LSE offers students great opportunities to make their student experience unique in all different sorts of ways. It’s very likely that depending on the programme and their personal interests, there’s gonna be a perfect role for students to undertake alongside their studies during their time with LSE. Whether as a student ambassador, helping to showcase the School’s initiatives and support its events, or as a research assistant, working under the supervision of an experienced professor, LSE has a wide range of extracurriculars to help you feel the most productive and fulfilled self.
In my case, in 2022/23, apart from my role as a student blogger, I also worked as a student content creator with the School’s Social Media Team. The job consisted of brainstorming ideas and pitching interesting pieces to the team to be posted on some of the LSE’s social media platforms (TikTok and Instagram). I reckoned that this was a good way to stay up to date with the latest viral trends on TikTok and Instagram – which can be particularly appealing to those who like to maintain a strong social media presence. In collaboration with the rest of the team, student content creators were then responsible for shooting, editing, dubbing, and doing whatever was necessary to produce content in the digital format. Now the whole production process was definitely the best part of this role for several reasons.
The first reason being that LSE student content creators all came from different programmes, and they could be either undergraduate or postgraduate students. Also, people in the cohort has their own talents. For example, some student content creators were really good with shooting takes; others were particularly interested in editing videos; and finally, some preferred the creative side of the job, pitching brilliant ideas for the next viral LSE video. What all of these entailed – and was actively encouraged by LSE Social Media Team – was the collaboration of different students on the same projects, as a way to bring together the best minds and skills to the task. Ultimately, this was also a great way to meet new people and make new friends!
The second reason was that LSE Social Media Team offered support and training to help student content creators develop the skills they thought they lacked. All to make sure that everyone felt supported and empowered to produce high-quality content. Right after the selection of the cohort of content creators for the 2022/23 academic year, the students were invited to attend a training session. This was the perfect way to introduce everybody and present them with all the resources available to make the job frictionless. At this training session, we were also introduced to our direct supervisors and points of contact with the Social Media Team.
Finally, the experience as a content creator taught me the importance of being a representative for a high calibre brand, higher education institution, and organisation such as LSE. And the reason for this was that even though we were mostly working with viral trends on social media, we still needed to abide by certain guidelines to make sure that the content we produced projected a message that matched the School’s values. After all, as content creators, we were the face of LSE on their social media platforms. So we had to bring this responsibility to every project we pitched, drafted, shot, edited, and produced.
Being an LSE student content creator was an incredible experience. In addition to be paid to learn new skills, I was also exposed to the LSE research, as I showcased some of the research cases in the School’s social media. This exercise definitely enhanced by student journey.
