11th February, 2022

As I prepare to get back to university teaching, I’m reflecting on one of the first postgraduate courses I write back in 2018. It was a video course. Partly because I wanted the excuse to learn video production, partly because I felt like such an imposter that I wanted to avoid live classrooms.

Back then, I had no idea how to stitch two videos together. I was so immersed in how out my depth I felt in academia that figuring out adding captions to video felt like learning the alphabet again. It was a pleasantly distracting curiosity. Fast forward to 2021 and that same risky skill would help put food on the table. Video editing skill was exactly what I needed to win a new teaching-focussed role I really wanted. Had I never opened my laptop’s default video editing tool 3 years previously, I’d never have made any sort of mark in what became a pivotal career interview.

In this current fellowship, the very same skill that began as an experiment and evolved to become a star bullet point on my CV when I needed it most is now serving the science our team works on. It’s helping us sharing our message and understand what goes on under the hood when we hit the little red button on a camcorder.

What are you daring to learn now that could pay dividends later?

If you have a question for Marc, upload an audio recording for it to be featured on a later Q&A episode!