Behind the scenes

The hub of the Music department is the office, where our wonderful team of education and performance staff keep our huge range of activities going.  Shilla NaKandi is from one of our local schools, and spent a week of work experience seeing how it all comes together:

Hi, my name is Shilla, I’m 14 years old and I enjoy music and sports. During my one week of work experience I chose to work at the University Of Southampton because I thought it would be a good experience for me, especially because I got the chance to work in the music department.  The whole department was very welcoming and friendly – the office staff Linda Burt, Louise Johnson, Victoria Hooper, Stephanie Amies and Clare Bonugli, and also other members of staff and students that were around me. During the week I got the chance to attend some of the student’s piano lessons, which supported my knowledge and helped me understand more about pianos and the music itself. I also got the chance to see the students’ concert rehearsal and I was surprised how amazing they did.  There were also certain times when I was arranging the students’ assignments: the longest time I took was 2hrs and 15 minutes, which was not a hard thing to do at all, but also helped me to see how many students took music and from my point of view there were quite a lot of them! I arranged the students’ locker keys and the music room keys and it was more fun than I had expected. I was also invited to attend a meeting on the Avenue Campus in the main Humanities office, which was about the university and from the meeting I gathered a lot of information that I hadn’t necessarily known before. I also worked at the Turner Sims concert hall and the box office reception, where I was welcomed by Rosie, Lizzy, and David, who were very nice and friendly. Working there was very exciting because I enjoyed what I did, such as printing the concert tickets. I found this an exciting thing to do because I managed to see how the process works and how tickets were being booked and the expense of the tickets. The whole week was amazing and a very good experience, but mostly I was pleased by the sight of the campus, because it was very nature-friendly and was a good place for hanging around during your free time and was very peaceful.  

Although everything was really exciting and fun, I most enjoyed watching the students’ concert rehearsal and arranging students’ assignments  because this gave me a very good opportunity to know what the students do during their music courses and the types of music they mostly do.

I had a fun week that was superb and enjoyable because, as it went on, I was given new events to do that were all enjoyable but also I learned a lot from!!! And I would recommend the University Of Southampton to students who are looking for good Universities to go to…