TY Internship @ the IIMS - Conor Cooling
TY Internship - Conor Cooling
Social Media Post by Conor - designed on Affinity Publisher
I could describe my time as a TY Intern at the Irish Institute of Music and Song in many ways. Surprising, comfortable, informative... But I sure didn’t expect it to be fun! And that’s exactly what it was. From my friends’ tales of work experience, I thought we’d be lifting heavy boxes from dusk till dawn. I thought we’d be wishing for the day to be over. But those things didn’t happen. Instead, it was expected that our own creativity would do the heavy lifting.
It started with myself and Paul, my friend and co-intern, waiting hesitantly outside the IIMS building for someone to arrive and let us in. So, you can imagine our surprise when the CEO cycled by, stopped and greeted us. I personally was still in shell mode (as in, I was very reserved) but not Michael. Straight away, he showed us to The Square with amazing enthusiasm. From our short interaction, he seemed like someone who loved doing what he did, and he spread that enthusiasm out. Soon after, we met Dónal, who would be taking care of us for the week. He, like Michael, had an up-and-at-’em attitude that was instrumental in helping me feel a lot more relaxed and talkative. He gave us the tour of the campus which included: the amphitheatre, the guitar garden, the music tree (An Crann Ceoil) and the many rooms dedicated to influential figures who contributed to Irish music; many of whom, history has largely forgotten.
After the tour, we were set to work on our first task. Making TikToks. I was shocked too but I’m not going to lie - that made me very interested in what else we would be doing all week. And it wasn’t a bad indicator. But let me be clear. We were very, very, very bad at making TikToks. The camera was shaky, the angle was just wrong, and the ideas weren’t optimised for the app. And so began the long journey of us, becoming (at least, somewhat) more competent with filming. However, we were never told our ideas were bad or that the shots were weak. The comments were always constructive and helped strengthen our skills and our mindset.
The next day came along and with it our confidence grew. When we made coffee that day, we only asked for help once. Lea then asked us to deliver leaflets to houses in Balbriggan, which was actually quite nice because the town was very sunny and warm.
I could go into massive detail about what we did, but I think I’ll just go over the highlights. We learned how to design and edit posters with Lea on Affinity. She was so good at teaching us how the software worked and always explained our questions in detail. We soon went to work on designing our own posters. We’d previously taken photos outside and sent them to Lea so we could edit them. We had to cut our bodies out of the photos, which was actually very easy once explained. We had great fun messing around with the different tools in the software like the transparency and styles of writing. I seriously didn’t think that editing photos and flyers would be that interesting, but it was one of my favourites things on the TY Internship. We actually got a good understanding of the type of work that goes into making a flyer look professional.
Hugh, the Multimedia Manager, was the person we showed our TikToks to. He would tell us what worked and what could be improved upon. He showed us how to use a gimbal, which made filming anything we were doing a lot easier. Hugh showed us in great detail how the very, very expensive in-house camera worked, explaining topics such as frames per second (FPS) and ISO. He explained that it’s always better to have more pixels in your footage and more FPS as you can’t add that stuff in “post” (post-production), but you can take it away. We were asked to shoot some B-roll footage, so Hugh gave us the camera (the very expensive one) and a tripod. Actually, that tripod cost a grand so it’s not just “a” tripod. Anyway, after we had filmed - which was so much fun! - Hugh showed us how to edit the footage and use software called Final Cut Pro. The end product was actually something I’m proud of.
On Friday, Dónal asked if we’d like to sit in on a workshop he had and observe how he interacted with the kids online. It was a body percussion workshop. We had 3 sessions of it. The 1 st one was with 1 st class and 2 nd class. This was really educational to me anyway as I learned ways of dealing with children. This will definitely help me when I help out in the “Sounds Good” summer camp in
Drogheda this summer as part of my TY work placement at the IIMS. I will be interacting with children ages 7-12 as assistant to the IIMS education team. Anyway, Dónal was very energetic and was able to use his own energy to get the kids to follow along with the lesson. This was amazing to me as I’m not that good with dealing with kids and it was a great insight to see someone who was and did it so well. The next workshop, with 3 rd and 4 th class, was very fascinating as I could see how Dónal was able to turn down the intensity a tiny bit to accommodate the older kids; and even more so with the kids of 5 th and 6 th classes. The older the kids, the more independent, freethinkers they are which requires a very unique approach to interacting with them. He had little tricks for keeping their attention focused on the lesson while playing a game. Even when technical issues came up, he was able to keep the kid’s energy and enthusiasm up. It was amazing and I really hope the summer camp can act as a good step for me to build that level of skill dealing with groups of kids. Later on, I sat in on the weekly IIMS team meeting through Zoom.
It was a really cool experience because it highlighted the work that goes behind music education. When we had to leave, I was actually quite sad because I had a lot of fun in those 5 days. Hopefully, I’ll recapture that when I work there in the summer.