degree – School of Arts & Creative Industries

Is experience more important than qualifications?

That’s a good question isn’t it. Can we do what we want to do without qualifications? Can we work as a lawyer; a doctor; an architect without qualifications? Of course not, but we certainly couldn’t work in those professions without some experience as well.

by Paul Bailey, Senior Lecturer in Media

As Julius Caeser once said: “Experience is the teacher of all things.” And he should know as he conquered country after country. Clearly for Caesar simply having a qualification in Latin was not enough. Most successful job candidates have both experience and qualifications, and both contribute to their ability to perform their job well. Qualifications show that you have the knowledge necessary for your profession, whereas experience proves that you’ve practiced working in your field. Which brings me to an anecdote about a boy from South Shields who wanted to go to university but hadn’t quite figured out what career he wanted to do. He did get to university – the first in his family to do so. He studied politics and history because that’s what he was good at while studying his A-levels. While at university he had to complete a 12,000 word dissertation for his final project. He decided he would write about the recent miners’ strike that had just finished. He thought it was a good idea to spend summer in South Shields talking to former striking miners, newspaper reporters, the general public and many other people about their experiences of the year-long strike. He came away thinking how much he had enjoyed meeting these people and listening to their stories. What job entails meeting people, interviewing them and finding out about their lives? Well journalism of course. So, after three years at university studying politics and history he decided he was going to be a journalist.

But how do you become a journalist? The university career advisor was very helpful. “It’s very hard to get into”, he said.

Student in the recording booth at Radio Tees — Student gaining work experience at Radio Tees

Undeterred the youngster went along to the nearest college offering journalism qualifications. He was accepted for an interview to get a place on the course. Things were moving in the right direction – it wouldn’t be long before he was reading the news on television to an eager audience.

“What journalism experience have you got?” asked the tutor.

“None whatsoever,” the youngster retorted.

“Sorry you can’t have a place on the course then. There’s plenty of other people who have done work experience who want to come on the course,” the tutor replied.

The youngster had the right degree qualification but didn’t have any experience. So, he spent a year working for any media organisation who would take him – radio, television and newspapers.

He returned to the college a year later and was offered a place on the course.

One year after that he got his first journalism job as a trainee reporter on a local daily newspaper.

So – two years after graduating and five years after starting his degree he was finally a journalist.

Student in our recording studio at Teesside University

Wouldn’t it be good if you could get a degree and do some work experience at the same time? Doing it all in three years instead of five.

The BA (Hons) Journalism and BA(Hons) Sport Journalism degrees at Teesside University allow you to do just that.

Just look at what’s been on offer to the students since September:

Working with BBC Tees
Working with Reach plc – publishers of The Mirror
Working on the university’s in-house radio station – Tuxtra
Working with the commercial radio station Radio Hartlepool
Working for an international news website with a chance to visit America.
Three journalism students recently flew to Spain to report on an international quiz event – producing videos and written news stories about the occasion.

All great work experience opportunities available to students in first year; second year and third year in the last three months.

Ultimately, neither experience or having qualifications is more important than the other. But having them both can really make you go places.

Courses in the School of Arts & Creative Industries

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES

BA (Hons) Comics & Graphic Novels

BA (Hons) Fashion

BA (Hons) Fine Art

BA (Hons) Film and Television Production

BA (Hons) Graphic Design

BA (Hons) Illustration

BA (Hons) Interior Design

BA (Hons) Journalism

BA (Hons) Music Production

BA (Hons) Photography

BA (Hons) Sport Journalism

POSTGRADUATE COURSES

Art & Design

Media & Journalism

If you’d like to speak to a member of our team to find out more about studying in the School of Arts & Creative Industries, email saci-school@tees.ac.uk and we’ll get straight back to you.

Art & Design Facilities video

Media Facilities video

Make a Good Decision this Clearing!

What do you know about yourself? “Think wisely and make good choices” says Dr Laura Sillars, Dean of the School of Arts & Creative Industries at Teesside University.

How many weeks do you think you have between being zero and 80? The writer Oliver Burkeman has recently published a book on this … most people guess a far larger number than the true figure. My nine-year old guessed 10,000. When I told him it was in fact only 4,000 he suggested that this was a good rationale to eat a lot of cake! Well, I like cake a lot as well, but that’s a little beside the point. This number shouldn’t scare us, but it does focus the mind on making the best use of our time.

A standard three-year degree will occupy your imagination for c.156 weeks (including holidays where it might be at the back of your mind even if not front and centre). That is 4% of your total available lifetime budget. So, it’s worth making a good decision on what and where you study. There is so much noise and so much available data, how can you choose? Writing as someone who made a good (but rather rushed) decision in clearing rather than weighing up the options I have some personal experience to share.*

Make the right choice for you!

So this sounds a bit obvious, but most good decisions require us to know ourselves a little to know what we specifically need. Do you thrive in an ambitious environment where you’re mostly working alone and self-driven? There are Universities that offer, what one of my colleagues calls, DIY degrees. They really suit some people who are ready to simply crack on. These are not the degree experiences that we offer at the School of Arts and Creative Industries at Teesside University. We are very focused on the learning environment, creating networks within the lessons and nurturing talent. So, what is it you’re looking for?

Start by writing a top ten list of things that are important to you. Here are some ideas. Do you need a focused timetable so you can work or undertake caring duties? Do you need great facilities to be on campus because you haven’t got space at home? Are your career aspirations driving you? Do you want industry experience so you’re ready to go once you graduate? Do you want to improve your technical skills? Is a smallish friendly group more important to you than being in a big competitive environment? When you’re done, share your list with friends and family to check if you missed anything.

Once you have your own list you can mark the places you’re looking at against your own criteria.

1. Website

Don’t just look at the course content and the general marketing blurb, search for distinctive words that connect with what you’re looking for. If you’re still not 100% sure about which course then follow the next steps.

2. Attend a Clearing Open Day

This way you can meet staff and students from all different courses and you can dip in and out of subject talks. It will help you review your options.

3. Visit (any day – even if not an open day)

Nothing gives you a better sense of a place than a deep dive visit. Even if it’s lashing with rain or snow, get out there. This is a big decision. There are so many sensations you can get from a visit. It also allows you to review the place against you list criteria.

We find that many folk who come and visit us sign up both because they love the learning facilities and environment, but also because they get a sense of the friendly vibe which helps them imagine studying with us. You can only experience this by coming in person.

4. Speak to Someone

Even if you spoke to someone in the past, get in touch again. We all have teams of people waiting to speak to potential candidates. Approach your conversation with curiosity – write down key words that are said. Do they align with what you are looking for. Friendliness and good humour should not be overlooked here!

5. League Tables and Data

You can gain some useful insights from the league tables if you’re reading them through the lens of your own criteria. In the student-led NSS survey, our creative courses score really well in all areas, but specifically our courses are very strong on areas such as Academic Support and Teaching on My Course. This data can tell you something about what we prioritise as a team.

So as you weigh up what you’ll do with 4% of your life, I’ll leave you with a quote from Oscar Wilde:

‘Be Yourself; everyone else is already taken’

Make a decision that fits you now and your sense of what is important to you for the future, your values, the ways you like to live and work and the rest will fall into place.

Good Luck!

Laura

Courses in the School of Arts & Creative Industries

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES

BA (Hons) Comics & Graphic Novels

BA (Hons) Fashion

BA (Hons) Fine Art

BA (Hons) Film and Television Production

BA (Hons) Graphic Design

BA (Hons) Illustration

BA (Hons) Interior Design

BA (Hons) Journalism

BA (Hons) Music Production

BA (Hons) Photography

BA (Hons) Sport Journalism

POSTGRADUATE COURSES

Art & Design

Media & Journalism

Art & Design Facilities video

Media Facilities video

Doing Things Differently

We’ve been listening to what our students and applicants have to say about studying for a degree in the creative arts, and have decided to make some exciting changes to our undergraduate degree programmes. So if you’re joining us to start a degree in September, here’s a summary of the unique benefits of our creative courses

Life-shaped learning:

Students will benefit from a compressed timetable

We recognise that our students are busy people. Many juggle jobs and family commitments. So, we take a blended approach to learning with the majority of time on campus on a compressed timetable and some elements of learning online, so that you can protect your family/work time. You will also be supported with online resources so you can catch up and revise. Of course, you will have access to our world-class facilities throughout the week, however, this way you can plan your time.

2. Build your Creative Identity:

Our courses are designed to help you find and grow your unique creative voice.

We focus on a nurturing/coaching/mentoring approach to learning and teaching. Once you’re a creative you’re always a creative. But how do you keep building and growing? Creativity requires resilience and mental strength. We have designed unique creative, reflective processes that will support you to see the patterns in your thinking. Using bespoke designed course planners, you will regularly use journalling techniques to support your creative identity development. Journalling is also known to support good mental health and wellbeing. Our programmes are shaped around the unique interests of our learners with projects forming the majority of assessments. You are located in a studio environment where you will develop the confidence to give and gain feedback from your tutors and peers so that you can grow and develop your personal resilience.

3. Fuel your Career:

Who you know as well as what you know!

Career development is built into your course from day one. Creative industries are growing faster than all of the economy with 1 million+ new jobs by 2030. We focus on supporting our students to develop the skills to compete in this dynamic environment.

On our courses, in year 1 and 2 you will study short, practical modules to give students a full understanding of how to build a career in the Creative Industries – you will focus on your specialist area but also explore the wider environment. In year three you will produce a portfolio as you develop your own unique professional identity. Throughout you will:

- - Gain behind-the-scenes insights, knowledge and build professional connections
  - Meet alumni in great jobs who can help you find your feet as you leave

4. Creative for Life:

Almost 30% of our students tell us that they are driven to study here because of their love for the subject.

Some of our students already have a career or want to work in adjacent areas (from marketing and PR to management) but they want to fulfil a lifelong ambition to develop their creativity. We fully embrace this ambition. We know that being creative will enhance your life in so many ways, and we create opportunities for you to develop your professional networks and your skills in areas such as funding applications or developing commissioning opportunities and outlets for your work. So, we support you in pursuing your passion alongside your career.

5. Find Focus and Flow:

Our course is designed to help you find your flow and creative focus.

Have you heard of the concept of flow? It’s how creatives to do their best work. We have taken lots of feedback from students. They find it challenging to study many modules at once. When you are fully immersed in a task and are fully present creatively new ideas emerge. You will grow creatively. We have designed our courses so you will only ever do two modules at one time. Most time is spent immersed in your creative studio with your tutors, specialist technical team, industry practitioners and peers as you learn through making and doing. This way, we help you get into your creative flow.

6. International Perspectives:

Our courses are designed to give you an international perspective from Teesside as well as opportunities to study abroad.

Being able to work and collaborate internationally will help you grow your career. Creative Industries are global! Our school has partnerships in Madrid, Milan, Prague, Rome through to India, Singapore, China and Turkey. We provide opportunities to work digitally with students studying internationally, to collaborate on projects or to travel and experience another country while progressing through your course. We actively encourage student mobility and support you in taking up these opportunities. We also identify and encourage students to enter competitions nationally and internationally to help you to gain recognition for your work.

7. Creative Making and Experimentation:

Risk-free experimentation is built into every semester allowing you to try things out and build new skills through MIMA Creative Week.

Throughout your working life you will need to keep experimenting, learning and trialling new things. We celebrate creativity by running a Creative Week where you go off timetable every semester so you can learn new skills and experiment creatively. From podcasting, studio photography, filming in a green-screen, screen printing to animal drawing – we have lots of opportunities for you to work in specialist facilities across our school to discover and develop new skills.

8. Becoming Digital:

Our future facing courses support you to be digitally confident and curious.

Every year new digital tools change creative production. Our students don’t just need to learn new software, they need to learn how to stay flexible and adaptive for a digital future.

You will have access to a range of devices loaded with creative software to explore. All our courses adopt industry standard software. MIMA Creative Week offers a range of short, intensive digital courses. In-person content is backed up by material on our virtual learning platform, meaning that you can go back to view material at your own time.

All of our programmes are supported by Adobe with Teesside being the first European Adobe Creative Campus and we’re recognised as an Apple Distinguished School for our pioneering commitment to digital teaching and learning. We provide opportunities for students to gain accreditation via Microsoft, Adobe and Apple, to enhance future career prospects.

Here are the courses that you can study with us to benefit from this new and exciting approach to learning:

BA (Hons) Comics & Graphic Novels

BA (Hons) Fashion

BA (Hons) Fine Art

BA (Hons) Film and Television Production

BA (Hons) Graphic Design

BA (Hons) Illustration

BA (Hons) Interior Design

BA (Hons) Journalism

BA (Hons) Music Production

BA (Hons) Photography

BA (Hons) Sport Journalism

Art & Design Facilities video

Media Facilities video

Our ongoing journey

These developments have grown out of much discussion with staff and students and we will keep innovating and developing in the future- we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback

Better the Devil You Know? Meeting our Movers and Shakers.

Dr. Laura Sillars, Dean of the School of Arts and Creative Industries and Director of MIMA, shares her thoughts on students who join us part-way through a degree course.

Every year students switch to study with us moving from where they began their studies to one of our undergraduate degree courses. I asked them how it had been and what we could learn from the experience of these brave movers who shake things up by taking a bold step and shifting institutions midway through their course.

Let me begin with a caveat – there are many amazing places to student creative subjects across the UK and beyond. While we all want to promote our own unique institutions, we do not want to do this at the expense of our valued colleagues labouring elsewhere. Education, particularly creative education, is an eco-system and most of us know each other and care about each other! Nevertheless, each place has its strengths. A series of discussions with students who have moved to study on our creative courses midway through their studies in their second year or third year gives them perspective on the differences between institutions. It has helped me understand some of the inherent qualities that our courses, location and institution can offer.

Here’s what I learned that our students valued:

I see you …

Some of the very large providers can be great for gregarious, self-starters who don’t mind being in big groups and who can forge their lives very independently from their University life. Don’t get me wrong, we have many outgoing, self-starting students! However, I’ve learned that we are also a great place for quieter students. For those people, big impersonal environments can make them feel lost and they feel anonymous.

The overwhelming feedback our movers and shakers gave me was that at Teesside University they felt seen and heard. They were not remote from their teachers but were connected and coached. Their ideas could come through and they developed projects that genuinely helped them find and grow their creative voice. Treated as a unique individual they felt seen and heard.

Staff

Associate Professor Richard Sober talking to a student

Linked to the point above, a third-year graphic design student fed back that even in his first meeting with an academic staff member he had the most meaningful and useful conversation of his higher education experience to date. Our staff listen to their students and are great at tuning in to what makes them interesting and special. Gently and carefully our staff challenge them to produce their best work.

This nurturing and creative care-taking is visible across all of our courses. It shines out in student module feedback and our student surveys, but it’s a value that is easy to miss or misunderstand. In short, our staff are particularly good at helping creative students become uniquely their best selves. This links to the students’ ability to get into the career of their choice – they stand out.

Students

Students working with staff in the printroom

The safe-space studio culture that is developed in our school across all subjects means that movers and shakers can quickly make friends. Everyone I talked to had been made to feel welcome. They felt like they were a positive addition to the group rather than a latecomer interloper.

Also, while many creative universities have large inner city campus venues in high value real-estate locations, one of the huge benefits of our locations is that we have spacious facilities. This means that students can enjoy an environment which isn’t under too much pressure from other groups. There is dwell space and students can drop in and use facilities out of class time. Our movers and shakers really enjoy this capacity and it’s not standard provision across the sector.

Because students are focused on being their best creative selves, the working environment feels supportive rather than competitive. This is really important to our movers and shakers who reported feeling anxiety due to competition in other settings.

Smaller groups

Staff and student in our Graphic Design studio

Even when we have larger groups, our students are predominantly taught in small studio groups and work together on projects. For some students who love the scale and energy of a massive studio culture this would not matter. For others, however, they feel that the calmness and connectedness of a smaller group can allow them to create their best work. This was a theme throughout.

Movers and shakers enjoyed being in an environment where they knew the people that they were working alongside. They noted times when they’d worked with the support of their peer group and had gained useful advice and feedback.

Space and Facilities

We have brilliant facilities. This is something that is easy for us who are immersed in the place can take for granted. Movers and shakers love the access to our wood and metal workshops, fabric printing, paper workshops through to green screens and high-tech studios. They also love working with our specialist technicians who helped them develop their wackiest of ideas.

There are many other reasons to study one of our creative courses, these conversations really helped put into perspective what we offer both new starters and movers and shakers. I have learned a lot from the conversations with this group of students about what makes our learning community and environment work for students. Thank you to those who spent time talking with me.

Laura

Find out more about courses available in the

School of Arts & Creative Industries

Undergraduate Study:

Art & Design

Media & Journalism

Music Production

Postgraduate Study:

Art & Design

Media & Journalism