweaked the odd thing here and there to make it fit this new brief. I re-edited the videos, podcasts and blogs in Where Is Bill, and next mont they will be posted on the blog. So with no extra cost, and some working tying everything together, these scraps of forgotten ideas and writing exercises have turned into something new, greater than the sum of its parts. Slide 8: One of the 'article sections' What this resulted in was a whole new flavour to The Butter Mouse. It now has the feel of a conspiracy theory, more in line with creepypasta and Illuminati Youtube videos. This means it is the fictional work on it feels suited to the internet. A being that travels through dimensions is no less out there than the conspiracy theory that Finland doesn't exist. This is not just writing that has been put online, but a project that suits being published online. Slide 9: Experimental stuff Though The Butter Mouse has come together from scraps of various projects into something new it still has its original function as a writing exercise. Only now the small, weird ideas are perfectly acceptable a look into a world different to our own. This allows me the freedom to experiment with any weird ideas without damaging the over all narrative. There is a story you can only read by following the clues in the story before. A story that is sideways, because the writing is in another dimension. Some weeks it is just a monster move in five hundred worlds It all fits the brief, because rather than lots of esoteric stories that don't connect, it all forms one larger narrative. Write down a minute of your dreams on the back of a receipt, and it won't make any sense to anyone who reads it. Make a dream journal, and they come together into a logical document. This culminated in the final idea of working out what the Butter Mouse actually is. That dependent on what dimension you were in, the creature could turn into anything. It might be a mouse shaped piece of graffiti on the wall, it might be something like a tiger. Anything at all. And in our dimension, in the world we inhabit, The Butter Mouse is the Tumblr account, The Butter Mouse. So technically, we are in the world of the Butter Mouse right now. Anything that could happen, could end up as a story. Which is about as far away as you can get from literary sit-ups. Slide 10: Upcycling in picture. What I hope you can take from it is that if you have any scraps of old project, it is now so easy to bring them together. I have always considered that creative time is never wasted. Now for me creative time is always making new resources, like spinning wool even if you are not sure what the jumper will turn out like. It is just a case of finding a way for them to tie together, or be converted by new media into a way that makes sense. What I've started doing is looking through old laptops and hard drives, to see if there is anything that can be cannibalised. Next week I have combined videos of Bristol and Osaka Zoo to make footage of another dimension, and next year I am going to get as many of my old holiday photos as possible, and turn them into a year travel blog from an alternate universe. Just as the work on the blog is creative flotsam and jetsam, so do they become flotsam and jetsam from another dimension. Slide 11: Spreadhseets And I also hope it can show you that whatever the situation you are in, you can keep a project going on in the background. Twine, Tumblr and Youtube are completely free to use and public. On total, the whole project has cost me basically nothing, and now spans dimensions. Now, I fully appreciate that I was lucky to have these resources to hand. To have script and the wreckage of a transmedia to weld onto the side of a flash fiction blog, and call it esoteric science fiction is a situation bespoke to me. But I hope it shows you that if you have stuff that is simply hanging around, why not try and stitch it together? What is the worst you can happen? Is there no way you can mix your cooking blog with your song lyrics, and call it a ghost story? And even if you don't have a library of material, think about what skills you can smash together instead. If you are good at making spreadsheets, why not make a crime thriller story made in Excel? Can you find your old emails to your an ex-girlfriend, and cut them down into romantic haikus? Even if some of it doesn't work, surely it is better than nothing. Upcycle your old material into something new, and use the strengths of online publishing to make it something people can view. Just like an old piece of furniture can be remade on wet Sunday afternoons, regardless of your creative skill set, and what time/budget you can put into your story, you can make something that will regenerate old and forgotten ideas, and push you to experiment without the restrictions of traditional media. So just a final point to emphasise that you really can turn any skill or piece of work into a creative project, if you check The Butter Mouse tumblr account in about an hour, a fictional version of this presentation will form this week's story. And right now in millions of multiple universes, slightly different versions of this blog are being presented and posted online, by beings of all shapes and sizes, all with slightly different lives. So, I want to thank you all for being part of The Butter Mouse. Thank you.

#blog #flashficwed #horror #scifi #podcast #tips #presentation #PowerPoint #amwriting #mix #mix2017

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themelessness · 7 years

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A story I need to tell *TW: suicide/depression*

Hi, I’m 17.

This is the weather from last night. See that big rainy mess that blankets central Texas in the evening? That’s what I was in the middle of last night, working at the neighborhood pool for a ‘security’ company hired by my community’s HOA. I had the 4-10pm shift, which I had signed myself up for, thinking it wouldn’t be as hot (Texas summer) and probably not as busy, being a Sunday night.

What no one saw coming was that big rainy mess. The temperature dropped ten degrees, and I was outside, just under a covered patio, at a folding table in a pool chair under a fleece blanket. At 1800 (6 pm) I texted my boss to ask if I should leave, as I had closed the pool after the overcast had become a thunderstorm. He told me to never leave unless he instructs me to. Fair enough, he doesn’t want the pool suddenly abandoned of staff without warning.

So it’s getting dark, it’s getting colder, it’s raining, there are thunder and lightning, and I message the Boss again, saying I should really leave. More agitated, he tells me I don’t make the rules, and I need to stay to keep people from trying to get into the pool. I’m not in a neighborhood where “trouble kids” are going to be trying to get into the pool in the middle of a thunderstorm, if their moms even let them out of the house. Our gate as an automated lock that’s on a timer, and I bet I could have figured out how to override it to stay locked until the next morning, but the control panel was in another building, and it would involve running out into the storm in my worn-down Chucks on the wet concrete, or worse, doing it barefoot. So I stayed put.

Until the depression kicked in.

I took this job at the pool to be around people, to be busy with checking the chemicals and keeping people safe, to be able to sit and doodle in the evening sun with the breeze blowing through the covered patio of the front gate, which is exactly what all of my coworkers have experienced. We all love the job, and for $8 an hour, no one was complaining about having to use a little bug spray at night. But sitting there alone, cold, scared, out in the storm, I started to go a little blank, I became numb. And something in me told me, it only takes three hours to die of exposure. I remembered a Girl Scout training course I did for outdoor emergency survival, where it was also instructed that water and rain can speed up that time frame, lowering human body temperature much faster, often irreparably. I wrote a goodbye letter on my clipboard, Mental illness is as much an illness of the body as it is of the mind. When the brain is sick, as is the whole being. And I stood up, and I walked out into the rain.

I couldn’t feel a thing. I didn’t need to think, and I wasn’t. Everything I usually think about when I get the dark feelings was gone. My dog, my friends, my desire to see Italy again, were all gone from my mind. I was at peace. I was cold, I’d gone numb, and I was ready to go.

I stopped answering my phone. I stood in the rain for nearly an hour before my ex boyfriend pulled into the pool parking lot, umbrella and blankets and towels in hand, and came inside the gate. He dragged me back under the cover, I fought and kicked and struggled. He dried me and wrapped me in towels, and gave me his own warm socks and slippers for my feet. My mom pulled into the lot shortly after he did. He took me to the car, and we sat with my mom for a few minutes before he drove home.

I texted my boss again to tell him I was leaving. He scolded me. Mom and I went back into the gates to finish closing up the pool. I left the keys in the lockbox and turned off the lights. When we got home, I saw that he had sent me a message to tell me to leave my staff shirt in the supply closet, I was fired.

“Never abandon a job site, it’s against protocol. You are done working for this company.”

I never signed a contract. We were all paid by checks left in the pool binder, anyone could access them. These ‘policies’ were not posted anywhere, I had given him warning.

And it was 63 degrees and storming on a Sunday night in May in the southern United States. I had to be dragged away from the pool, I was so cold.

I’m not an adult, I’m not a security guard, I’m not contracted or paid a living wage, or even a lifeguard. My job is to check addresses of people who walk into the pool gates, and occasionally check the Chlorine and pH levels of the two pools we have. I was not abandoning a job site, there was no job for me to do. I’m not the security electrician responsible for knowing how the automated system works. I’m not the chemical technician responsible for the pumps and filters of the plumbing equipment, or the giant chlorine tank I could be fully submerged in. I’m not a medical attendant. I’m a kid that sits with a laptop open to an Excel spreadsheet that types in the first couple letters of a last name to make sure that the people who walk in are actually supposed to be there. That’s it. In a storm, the pool is closed, I have no work to do. I was fired, for not doing my job - nothing.

And yes, I added to my cold because I walked out willingly into the storm but that’s how cold it was. Cold enough that I could simply stand there and wait to die. Even a healthy person with no history of mental illness would have become very sick waiting for the shift to end that night. And I was fired, for taking care of myself. If I had stayed put under the cover with my little blanket for four hours, I’d be worse off than I am now, having stood in the rain for just under an hour, because someone came to my rescue. If I had stayed through the end of my shift, no help, I likely wouldn’t have been able to move or call for help by 10.

So sue me, Ben. At least I’m alive.

#may 21 2017

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alexandriatilleyphotography · 7 years

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The Interview

After the presentation, I received 11 emails for both first and second year students, all of which included 150 words of why they wanted to be apart of the SBC. We gave a deadline for the emails, and after the deadline myself and Sam constructed an email to ask for portfolio’s as well as discussing the possibilities for interviews, the email was as followed;

Dear All,

Thank you for your applications for the role of Assistant Photographer for the South Bank Collective.

We would like to give you all the opportunity to participate in the interview process and we will shortly be sending out a sign up sheet where you can apply for a slotted time.

The 20 minute long interviews will be held on the Monday 27th February. First years we are aware you have lectures on the Monday, so we will hold interviews before the lectures and on the lunch breaks. Second year students will be held throughout the day.

Please would each individual send me a link to their portfolio or a PDF that represents the area that they would most like to work on, e.g - previous event work, portraiture or examples of retouching. The deadline for the portfolios are Wednesday 22nd February, so myself and Samantha have time to review them before the interviews.

The interview and portfolio review will be a friendly conversation for you to get used to the collective's atmosphere.

We look forward to meeting you all.

Best Wishes,

Alex & Sam

We wanted to set a deadline for the portfolios as myself and Sam wanted to be able to get an idea of what photography the students focused on. We created documents for each that included the 150 words of the student and combined this with the portfolios so we had a good idea of the applicants and their strengths.

When the deadline was upcoming, myself and Sam had to construct another email on the 20th to remind the candidates about the portfolios as some were leaving the deadline a little late, and myself and Sam really wanted the students to understand that this is a serious deadline, and a serious application. However we understood they may be nervous to send them, and we therefore reminded them that there was nothing to worry about. The email was as follows;

Dear All,

This email is to remind you that the portfolio deadline is this Wednesday, 22nd February.

The portfolio's are compulsory for the Interviews so they can be reviewed. It is nothing to be worried about, it is just so we can get an idea of your current abilities.

This is a professional business and it is incredibly important that deadlines etc are to be taken seriously.

If you do have any problems with your portfolio, then please email us before the deadline.

Best Wishes,

Alex and Sam

We then sent a following email for a sign up sheet for the interviews. Myself and Sam explored two options for the sign up sheets, a site called ‘Doodle’ which promotes easy scheduling, however we went with using Google Docs excel and creating out own sign up sheet as we found this easier. However it is still useful to know about Doodle for future references. The email went was as followed; Dear All,

The interviews on Monday 27th will be held at both the Clarence Centre (DC112) and in Keyworth (K120). Please appreciate that the times 9.40-10.40 and 13-13.40 are reserved for the 1st years due to them having lectures on this day.

Below is a link in order to put your name in a time slot;

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QNAtJDysr5cRQxwV3MiPNMl_lpPPN6B6yaKwcIBOxao/edit?usp=sharing

Also please don't forget to send your portfolio's if you haven't already!

Best,

Alex Tilley

Quite quickly people signed up, however a few emailed saying there were unable to make it, in which I had to negotiate new timings that fitted in with both mine and Sam’s schedule as well as their own.

The process of creating sign up sheets, emailing people for new interviews times and for portfolio made me improve upon my response time to the emails, as well as become much better at writing formal emails and chasing up people without being rude. This has given me an insight into how much planning goes into organising interviews, and this will help me in the future into holding interviews for myself and Sams company as I have a clearer understanding of the processes.

#professionalpracticepromotion

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