For the past few days I have been working at CME as a music workshop assistant. It wasn’t much like I expected it to be but in a good way. The atmosphere here is very relaxed and a nice place to be. On the first day I had an induction telling me a bit more about the job. Shortly afterwards I observed the Learning Foundation workshop that was taking place here. In this workshop there are a few different courses going on. These are the digital audio course, the digital sampling course and the digital art course.
My job at first was to just talk to the students and find out about what they were doing. One of the students doing the digital art course was making an album cover for a CD which was being made by the students doing the audio course. This tied in the two courses well. One of the things I liked about it was that the tutors tended to have better relationships with the students than teachers at school, for instance. At school it tends to be a teacher standing at the front of the classroom telling everyone what they have to do and there isn’t much compromise in it, whereas here it is much more about user centred learning. The tutors work together with the students in a friendly atmosphere to achieve goals and everyone is happy to do it. I had lots of fun talking to everyone and joined in playing instruments with them.
On the second day I had the job of updating the contacts database. This involved telephoning a list of people and checking their contact details. Later on I was told to familiarise myself with a recording program called Garage Band which is often used in music workshops. I had a lot of fun with this and recorded the start of a song and learnt how to use the program.
On the second day I had the job of updating the contacts database. This involved telephoning a list of people and checking their contact details. Later on I was told to familiarise myself with a recording program called Garage Band which is often used in music workshops. I had a lot of fun with this and recorded the start of a song and learnt how to use the program.
Another of the jobs I had to do was attend a meeting with the other new employees. This gave us a chance to meet the people we would be working with in the future. We were also shown and signed up to a site called Linked In which can be used to keep music and business contacts on. Another site we were shown was the Music Leader website. This had lots of information about available music jobs as well as upcoming training events etc.
Some of the other tasks I have been given included re-stringing a guitar, deciding what equipment to take to a workshop, copying and preparing some DVDs for promotional use, and various other jobs. Overall I have thoroughly enjoyed my first week of working here. Most of the time it doesn’t feel like work at all and the time goes really quickly. Although the placement is only six months I will gain lots of experience, skills and training in this area of work and it should help be to find other jobs equally as enjoyable and relevant to my interests when this one has finished.
