#if an UAL degree can’t get me a good job
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Isabella of France VS Hugh Despenser
My cat modeled for all four historical figures — simply because I don’t know what these people looked like
Left background figure (wearing armour and waving pom poms) Roger Mortimer, Isabella’s alleged lover
Left foreground figure (wearing a red dress with armour and holding a pole axe) Isabella of France
Right foreground figure (wearing a hat and holding a sword) Hugh Despenser, Edward II’s alleged lover
Right background figure (wearing kingly attire and shedding tears) Edward II, Isabella’s husband
I found this particular fragment of history fascinating because it showed us the ruthless ambition of both women and queer men in medieval times, a contrast to society’s common perception of them from that era. This manuscript by the French chronicler Jean De Wavrin is not only a gruesome retelling of this event, but also a campy propaganda ; Have I not seen this manuscript from an exhibition, I’d never know these people existed, it also shows that historical women and queer men were sidelined in collective consciousness.
I’d like to read Alison Weir’s She-wolf of France to know more.
Manuscript by Jean De Wavrin from the “Medieval women” exhibition at the British Library.
#also an excuse to draw my cat again#didn’t bring him to the UK#i miss him so much#medieval manuscript#medieval history#isabella of france#Hugh Despenser#lol#edward ii#british history#my art#illustration#if an UAL degree can’t get me a good job#I can at least draw cats for a living#cat art#cats#damn
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Industry Research
Who is leading in the field?
Marketing Week present their Masters Awards back in 2019, across a variety of different categories in marketing such as ‘Brand of the Year’, ‘Marketing Team of the Year’ and ‘Best Use of a Small Budget’. The company that snapped up the award for ‘Agency of the Year’ were Mother, an agency set up in 1996 to be 100% independent, and free from private equity firms and holding companies. Clients for the agency include; IKEA, KFC, UberEats, PG Tips, Greenpeace and many more.
What is really interesting about the company, is that it’s a synergised collaboration under the label Mother Family. It consists of; Mother offices in London, New York, Los Angeles and Shanghai; Madre, the Latin American equivalent; Mother Design, in London and New York; and The Secret Little Agency, focused on solving problems in surprising and entertaining ways.
Who are the leading practitioners in your field?
Agencies sometimes compete against each other to pitch for a client, or pitch a campaign for a specific brief. Although this part of the process can be competitive, there is no specific leaders in the market. When a brand chooses an agency to produce a campaign for them, it often depends on their previous clients and whether they have aligned values or traits with the brand. Once a company finds an agency they can trust to produce a high standard campaign for them, they often stick with them, like IKEA and KFC sticking with Mother over and over.
How can you access that field?
As previously mentioned, it’s impossible to fall into a job in direction, especially with little to no experience in the industry. As a graduate, and even towards the end of my degree, I can apply to in-house creative positions, in content creation and other similar roles. To find roles specific to this, I will have to apply to larger agencies, as smaller agencies tend to commission freelance artists and teams to create content to a specific brief. An agency like Mother, for example, have a large in-house creative team,
What are the names of the people you need to speak to in order to get work, jobs, work placements? What are their roles and job titles?
I’ve contacted one of the creative directors at Mother London, Pilar Peace, in order to ask them some questions about what the structure of the company is like, and what specific roles there are. I can’t find any contact details on their social profiles, so I sent a Connect request and added a 300 character message explaining my position.
What I find really interesting about Pilar as a case study to contact is that they graduated BA Graphic Design from UAL in 2006, and started a position as an Art Director 3 years later. 21 months later, they were an Art Director at Mother, eventually progressing to a Creative Director. If I can get in contact with them, I’ll ask about the process of getting into that position, and whether there is an industry standard process.
Are there any online resources to help you find these people? Which ones?
Most of the Creative Directors for agencies in London specifically have a presence on either LinkedIn or The Dots, and something I’ve noticed is that it’s a battle of namedropping clients they’ve worked on. In almost everybody’s ‘About’ section, there is a long list of big brands and corporations, alongside any awards they have been nominated for, or won.
Something that these profiles don’t include, however, are contact details. When this is the case, I use a technique taught to me by somebody who works in PR. Using a website called ‘RocketReach’, you can search for companies, which store employees email addresses in their databases. This website then gives you a template for how the company writes their work email addresses. For example, the given email address could be:
[first name].[surname]@[company].co.uk
This will then have a probability of how likely the email address is to work and not bounce. All you do then is fill the employees’ information into the template and send your desired email. This is something I have done previously with Dazed, talking to commissioning director Saorla Houston.
Companies offer job vacancies on LinkedIn, The Dots and Indeed, but also you can email directly to some agencies. For example, Mother have a line on their website saying:
For work experience, please email [email protected]
How will they expect you to present work?
This completely depends on the type of work the agency does. There are three main types of creative marketing agency; digital; print and advertising. If you’re working in digital creative marketing agency, you’re expected to have work kept digitally, whether this is via a digital portfolio or website. If you’re working in print, it would be more appropriate to have physical copies of your work. This isn’t always appropriate, as it includes large scale print jobs, such as billboards. These obviously can’t be printed and taken to an interview or booking to get your work seen. In this instance, a photograph or video of the print would suffice alongside any other supporting media. In an advertising marketing agency, it is a lot more broad and there isn’t a specific mould for what you can or should show. Each advertising job is completely different, and often includes a variety of different mediums produced for the campaign. In this instance, you could show them on a mixture of both printed and digital formats, whichever are more applicable to the context used.
What is expected of a person just starting out professionally?
When you start out in this industry, it takes a long time to work up, build experience and trust from potential clients, so they know you’ll be the best person / team for their marketing needs. One of the most important parts of this process is building a network of people you can use, trust and talk through ideas with, as any additional information and opinions can be used to strengthen campaign pitches. Another expectation that is put on you is the willingness and determination to work hard and put in a lot of effort to show your desire to work up in the industry. This isn’t specific to Marketing Agencies of course, however if employers and clients can see you’re determined and working hard from day one, its a good reflection of character. To add to this, professionalism is really important to have both in person and on your online presence. With a job that is based around online content and building a brands reputation, it is important to show that you are able to first market yourself. Staying clear of controversy and unprofessionalism on your social media is key to make a good impression when starting out.
Are there any other opportunities? What else can you do job wise in relation to that field?
As previously mentioned, in larger agencies they tend to have an in house creative team, so I could work as part of that. It would mean that I am producing the work that is conceptualised by the direction team. Alternatively, I could work in a similar position, but in the context of magazine and press. This would allow me to put together stories and editorials as part of a larger magazine, which would sit alongside the adverts produced by the marketing agencies. Finally, if all else fails, PR is a very similar industry to marketing, it’s just the step after the work has been produced and is more about getting the work seen and covered by the right people and audiences. This would still require work and attention to the brief, as the content will have been produced to be seen by specific audiences.
How can you raise your profile?
Networking is one of the most important parts of working in an agency, both internally and externally. It’s crucial you know exactly what job roles people have and who completes which tasks. This means that if there is any issues that arise, or you need to run something through with a set designer (for example) before pitching a big idea to see if a campaign shoot is possible, you know exactly who to address and they’re more likely to help with urgency.
Making yourself seen is another way of raising your profile, whether this is at events or online. Go to social events, talk to colleagues on a personal level as well as professional, go to the PR events surrounding your brand, to meet other people who may be interesting to work with in the future. PR agencies have long lists of ‘go-to’s’ that they invite to events, so mixing and networking with these will help you to get known amongst other agencies and potential clients.
How much can you charge? Why? When can you charge more? (Can you?)
The work I would be doing in an agency would be salary based, therefore not a lot of negotiation is available in my hands, especially in an internship position. On Glassdoor, it says creative interns at Mother London are on starting salaries of £21-23k per annum. Direction and higher positions in the agency are higher, sitting around the £65k per annum mark.
Where to get funding?
Funding for projects usually comes from budgets inside the agency. A client will pay the agency a specific amount of money to produce the campaign for them, and a percentage of that will go towards the production costs. If the creation is being commissioned onto an artist, they will usually then invoice the agency to pay for any materials and time used to complete the project.
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You Need to Start Investing NOW! Pt II
In part one of this blog we touched why you should start investing, how investing allows you to participate in the success of companies you're familiar with, and the beauty of owning a business without running a business. In part two we touch on why some people have avoided investing in the stock market. We tackle these issues head on including the risk of losing money. To be an investor, and a good investor - which I'm sure you're capable of - you need to have all the information, the good and the bad..
So many people go their entire lives not investing because they believe the stock market is a scam, which is the mindset of someone who just doesn't understand how it works, and to be honest with you, that is by design. Yes, it's by design that you weren't taught about how the stock market actually functions, but that's another topic for another day, for now let's address the stock market is a scam issue.
The Stock Market is a Scam.
This mindset plagues a lot of people, According to Statista only 55% of American adults are investing, and of those people that are not investing, some have been told that the stock market is rigged or it's a scam.
One part of that last sentence is absolutely correct, the stock market is rigged. It's rigged for investors with patience to win in the end. It's rigged to take the money of anyone buying without an understanding of what they're buying and why they're buying it. It's rigged to leave anyone who believes they will get in, get out, and get rich quickly with nothing. I cannot deny it, it's definitely rigged. But I will argue against the stock market being a scam where only the rich guys win.
In part one I mentioned McDonalds and Johnson & Johnson, are those companies scams? Nike (NKE), Clorox (CLX), General Mills (GIS) the cereal manufacturer, Campbell the soup company (CPB), Dick's Sporting Goods (DKS), Target (TGT), Walmart (WMT), United Airlines (UAL), JetBlue (JBLU), Delta (DAL), Facebook (FB), Google (GOOGL), Netflix (NFLX), Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), these are all publicly traded companies. To say the stock market is a scam is to say the products of the stock market, the companies I've just mentioned are a scam, and you're smart enough to know they are not. You wouldn't buy scammy shoes to put on your feet, or shop at a scammy store, or fly a scammy airline would you? If your answer is no, then you agree with me that Nike,Target, and JetBlue aren't running scams.
But from speaking to new investors about why they didn't invest earlier we usually hear the same story. A friend, cousin, uncle, or parent got a stock tip, bought in - without doing any other research - the stock price went down, and they lost their money, but the person that gave them the tip made out very well from the investment. This story is centuries old, and the last time I heard it, won't be the last time I hear it. It's unfortunate that it happens, but remember what I stated earlier, the market is rigged to take the money of anyone buying without an understanding of what they're buying and why they're buying it. A stock tip does not qualify as understanding what you're buying and why you're buying it.
Something else we've gathered from speaking to people that have had bad experiences in the market, their market outcomes had a lot to do with their mindset around money.
We've listened to people who were used to paying top dollar for everything. Getting the most expensive watch, car, wardrobe, house, meal, drink, et cetera, because they could.
That mindset is counterintuitive in investing.
Investors don't make money when they purchase shares of a company for $15 billion if the company is only worth $10 billion. Investors make money when they find a company worth $15 billion, but the market is selling the company for $10 billion. That $5 billion difference between the price the market is currently selling the investment for and what an investor believes the investment is worth is where the money is made.
For an investor to have success investing they have to be bargain hunters. Whether they decide to invest in value companies or high growth companies, they have to search for the bargain in order to make money. The same thing goes for real estate, buying a house for top dollar is an unwise move for a real estate investor. Buying high for the sake of buying high doesn't work in investing.
I hope this does a little bit to clear up the stock market is a scam notion. How can it be a scam when some of the largest companies in the world are a part of it? If an investor is constantly losing money and seeing more loses than gains over a long period of time, it's not because the stock market is a scam, it's because they aren't investing correctly, and are overpaying for their investments.
The Fear of Losing
Another reason many people avoid the markets is because they're scared of losing money. I was up front with you on the markets being rigged, and I'll be up front with you here, if you invest, there will be a time when you will lose money. There is no way to sugarcoat that.
The greatest investors in the world, the billionaire money managers that are featured on CNBC and Fox Business have all lost money investing at some point, and these are the worlds best and brightest investing minds. Losses happen, and this is why it is important when investing to think long term.
On the bright side, every dollar lost is a lesson learned in investing. It's a lesson on what to look out for on the next investment.
If we buy McDonalds at a value price with plans to hold it long term, we increase our chances of making a very good return on our money and decrease our chances of losing money.
McDonald's may have a rough quarter or a rough year, but it will likely be here long after you and I are gone, and it will likely be worth more money ten years from now than it is today.
There is Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself
Today investing is easier than it's ever been. More importantly it's easier to start small than it's ever been. I started investing when I had to call a broker, listen to that broker chuckle at the few dollars I had to buy the few shares of stock I wanted, and then pay that broker's commission for taking my order.
It's so much easier today. First, everything is online, and setting up a trading account is as easy as filling out a job application. You can log in to your trading account, deposit money, withdraw money, buy stocks and sell stocks without speaking to anyone at all.
Also trading apps like Robinhood and WeBull initiated the zero-commission trading phenomenon, which eventually caught fire and forced larger investment houses to adopt a zero-commission fee structure. Now investing is easy and almost free, in addition some sites even allow investors to buy fractional shares. Now investors don't have to buy a full share of stock outright, they can buy a fraction of a share, and still enjoy in the success of that company to the degree of the ownership stake they have.
Why Stocks (and ETFs Sometimes)?
There are enough people yelling at you in those four minute YouTube commercials about the best, easiest, quickest way to get rich, I want to avoid that crowd, but still explain to you why The Seville Report is focused on stocks/equity.
First and foremost stocks are incredibly easy to buy and sell. Open an app, enter the stock symbol, enter the number of shares I want, hit the buy button and I'm done. If I need to know the value of my investment I can easily find it. When I'm ready to sell the stock it's just as easy; open the app, enter the symbol, the amount of shares I want to sell, hit the sell button and I'm done. I just can't beat the simplicity of conducting a stock transaction compared to other investments.
Also stocks provide the ability to gain exposure to a multitude of markets. For example a stock in a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) can provide exposure to the real estate markets. A REIT that pays a monthly dividend can give me the sense of collecting rent, without having to secure a mortgage, locate a property, and qualify tenants.
If I foresee something great happening that will positively impact a specific industry, I can buy an ETF and gain exposure to that industry. An ETF like the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF (SPY) tracks the S&P500, and this one investment instrument provides investors exposure to the best companies in the United States.
Also, I find the process of researching publicly traded companies easier than researching most other types of investments. I also enjoy that as long as I have an internet connection I can research a company from anywhere, and there's the euphoric feeling I get when I find an undervalued gem. Life is hard, so I try take the easy way when I can, and stock investing is just easy to me.
Invest Now!
No matter what you decide to invest in, it doesn't matter to me, I just want you to invest. We can all use a money multiplier, something that grows the money we have, while we're trying to make more money, and there is no easier way to do that than by investing.
A case for investing in stocks is that investing in stocks gives you the opportunity to own a business without the huge cash outlay needed to start a business. Also, owning stocks allows you to participate in the success of companies you know and whose products you use.
Remember the stock market is not a scam. Real companies are traded every day in the stock market, companies that you know. Don't fear losing money, because you will eventually take a loss if you're investing, that's in stocks as well as real estate, losses are a part of the territory. But when all is said and done the wins should more than outweigh the losses.
Don't let the process overwhelm you, opening an investment account is like filling out a job application or opening a bank account. Once your account is established you're ready to start funding your account and investing.
If you weren't investing or never thought about investing, I hope that you are seriously considering it after reading this. If you're ever in need of investment ideas, we publish our investment newsletter quarterly, and it can be purchased here. In our newsletter we discuss undervalued opportunities in the market. Good luck, and may your next investment be your best investment.
#Investments#Investing#Research#Education#Financial Education#Investment Education#Money Education#Stocks#Stock Investing 101#How to Invest in Stocks#Stock Market Education
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9:How to become a Curator?
It is one thing to say you have interest in a Career path but it is another to understand how to get there and know what degrees BA, MA, PhD etc what you need, what experience do you need along with the degree to get this job type?
In reality you can’t say that you want a certain job and expect to get it. It is not that simple, you have to work your ass of to get where you wanna be. Set yourself goals, get a plan, follow it and keep going until you achieve your goals.
To become a Curator you need a BA and a MA. I am currently in my second year of my BA Hons Photography Degree, therefore I haven’t quite ticked the first box yet, but I’m on the right track.
I am someone who has always wanted to do a masters and over the past year or so I am not sure if i wanted to do my MA in pure Photography but rather explore a new field of study and this way of thinking ties in nicely with the career role of a Curator as you most likely would need a MA in Exhibition Studies or the History of Art.
What Universities offer these MAs?
1)John Moores Liverpool - MA in Exhibition studies
(https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/study/courses/postgraduates/exhibition-studies-ma)
Description of the course:
I am not researching these courses just to make my blog look good for this module but rather MA courses that I have generally looked at last year, setting myself goals and know what i want to do and achieve in the next five years.
Why liverpool and why this course?
Liverpool is in fact my favourite English city, it is a city known to highly support woman artists and woman photographers. Liverpool has one of the best photography scenes that I have witnessed which draws me more to this intriguing city. I am highly drawn to this city.
From Tate Liverpool, to the Open Eye Gallery it has a great sense of wanting the next generation of artists or photographers to be successful. (I will discuss this further in another blog post) Thanks to its brilliant art scenes and opportunities that they give upcoming creative individuals, undergraduates and graduates.
This MA Course focuses on the history of exhibitions from 1850 on-wards and as I said earlier I adore learning about the different aspects of the history of art. I studied Art and Design for Four Years at the Southern Regional College, exploring Art History in all these years. I was to continue this.
The idea this course also involves research this is right down my street as I love researching, it is how I learn, where I find my inspiration and how I deepen my knowledge of Photography and the Art industry.
2) University of Arts London - MA Exhibition Studies
(https://www.arts.ac.uk/subjects/fine-art/postgraduate/mres-art-exhibition-studies-csm)
This course is very similar to the Exhibition Studies MA taken at Liverpool John Moore’s university.
I am put of by this course at ual for different reasons such as financial reasons. In ual the course is 12,000 in ljmu is it 7,000.
Although each course are different in some aspects at ljmu the course is 1 year full time and two years part time and in ual the course is 2 years part time.
If I was very serious about moving to London in the future I would have to think hard about things like money, living in London would be extremely expensive, how would I financially support myself, both living and paying of my MA while I study. There is alot of think about.
Other universities that offer similar courses:
3) University of Manchester - MA Art Gallery and Museum Studies.
(https://www.manchester.ac.uk/study/masters/courses/list/01100/ma-art-gallery-and-museum-studies/)
4) University of Leicester - MA Museum Studies
(https://le.ac.uk/museum-studies)
#photography#photographer#curartor#mastersdegree#england#university#careerpaths#path#arts#exhibitionstudies#studies#museumstudies
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