Placement Job Title:
Student Research Assistant
Company / Institution name:
I worked for the European Cinema Audiences research project in association with Oxford Brookes, De Montfort University and Ghent University. This project represents a database of interviews quantifying people’s experiences of going to the cinema in the 1950s. The project was set up and is run by Daniela Treveri Gennari – Professor of Cinema Studies and Research Lead for the School of Arts.
How did the Placement come about?
My work placement was made up of three large tasks. My first task was to undertake the data cleaning of 140 interviews. I had to make sure that time stamps, names and dialogue from the interviewer were all erased. That task took about 2 months (2/3 days a week – 5 hours a day) but luckily the interviews were already translated into English. I also refined my method as I went along, like using the key search option in Excel, for example, which opened up the opportunity of deleting elements en masse. This made the job much quicker and easier.
My second task was to give feedback on the usability of the project website. I broke it down into aesthetics and compatibility between different devices (phones and computers). I started off by writing down my observations and then went on to fixing certain pages in Photoshop so as to show what I thought might work better. I got the opportunity to discuss with the website creator and my mock-up for the research page was adopted and used to replace the old version. This task allowed me to discover skills that I didn’t know I had.
For my third task, I created a database of every single film that was mentioned in the original interviews that I cleaned for my first task. This task brought up some problems but I spoke to a family friend who works in data collection and he showed me tables that can help this process, which Daniela is now using in talks on the subject. I also collaborated with another student who was doing her work placement on this project and we compared my film list to hers, which covered ‘The Top 10 Films Screened In Any Given Cities’. This covers the question of which films are watched more in which cities and what does that tell us.
What was the most surprising thing about the experience? (Expectation vs. Reality)
I did an online search for ‘research assistant’ ahead of time and found that this position is very romanticised in academia. Once I actually started working, I realised that it was much more down to earth in real life and that it was completely different to working in film. The work placement took place entirely online and was self-motivated so I tried to encourage interaction through emails and video calls so as to feel less detached. What I enjoyed is that it gave me the opportunity of coming up with my own ideas that other people hadn’t necessarily thought of and being critical. Being attributed these miscellaneous tasks allowed me to feel like I was actually contributing useful work and the whole experience expanded the window of careers that I am looking into getting involved with.
Was your experience beneficial and how might it help you in the future?
This experience gave me the confidence to write long pieces by getting me to work on time management and focus skills. In undertaking this work I developed a fascination for data work. We had done a module on it in second year, which had felt a bit boring at the time whereas this work experience was super interesting. I was given the opportunity to ask questions myself and come up with my own answers to other issues. I would definitely consider going into data collection in the future because I think that it is important to know how to do that in the modern world. You need to have an understanding of what is going on; for example my work with my coursemate on the placement looked at important topics like politics in the 1950s after the war and languages used in the studied films.
Describe the outcomes of your experience in three words
Growth
Fine-tuned skills
Critical thinking
What advice would you give to a student in this position?
For the position of research assistant in general, you have to be very open, everyone is working on something different and you won’t necessarily know exactly what your work will look like until you are set it (quantitative v.s. qualitative, writing a paper etc). You also need to be flexible and willing. With this work you can sometimes discover things that you didn’t realise you can do (like giving feedback and advice to the web designer in my case, for example). Finally you need to be overall determined, even if that means ‘faking it until you make it’.