Framing your future: 

- Just then something different students kind of handle in different ways depending on what their work is. I'm a photographer, so what I use to do is I would-- I would have shoots in my studio. And then after doing that I would move on to university shoots, personal project work. And then in my evenings, I would do more of the lecturing-- lecture work and tutorials, webinars, and reading. So yeah, that very much works for me because my working day was quite flexible and it meant that I could shoot in the day, which I really enjoyed.

But I think it's quite easy to move everything around the way that you need it to just because everything is so flexible and you can pick up and put down different bits whenever it suits you. There's certain things like-- there's certain things I can do better during the day or in the evening, depending on what works for me. And I that's what's quite nice about the course. You can sit down with a cup of tea in an evening and watch a lecture that you didn't have access to at 10:00 that day. So yeah, I think it's quite easy to make the course work for you and have everything in time, spaces, and certain-- some people work four days a week, so they would do everything on their day where they weren't working during the week.

So it has that flexibility, I guess. And there is a lot of work to do. But it's quite enjoyable work, so I quite enjoy doing it. And I find that there was always enough time to do everything that I needed to do. I was already working as a photographer beforehand, and think what the MA has done is it's given me my own personal practice back again.

So going through the two years on the MA, it's been very explorative and research-based-- I don't even know if I just made that word up. But yeah, it's been very research-based and it's helped me expand my ideas and my creativity. So alongside my paid client work, I now have my own personal practice. Since finishing MA, I've had an artist residency and an exhibition, which would never have done had I not done the MA. And I'm also currently now on the PGCHE program. So I'm hoping to go into teaching as well, which MA has opened up and invited to look into. So yeah, lots of positives. And I think more than anything, I think it's just re-awoken what it is that I was drawn to photography to do in the first place.

- There's a lot of students that come to Falmouth knowing the Falmouth name, knowing Falmouth has this connection with photography and a long developed history with photography and the Institute of Photography. And I think so-- I think we do draw people that have already got somewhat of an interest or understanding of photography and the industry. And not always, we get a lot of people that come from many different backgrounds, were ex-policeman, ex-doctors. And so they already-- they come to the program with a very unique-- their own personal histories. And I think that what the course does very well is give them space to also engage, interact the new knowledge that we're giving them, the sort of research into photography and contemporary photographic practices, but also the ability, the space to harness their previous knowledge. And how those two kind of new--the old and the new understandings interact.

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