My Future Plans

Since we were talking about our career goals and plans for after we graduate I thought I would post and share some of my thoughts about my future plans. Dun dun dun….life in the real world! This is something I have been thinking about and worrying about a lot especially this past summer and semester! I think about it a lot. Where am I going to live, what kind of job and I’m going to find, what kind of job do I exactly want to find, what are my long term goals??? All of these questions run through my head and I’ve slowly been trying to work out answers to them. There are so many different scenarios and possibilities!

Since the Television/Radio major covers such a wide variety of topics and career options my first problem came with trying to figure out a specific area of focus to target my career plans toward. When I first started at Ithaca I really had no idea which aspect of TV/R I liked the best or even what all of the options were. I was able to narrow my ideas down thanks to all of the different production classes I’ve taken and through my internship experiences.

At my internship on the set of an independent film I got to see every department at work and an insight into how they operate. I was most closely associated with the production team and the art department. Since the film was low on funds and sometimes low on staff I got to delve into many different tasks from working on set as a PA, working in the production office, acting as locations manager, assisting the art department, etc. This internship was a lot of fun and helped me narrow down my career choices.

I have been trying to decide whether I want to live in NYC or LA. I have some contacts in LA from my internship that I have been keeping in contact with so it would probably be most practical to start there but just in case I want to try NYC instead I have signed up for a NYC Alumni networking night over winter break that will hopefully help me meet and talk to some Alumni from NY to get advice and hopefully some do networking.

After I decide where to live there is the difficult question of…what to look for in a first job and how to get it?? I really enjoyed working on production in LA and it seems like a good way to break into the business so I will most likely try to get an entry level production job as a Production Assistant for example. After that I will try to work my way up through the different production jobs. Eventually I think I want to maybe be a producer or something along those lines in the production team (but I’m open for suggestions-who knows where my experiences will lead me!). I also really enjoyed working in the Art Department on my internship so an Art Department Production Assistant would probably also be a good place to start.

Ahh I think about this all the time and I’m very nervous for when I graduate and it is time to try put these ideas in motion…and it doesn’t help that I am a very indecisive person! But at the same time sometimes when I think about it I get really excited…that’s a good thing right? I am not sure why I didn’t talk about this in class the other day…maybe I’m better at expressing myself through writing or maybe I was just really tired that day-both are highly likely!