 Hi, everyone. Good morning. My name is Casper Melville. I'm the convener of the Global Creative and Cultural Industries MA at SOAS. It'd be great to be to see you. So if you could turn your cameras on, I'd love to just see your face and have you say hello really. Who's that? Joanna? Hi, Joanna. Nina. Hi. Good morning. Do you want to just before we start just tell just just introduce yourself. Tell me where you're you're logging in from. Joanna, where are you? I'm sorry, I'm just changing my camera. You've got two angles. That's cool. I'm in London. In London. Okay, great. Nice to see you. And Nina, where are you? Oh, your mic doesn't work. Okay, fine. Let me just see what you've said. Oh, you're in Amsterdam. Oh, lovely. Okay. No problem. But it's great to see your face. So I'll just get started. I mean, we may be joined by a few others and just to let you know, this is one of several events that we're doing some in face to face some online. So this isn't necessarily an indication of how many people you're being a class with because people are spread all over the place and come into the process at different times. So I'll just talk to you a little bit about the course. And then please do ask me questions. Feel free to post a question in the chat or, you know, just interrupt me at any point if you've got a particular question. I'll talk for about 15 minutes or something. And then we can have a bit of a question and answer. And I can kind of fill you in about things that you want to know about. Okay. Good. All right. I'm just going to share my screen here so that you can start. Joanna, can you see that? Yeah. Okay. So MA Global Creative and Cultural Industries quite a mouthful. I know. So we usually call it GCCI just to sort of cut things down. So this is really just a question of just to think about what is it and why would you study it and why would you study it so as well. So this is just to give you a sort of just a brief outline and it changes every year. But this is this is the kind of profile of the students from last year. I had 30 students in the class last year. That's actually a pretty big class. I think numbers usually somewhere between 15 and 25. There was a bit of a kind of COVID bounce last year because I think people couldn't work and we're looking for things to do. So generally speaking, I have a very international student body. People from the UK tend to be the smallest group, not necessarily the smallest national group, but they're outnumbered by people from other countries. So as you can see of the 30 students I had last year, I had students from France, Singapore, Ghana, China, Pakistan, Singapore, I said Singapore, Taiwan, Poland. Oftentimes people who come to SOAS are also have interesting cultural backgrounds. So in fact, the person who was from Poland was in Poland, but she was half Japanese. The person from Ghana was a UK, British, African descent. Roughly speaking, the sort of age profile tends to be, well, I've put here 20 to 50. That's because I've had some people in the class who are closer to me in age than you. But I say probably the average is about 27. It's usually people who've done their undergraduate degree and then probably done some work, not necessarily in the cultural industries, although a lot of people have done work in the cultural industries as curators or working as musicians or working in social media marketing, that kind of stuff. In terms of academic background, because this is a discipline which combines a lot of different perspectives and is a relatively new discipline, people who tend to do this class come from a very wide range of backgrounds. I've just listed some of them here. You can see from literature and cultural studies, anthropology, history, fine art, maybe practical-based courses. A lot of people have come in having done a music degree or some kind of production degree or they've been a photographer, that kind of stuff. It really is very varied and it really is fairly immaterial what your first degree is in. Different degrees set you up in different ways. If you've done a philosophy or a kind of humanities degree, you might be a little bit ahead of the game in terms of writing essays, but then you've had some practical experience with cultural industries, you can bring that to bear on what we're doing. What do students have in common? This I'm kind of basing on the statements that people make when they apply. I don't know if you've applied either of you, but you have to write a personal statement. Really, the issue is what are people looking for in a course like this? I think the general issues will be people who either who do work in the creative economy in some way or other, they might be makers of things, artists or cartoonists or photographers or musicians or they may be people who've worked somewhere in the middle in between the artist and the audience like a curator or working in music publishing. People who are trying to think more strategically about their own career, get some kind of deeper theoretical understanding of the field that they're working in, trying to think about how they can manage their workload and their kind of aspirations, working within capitalism, obviously. Then there's also people who are doing career changes really that they've worked for a while in, I don't know, working for a some kind of corporate company or for a charity and they're thinking, well, actually, I've got a passion for some aspect of art and culture, so I'd like to move into that field. So that seems to be the kind of common ground. Some people are pursuing an academic career, they're using an MA to kind of upskill thinking ahead to maybe doing a PhD and being an academic. Others are thinking about how they can apply what they learned to a different setting. For example, I've had four people in my class who work in the British Council, so they work in cultural policy, usually somewhere between the West and some other part of the world. Three of them are in the African unit and one in the Myanmar unit. You can see at the bottom just a list, these are just some of the jobs that the people in my class were doing or had done. I mean, some people work while they're doing the class. We can talk about that if you want. I had a swing dance teacher, somebody who managed a funeral home in China, fashion designers. I've had a couple of fashion designers and some people are activists, record label managers, radio presenters, journalists, jazz musicians. So that's the kind of range of people that you'd be likely to be sitting in a class with from across the world with a variety of different interests and backgrounds. This is a question which the government always sort of insists that we address and because they want to know that our teaching is leading people into careers. And of course, students care about it as well. It can be a tricky question to answer. I mean, in terms of the government statistics, it's tricky because the government only cares about jobs which people have in the UK. And actually what often happens for my students is they go back to where they're from or somewhere else in the world and you can't necessarily track them. But just as an indicative of some of the things that people have done, who've done the course, like I said, I've had four, I said three here, but I've got four students who've worked at the British Council. A lot of my students go into kind of event management and promoting events at the South Bank, Somerset House. One of my former students is running a film company in Angola. My jazz dance student is now running a dance school in Taiwan. One of my students is a curator at the ICA, the Institute of Contemporary Art. Several are on PhD programs across the world in America or so as Cambodia. In terms of the course content, so the idea of this MA is that it combines theory and practice or theory and skills. We want to make sure you're fully kind of appraised of the theoretical background to the study of the creative industries, various perspectives going all the way from kind of Victorian ideas of high art through kind of mid-century Marxist ideas about mass culture all the way up to the cultural studies of the 1970s and then through into the development of ideas around specifically around the creative economy which tended to happen at the end of the 90s, early 2000s. So I teach a core course where we look at all of that theoretical material and you write essays or students write essays. And similarly, there's a class on the global film industry and on the music business which look at those businesses in terms of their structure but in terms of a wide range of issues including identity, you know the content but also issues around distribution, issues around entrepreneurship and those kind of questions. So the structure of the course means that there are some things you have to do and there are some things that you can choose to do. So what you have to do is a dissertation, everyone does a dissertation, 10,000 words and that you deliver that in the September, the following September so your whole journey it so as starts in very late September and ends in September. So everyone does a dissertation. What you do it on is entirely up to you. We work with you to kind of refine an issue that you want to focus on and do research on. You might come into so as with a burning question that you want to answer or a set of issues that you want to explore or an area region that you're interested in or you might not have any idea and that's fine as well. Lots of people are making up their minds right now. You don't have to come up with a title for your dissertation until January of 2022 for my students who are studying now. So compulsory courses are the core course which I teach in term one, global film industries which my colleague Professor Lindy Wade Dovey who is an expert on African film teaches also in term one again she looks at film both as an aesthetic object and as an industry and she's got loads of experience and brings lots of interesting filmmakers and distributors into the class and the students make video essays as part of their assignments so it's quite hands-on as well as being theoretical. I teach a class called the music business in term two which does a similar thing for the music business thinks about it in a very broad way not just the big record companies but you know issues around copyright around identity around different genres and whether genres are useful kind of way of thinking about music. We look at all kinds of music in that class you know even including classical music and world music and stuff like that because all of it is caught up with the same set of questions around the music industry and obviously there's a lot of focus in there on digital technology on the the ethics of Spotify you know the power of the tech giants and how we can kind of address that and work with that and whether musicians can make a living. So those are the compulsory courses in addition to that there is a there's a list of guided options from which you choose a certain amount now we've changed it slightly this year and the current page doesn't reflect that change so in the past we asked people to take three modules from the skills section I think now we're going to say at least two because to give you a bit more flexibility but within that list you've got a podcasting class which I teach there is a sound recording class if you're interested in recording music in the studio with a professional producer there's a class called curating cultures where students make their own exhibition there is a work placement module which is called directed study and industry which you can use either to find work placement with the support of the convener which would be me or to develop your own entrepreneurial projects or to do both so a lot of people have used that class to well last year I had two students who set up a magazine I've had someone who who ran an online contemporary African art festival I've had someone who recorded their own album and released it and sort of thought reflexively about the process it's really the place where you think about the relationship between the theory and things that you're learning and your own career things that you want to do you know some people are using it as a place to kind of write a new business plan for their own business sometimes people are using it to think about how they can manage a kind of portfolio working life in the creative economy and then in addition oh sorry and then in addition to that there is a bunch of optional classes that you can take now there is a list on the so as site of the optional classes that I recommend that go well with this class so there's a lot of film classes from specific locations Taiwan China and various other places there's also media classes there and history of art classes there now there there is the scope to take open options they're called within so as from other departments and there is a list available there will be a list available of those so you've got quite a lot of choice and the main anxiety and the main difficulty that most students seem to have when they arrive is narrowing down their options because there's so much and so much of it looks interesting and exciting so bear that in mind you can't do everything there are reasons why you can't do everything some some of them to do with the structure of the course which only allows you a certain flexibility some is to do with timetabling two of the classes you want to do might be simultaneous you can't be both but there is a lot of option there is a lot of choice you'll be asked to make some decisions when you first arrive or do before you arrive at so as but you can you get a couple of weeks at the beginning of term to tweak those if you end up that you go to the first lecture and you don't really like it or it doesn't seem right or you've heard about another class that is open so there's a bit of flexibility there that flexibility will go away after a while when once you settle on what you're doing there's a lot of choice so as is a place which has a great deal of expertise in the regions that we care about you know Africa Asia the Middle East but also you know you know there are classes which are about Cuban music I myself tend to my research is about Afro diasporic music popular music in London so there's an emphasis on diaspora as well to go along with that regional focus in addition to the formal classes and the curriculum I run something called the Center for Creative Industries Media and Screen Studies with my colleague Lindy Wade Dovey which is a kind of research center within the School of Arts and we really use it as a place to bring in expertise from elsewhere so we run the seminar series we have group screenings debates that kind of stuff this is just a indicative list of the kind of people that we've had come and talk to our students if I knew it was actually a student on the course and she's the one who went to be a curator at the ICA so she came in and gave a talk about how she did that and what it was like. Clive Nuonco who's now at UCL just next door to us is an expert on Black British film or Black film in general and doing a big project with the British Film Institute. Kimmery Spence used to run cultural policy in for the Jamaican government but she's now a researcher and she came in to talk about K-pop and the kind of politics and economy of K-pop. Jenny and Bai runs the Creative Industries MA at City University and she came to talk to us about about her research in Africa and Oli Mold is a is a geographer who writes about the creative industries and how we need to change our kind of focus from a sort of individualized entrepreneurial idea to a much more community-based problem-solving sense of what creativity is so that's just a sample so all of that comes in addition to your classes. I'm just going to give you a brief kind of just a little sense of the kind of things and this is really based on the core course that I teach the kinds of things that I cover in the core course and some of the issues that come up. So this first slide is taken from my first lecture and this is situating the creative economy within ideas of the nation and national economy. This is actually taken from the British government's website where they're talking up the creative industries. Some of the information on this is a bit out of date this is 2014 but it gives you a general sense of what's going on. Western governments in post-industrial developed countries like the US, Australia, the UK have used the creative industries or have latched on to the ideas of the creative industries as a replacement for the industrial wealth that they no longer have. There's no more coal, oil, steel, any of those big extractive things. There's no more colonialism or colonialism has moved online in some ways and so here you can see how the government are using the creative economy and the idea of creativity annexed to an idea of kind of the nation building the nation making the nation great. Creativity is great, Britain can be great too right and you can hear see the numbers that are being delivered here almost 10 million a day generated by sorry almost 10 million an hour generated by the UK cultural economy. You've probably heard some of this debate going on at the moment about what a great country the UK is in terms of its culture. We take a critical look at that. In this slide really this is just to give you a sense that we also kind of incorporate within the core course discussions about different ways of thinking about culture from high art, high culture so bottom left there you've got a bit of a caravaggio to more anthropological notions of culture top right here is a ceremony in Afghanistan to the top left here is a piece of kind of activist art and so we look at some ideas associated with the idea of art whether it should be propagandist what happens when art is kind of put in the service of kind of you know social justice you might say and then bottom right there is a picture of a pub and that's introducing the idea of that cultural studies started to work on which is the idea that culture is ordinary culture isn't some kind of special thing that only some people have it's part of it's our everyday life it's how we live it's what we do with our time it's how we interact with each other with you know so that so that this is a way to situate discussions of culture. This um I'm not gonna I don't know I feel like I shouldn't show you this but I think this guy I'll just give you a bit. Hey guys how are you doing I hope you are having a lovely day wherever you are in the world I've had the best morning ever throwing a birthday party for my one year old pub. Right I'm stopping it there this is what this this guy Alfie I mean he's not an important person in one sense but in another sense he's indicative of something very important that's happened in the creative economy which is the emergence of influences social media influences this guy's made a vast amount of money from being pointless online he that's the name of his brand right so you can't criticise him for talking about a pug birthday party or doing reaction shots to his friend's instagram post because he's already told you it's pointless and yet he's built a huge audience and a huge amount of wealth last year he was worth three and three point three eight million um sorry yeah that's right last year the year before that two point two he has got a multimedia platform he's got a podcast he's written he's a best-selling author believe it or not with a pointless book you might think it's nothing to do with us and it's certainly nothing to do with art and culture but actually this introduces a whole series of questions that we do need to deal with the impact of digital on culture has it democratised the production of art and culture what kind of content is produced and what about the activity of the audience here you know who obviously are part of the process building this audience so that's where we look at digital this this image is just to indicate that there is a certain amount of kind of theory and some of the theory is marxist theory from the mid-century so this is just a kind of picture really which tells you the marxist view of culture you can see that culture sits on top of the base the base is what really matters in marxist theory you know the relations of production who owns the means of production and all of the other things sit on top other people other theorists like Theodore Adorno Walter Benjamin and then later cultural studies adapted this model but made it more sophisticated and started to argue that actually culture rather than being some sort of what they call epiphenomenon something that sits on top of what's really important is actually the way in which we understand everything including the economy so it's actually much more important than traditional marxist theory might have you believe so there'll be some introduction into that you know I'm not going to try and turn you all into cultural marxist but you know these these are really important perspectives to understand and if you do happen to then become a cultural marxist so much the better you'll piss off the Tory government. This is a picture about this just indicates the cultural studies perspective kind of thing which is that in the late 70s in the UK particularly but also in other places a very influential way of thinking about culture emerged which was focused on not on big industries you know not the creative industries but the way in which people including marginalised people use culture to make to build their own lives and express their own identities this of course is a picture of some punks from the Kings Road which relates to a book a very influential book written by someone called Dick Heddidge called subculture the meaning of style so I'll introduce you you may know some of those ideas if you've ever studied cultural studies but they may be unfamiliar to you but I will give you a kind of whistle-stop tour through some of those ideas and how they still impact on our understanding of culture and the study of culture. This this slide is really I do quite a lot in the midsection of the core course about the impact of digital the kind of ideology of digital and the the implicit claim that digital was going to democratise everything it was going to put power into the hands of the producers people like yourselves you can suddenly make their own films and you know on their phone go on to youtube build a relationship with the audience without having to go through the gatekeepers and the big institution. This is a counterargument from someone called Geron Lanier who was a famous kind of he coined the term artificial intelligence he used to work for you know he's worked for google and microscopy he's a digital guru really but he uses this example to suggest there's some real problems with the digital and this is the example of Kodak you'll know Kodak as the camera makers the film makers they're the biggest company in film you know for throughout the 20th century at the height of its power as he says here it employed 140,000 people and it was worth about 28 billion right huge jobs in america in germany jobs which were paying well and were therefore supporting families right it goes bust in 2012 this is a very interesting story about why it goes bust because we know we can imagine why it went bust because of the emergence of the digital camera but Kodak were well ahead in the development of the digital camera they were well positioned to shift to pivot as they call it too digital but they didn't have the infrastructure to do it they didn't have the understanding of it and therefore they failed and went bust and what happens also in 2012 instagram you'll know what instagram is was bought by facebook for a billion pounds right dollars actually it was a billion dollars and at the time it was bought it had 13 employees so you can see what's happened here something the capitalization has gone way up it's all gone digital but what's happened to the jobs and this is the big question that Geron Lanie is asking and he's basically saying that the internet has killed the middle class jobs in the creative economy right think about all those 140,000 people and all the people they're supporting and all the children they're feeding that's all gone there may be more than 13 employees now at instagram but it's not 140,000 so this is raising some questions that we need to ask about the nature of the digital economy which i do ask again this is looking at questions of consolidation media ownership who owns what what are the basic processes of digital as you can see here google for example the way it works is that they own they buy up lots of other companies and use them for research and development so they own 186 other companies so there's been huge concentration at the level of ownership while at the same time there's been huge diversification in terms of distribution different channels you know no no longer are we all sitting down to watch the same thing on television everyone's watching something different this is just a slide to indicate that i also look at questions of kind of politics and the relationship between the creative economy and state power here this is drawn from a piece that i teach about morocco i didn't write it but i teach it and it's just about thinking about the different forces and this is to encourage us not to impose a kind of western view entirely on the creative economy it's different in different places and different forces matter in the uk you know religion doesn't matter a great deal when it comes to thinking about the creative industries but that's not the case in morocco similarly the army doesn't have any role to play in the creative economy of the uk but is hugely influential in career so in terms of how it works in morocco you've got different forces at play you've got the monarchy it's all islamic with different kinds of islam the monarchy is kind of a sort of fairly secularized modernized view of islam but with the king and the king and his cronies who run a certain part of the of the state but on the other hand you've got the the prime minister who is uh from an islamist party so they're kind of modern in one sense but they're also traditionalist and quite conservative and then you've got the forces of the kind of the post arab spring forces these are the you know this was the big upheaval the revolution which was never quite um you know delivered on its promise but that has created a kind of civil society element within morocco and all of these different forces use culture in different ways they project a different idea of what they want the nation to be they show different they have different music different ways of dressing different film different kinds of dance so you can hear you can see the creative industries is the kind of place where political struggle is being fought out at the level of you know music festivals what film is acceptable what's happening on television and you can apply the similar kind of model to any almost any place you know obviously china has got a very different model to the us which has got a very different model to marley uh or to taiwan this is about thinking through questions of the creative city and some of the consequences of thinking like that the creative city idea has been a very popular one within creative industries and goes hand in hand with an idea of the so-called creative class like this new group of people who are working in the creative economy which you may want to be part of but this is just to remind you this slide is to remind you of some of the consequences which are often hidden so on the left top left you've got silicon valley and you can see where you know silicon valley the center of the digital economy and of course that is the place which where the power over culture now resides and then on the right you've got a place called the jungle which really is a kind of temporary encampment of people who have lost out who haven't prospered in the silicon valley world so there's some there's a lack of fit between the big optimistic promise of digital and creativity on the one hand and then you know poverty and being left out on the other and then at the bottom there's a similar thing you argument you might make about london down there on the right i don't know where you're sitting in london joanna on that map i'm in south london probably southwest so southwest which bit i'm in i'm in strutton you're in strutton all right well i'm in west norwood in fact we don't even figure on this map as you can probably see they've decided only north london matters but um but what you can see there is how is is is the change in house prices that's been happening through gentrification on the one hand and part of gentrification has been the growth of the creative economy and the big fuss that's made of it if you think of somewhere like shoreditch which built its reputation on creativity and hipster culture and has you know consequently house prices have gone up 68 percent and then on the left is gremful tower you know this um that this um housing block that that was insufficiently uh sort of secured against fire uh with poor residents living in a very rich area so the concept this is pointing out some of the ironies and some of the kind of critical way in which we need to treat the great celebration that goes on around digital cultures and the creative economy um so here's this is just an example of kind of some of the perspectives this person toby miller who's kind of critic of the notion of the creative economy so there's a critical edge to all of this you know it's not just about it's not about training you you know it's not a training course and how to work more efficiently within the creative economy necessarily or uh or a kind of upskilling to make you the super employee although you'll get lots of that it's also to give you a critical understanding of some of the core issues about justice about uh ownership and structure and how you might be able to work you know thinking about your own position in relation to these kind of questions and i i mentioned to you earlier on about ollie mold so ollie mold's book which i really like which is called against creativity very much a critique of a certain kind of ideological idea about what creativity is and very much proposing that we need to shift and there's been a big shift in the creative industry's literature recently which has moved towards thinking about how can the creative economy be sustainable how can it be you know environmentally um you know not wasteful how could it involve more people how could it really be diverse some of those kinds of questions are coming up a lot um which is great uh and and sort of opens a new space for uh your own research if you are going to be doing that so i'm going to stop sharing now there's my email there if you want to contact me um so i just want to know having told you all of that do you have questions how does it fit with what you're interested in Joanna you can i know you can talk and Nina you can't but Nina if you just kind of bash it in the chat if you've got questions um anything anything and i'll i'll try and how did that look to you Joanna yeah i had a question um actually maybe i'll be honest as well how i got here so i signed up for the open day yesterday as i was looking quite like a few courses on kind of climate change sustainability um and then i saw that and literally five minutes before i was like that sounds really interesting um because my background is so i i graduated um from my undergrad almost five years ago um i did economics economics and statistics and at St Andrews um but i now have worked almost five years um had a very large tech company um on kind of media sites so services like streaming music and uh and uh tv because music has always been a kind of big part of my life and passion of mine so yeah this sounds really interesting but i guess my question is because i've always considered myself quite a numbersy person i think you mentioned um that there are a few people who have um come from that background and then obviously getting used to writing essays um i think that was the part that kind of got my heart racing a bit because whenever someone's like i need to write a lot of essays well let me just okay thank you that's very interesting what you've said and just to say just to connect to what your earlier interest as i just said at the end there is now this movement within the creative industries to understand it as you know an economy an economy which has some responsibility to the to the world you know i mean i don't know if you've picked up this discussion about nfts for example you know non-fungible tokens the big thing in art everyone's so excited and then it's like by the way do you know how expensive on the environment it is to run this stuff to mine cryptocurrency and it's like come on are you serious that that's going to be the way forward so while there isn't a great deal of sort of teaching about that kind of embedded into this class in the sense that it's a relatively new field i get to it in the in in the course of um my core course but we don't have a kind of creative industry and the environment module let's say it is a very it's a new area it's just opening up there's a lot of good work in that space and it's the sort of thing that you could pursue through your own dissertation and the kinds of things you wanted to write about whether or not you're formally getting taught that that issue that's one thing to say the other thing to say is the open options thing would allow potentially the possibility of taking a class in development or you know if you wanted to have to back it up with some environmental stuff but on the essay writing thing i people who come to this class come with a very wide range of skills from being very good essay writers to being not very good essay writers and actually tend to cluster more to the not very good side and reason being that a lot of people are working not in their first language a lot of people haven't been in akib british academia a lot of people haven't been in any kind of formal humanities academia like you said they may be a numbers person or they might be more of a creative you know a sort of musician so i'm very used to working with people who are at lots of different levels now i'm a former music journalist and magazine editor i'm very keen on teaching the skills of writing good english but i'm not necessarily expecting people to have them at the start so things are so for example in my core course i set two assignments the first one is a thousand word essay and the second one is a 2000 word essay the first essay is worth 30 percent the second 70 percent so the idea is you do your first essay you do your best job i give you a lot of feedback on it and we try and refine you as a writer as we go so it's one of the skills that you're learning in fact it might be the pride the skill that you know that most people know least about but develop while they're here i'm very keen all of us are very keen to develop you as good academic writers and that doesn't mean writing over complex ways or with very long words it means you know putting together a logical argument supporting it with evidence you know those kind of questions um that being said not everything you do is essay based so you know in podcasting obviously the main issue is is making a podcast you keep a diary as well and you submit that you write a short essay at the end in the film class you make a film a film essay using your phone whether or not you've ever made one or not don't worry in sound recording obviously you're being marked about you know mixing levels and mics and stuff like that so we have a diverse range of assignments it's not just writing essays you will end up writing you know 20 000 words in addition to your dissertation 20 or 30 000 words depending on the course that you do but it's not something to worry about because it's something the expectations are it's such a varied group of people with such a varied skill set that um you know that and that's part of the fun you know that's one I want people to know that they can come in wherever they start and when they come out at the end they will be a podcaster if they do the podcasting class they will be an academic writer because they will have done academic writing they will have written a 10 000 word dissertation you know and it's it's just another skill just like any other skill that you can acquire I mean I'm terrible at reading spreadsheets but I've had to acquire some of those skills you know when I was running a charity and it's like you just have to go out of your comfort zone kind of learn how it works um but you'll get a lot of guidance and a lot of help and a lot of support you know I put a lot of emphasis and so do my colleagues on feedback you know we you post your essays online on this kind of uh a bit of software where we can put comments on the page so actually tell you you know here you need some more evidence this isn't very clear you know maybe you could have chosen a better word perhaps if you tried like this and then I give audio feedback as well um you know we have office hours so you know you definitely can't write as bad an essay as I have seen so as right but I've also seen people go from writing pretty poor essays to write doing outstanding work in within a year so it's entirely possible and it's just a matter of you know doing it and yeah no I agree I think it's it's uh it's probably because I just don't have another practice but it's practice exactly but this is this is your practice this is your your um your chance to do that I should say something on um part time and full time you can do it either part time or full time uh if you're a UK resident and my recommendation would be to do it part time if you're able because well there's two reasons one you're able to work if you want to two you've just got more time to assimilate everything because there's a lot I'm not saying you can't do it in a year and for some people that that works very well but you end up coming in uh you know doing four classes simultaneously in term one and then another four in term two and then your dissertation um you know so it's quite intense and the other advantage of doing it in two years is that you get a chance to kind of let it simmer a little bit and to develop your skills a bit more and to be associated with SOAS for longer because there's so much going on at SOAS that you can't do everything but you'll be able to do more of it if you're two years and one year it's only a recommendation and that different things two different people um Nina that is a good question and you know I actually don't know the answer to that I don't know if Laura does yep unfortunately um not at the moment and it's all just tied into visa sponsorship and regulations yeah I thought so now don't worry I mean you know I'm not telling you it's terrible in one year at all and actually you know it's a different kind of feel especially if you're coming from a different country it's like you're coming to London and you're absorbing yourself fully within it you know a lot of my students who do it part-time maintain a full-time job or a full-time-ish job um and which you know and they are able to do both but as a kind of I mean I did my MA in one year and I found it you know great and I just completely absorbed myself in it and you know and then it then it works and in terms of the way the work um breaks down in a year at SOAS it's we have three terms but only two terms are teaching terms so it's two very intense chunks of 11 weeks from September late September to Christmas is one chunk and then from early January to almost the end of March is the other chunk then there's a break around Easter time I don't know what I shouldn't really use Christian holidays to sort of describe this but you know you know how it goes and then in term three uh there's no classes that you might have some catch-up classes some exams depending on whether you've done classes which have exams um if people are doing directed study and industry this is when they're doing their work placements often that kind of stuff and you're starting to develop your dissertation but you're a little bit freer in your time you can spend more time you know going to events at SOAS and spending time in London but also working with your supervisor on your dissertation which happens over the summer uh yeah so that's how it all sort of breaks down uh in terms of sort of timings and whatnot have you got any more questions Nina how did that sound to you is it something that you're interested in I know it's a bit of a leading question you're not going to say no are you I wouldn't be offended if you did but okay good so I've given you my email well cm54 is at soas.ac.uk is my email and it's on the website feel free to drop me a line if you've got any other specific questions about stuff in terms of application I don't know if you've applied already but if you haven't don't worry too much about it the main issue is your statement really I mean as long as you meet the criteria you know financially and in terms of your academic background and like I said academic background it doesn't really matter what it's in and it also doesn't matter that much to me I must say you know if you were like an outstanding A star student or you were you just did okay that's not because a lot of people when they first they do their first degree you know they're not quite sure where they're at in life or that it's not a subject they're necessarily going to be good at much more important is the statement in terms of why you think this is interesting how it connects to your own interests how you know how you would like to take this forward just to get a sense of your personality and what and what you're about you know and then it's straightforward it just comes to in fact if you meet the criteria generally it will be straightforward and it it's only if there's borderline issues that it won't be and yeah term starts at the end of at the end of September there's something called welcome week which is the week where you can't usually the last week of September where you have to come and register and kind of everything's very chaotic and you know you don't know where all the classrooms are and then teaching starts at the beginning of October usually uh so it's great sorry go on sorry very quickly on the on the statement I think you mentioned it so when it comes to the kind of dissertation or end of the yeah um that project you don't have to kind of in the statement um yeah not at all no I mean if you have you know it's sufficient to say for example for you you know I've got an economics background I'm a numbers person but I'm interested in the arts and creativity and in particular in issues around sustainability and justice it's like that that's yeah that's perfect really um you don't have to demonstrate that you're you know completely o-fay with all the literature all those kind of things you know I'm sort of more more interested in the way to just connect with what you're interested in you know your set of interests and the kind of areas that you might because that gives me some some idea about forward planning about how to support you and where to who to send you because of course the other thing that SOAS offers is you have potentially have access to everyone at SOAS you know it's our job to be available to you so if there are there'll be professors who are professors of kind of water in India or you know legal questions around um you know FGM or you know just if the things that interest you or you want to connect them up because there's a kind of cultural angle to all of these things um that you know that that's there for you as well so when you're joining SOAS you're not just you know registering for classes you're joining a community of people who are all invested in you doing great work and you know actually in the end in your dissertation starting to do original research in areas which you know we we we can't do everything we need a new generation of people exploring these questions so yeah okay well it's really nice to meet you just like like I said this is not indicative of how many people will be in your class um it because it people come from all over and I never really know who's going to be in the class until the day it starts in honesty in terms of teaching just to let you know at the moment we're teaching in a blended way which means it's a variety of things but for one of one of my classes I give online lectures and face-to-face seminars we are moving gradually to a more face-to-face in term to uh we're encouraging all students to be around and come into SOAS but not everything is taught on uh face-to-face and actually there are great advantages to that it was a big learning curve last year with lockdown but there are some things which work really well online something about online lectures which are very lots of content which allows you to watch them at your leisure to re-watch them to you know to to pause them in order to assimilate them to review them before the final exams and things so we won't ever give that up but we we will strive to you know see as much of you as we can get you together with other students and do events you know our concert series is running at the moment we're you know we're having a christmas party there's you know we're starting to move into we hope the post pandemic sort of way of engaging with things albeit that at the moment for example you have to be masked in SOAS um that will that subject to review depending on what happens over the next six months probably okay well it's really nice to see you and meet you both Nina and Joanna like I said feel free to drop me a line if you've got more questions and I look forward to seeing an application from you that happens okay thanks Laura thanks everybody take care see you later bye